Showing posts with label cultural appropriation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cultural appropriation. Show all posts

Friday, December 07, 2007

plastic shamans

Fresh controversy has broken out over the issue of plastic shamans and other new-age wannabes ripping off Indigenous American rituals. Jason Pitzl-Waters comments:
While I think that modern Pagans and polytheists should strive towards solidarity (when feasible) with those who practice pre-Christian faiths and rituals, our support should never be confused with the notion that we have a "right" to "borrow" (and take out of cultural context) their spiritual practices for our own benefit. Empathy for the Indian struggle does not confer the right to appropriate Native traditions and practices. Praying like an Indian doesn't help the Indian preserve their culture and integrity, it only serves our vanity and dilutes authentic practice.
There's an excellent article about Responsible Eclecticism and Cultural Appropriation which outlines the difference - basically if you take someone else's ritual and plonk it down in your spiritual context with no thought about what you are doing, that is cultural appropriation. If in addition to that, the group you have borrowed from is in danger of having its culture and land-rights stomped all over by mainstream culture, and you do nothing to help them in their struggle, that is the pits. And most of the plastic shamans have done nothing to assist in the indigenous struggle for self-determination, they've just ripped off their rituals and made a great deal of money out of them.

If on the other hand you look for parallels within your own tradition, and adapt the borrowing to your own context (an example being centering prayer, which is an adaptation of meditation) that is responsible eclecticism.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

does he take sugar?

My friend Ocean blogged about a music video which includes ASL (American Sign Language) - oh how nice, you might think, except that not all the lyrics were translated into ASL - so it was clearly just there for decoration, not for communication. This is just another form of cultural appropriation. The video is now up on YouTube, so Ocean posted a comment there as well, and was immediately jumped on by a load of New Agey fluff-bunnies, saying that she was just bitching and should be grateful that the video included ASL, and how could she criticise it when it was about peace and love?

Ocean's posts:
Here are the lyrics of the song as I imagine they would appear to someone who was only reading the signing and not hearing the lyrics…

I am not a signer or a Deaf person and the sound had disappeared on my PC when I looked at the video, so all I got was some mouth and hand movements…

I always get annoyed when I see TV programmes where foreign languages have been mistranslated by the person doing the captioning, so I can understand the annoyance of Deaf people here.

For example, I once heard a voice-over of a German couple who were relating how they had found the Ice Man (the remains of a Bronze-Age man found frozen in the Alps). The woman said that she said to her husband “Das ist ein Mensch” (that is a person); this was translated as “That is a corpse” which is just plain wrong, and I felt was disrespectful to the woman’s utterance. This might seem “small stuff” but it’s a sign of a general disrespect (either towards Germans or towards language in general). I submit that this desire to "help" the Deaf community without consulting them is a sign of a generally patronising attitude (even if it only seems like “small stuff”). It’s like the whole “Does he take sugar?” attitude.

Read this poem if you don’t know what the “Does he take sugar?” attitude is.

I also think the video is schmaltzy, sentimental, manipulative and exploitative of small children. Just because it's about praying for peace and love does not make it sacrosanct and immune from criticism. Wake up New-Age fluff-bunnies and stop treating Deaf people and culture as a commodity.