NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/arts/books/23152

Text File | 1992-12-23 | 2.6 KB | 52 lines

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!rsoft!mindlink!a710
From: [e-mail] (Crawford Kilian)
Subject: Re: Cultural Appropriation and the New Age
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 17:41:52 GMT
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This thread is threatening to take a digression into religion, which I
hesitate to encourage, but for what it's worth I think the issue is who is to
be master. Native Indians (and other non-Europeans in colonial societies)
can't be said to "appropriate" a religion imposed on them...except as a
political stratagem to minimize damage to the original culture. For example,
native tribes in Mexico and Central America adopted Catholicism but adapted
it to include many of the old rituals; gods became saints, but their original
functions stayed largely the same. Christians themselves had done something
like that by "appropriating" pagan holidays and converting them to Christian
purposes.

Much more concern, however, now arises over appropriation as a kind of
plagiarism against the poor by the rich. If we take something from another
culture not to enrich and complicate our own, but simply to affirm our own,
then we may indeed be plagiarizing. That can run both ways, however.

A more sensible attitude to take might be simply to recognize that no culture
is hermetically sealed, and every culture is amazingly persistent. Rome fell,
but Roman culture thrives today in everything from architecture to
bullfights. Any truly alive culture is aggressive, always on the lookout for
something it can incorporate into itself (English and Japanese, for example,
are great absorbers of foreign words). Does this mean eventual loss of
identity as the culture transforms itself out of recognition? No more than a
child loses its identity in the process of growing up. Africa didn't lose its
identity by adopting American maize as a staple crop, any more than the
Mohawks stopped being Mohawks by going into high-steel construction work.

It may well be that far from being spiritually deficient by appropriating
from other cultures, a culture may be spiritually paralyzed if it fails to do
so. The consequences can be disastrous: early British Arctic explorers, for
example, never even *thought* to learn about survival techniques from the
Inuit, so the Brits suffered and died from inappropriate clothing and diet
while the bemused Inuit watched and wondered.


--
Crawford Kilian   Communications Department   Capilano College
North Vancouver BC Canada V7J 3H5
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