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Appropriate and inappropriate cultural appropriation

25 September 2016

tags: apartheid, cultural appropriation, modernity, multiculturalism, postmodernity

I only learned about the term “cultural appropriation” about seven
years ago, and blogged about it here: Inculturation, indigenisation,
syncretism and cultural appropriation. But though the term itself was
new to me then, the thing it described was not. Fifty years ago I
wrote about how disconcerted I was (well, more like disgusted) to
encounter English Anglicans who spoke of “Orthodox Spirituality” in
hushed and reverent tones, yet looked down condescendingly on other
aspects of Orthodoxy as the amusing antics of quaint foreigners.

One of the ways in which postmodernity differs from modernity is that
it is more tolerant of tradition, and indeed different traditions.
Modernity tends to be intolerant of tradition, or at least all
traditions other than its own. Moderns often express amazement that
“anyone could believe that in 2016”, a kind of temporal chauvinism
that assumes that anything anyone believed before the Enlightenment
must be false. Postmodernity is much more tolerant, and adopts an
indulgent attitude towards cultures of other times and places. The
problem is that it also tends to encourage an eclectic and rather
superficial borrowing from other cultures, in a way that trivialises
them. Here is a recent example: See Literary Figures Rendered in
Byzantine Icon Style, which is not very dissimilar from the
“spirituality” one of 50 years ago.

On the other hand, I li8ve in a multicultural society. For many years
our rulers tried to deny this. They concocted the policy of apartheid
(aka separate development) to keep different cultures separate. There
was little danger of cultural appropriation, except among those who
wanted to buck the system, and those tended to be suppressed. American
jazz, for example fused with urban African culture in the shebeens of Sophiatown, but the government brought in bulldozers to put an end to
that.

The government insisted on “own”. “Own” affairs, “own” culture, “own”
people, “own” land. So they tried very hard to stop cultures
influencing each other, and their policies tended to assume that
cultures were static. In “separate development” the emphasis was on
the “separate” rather than on the “development”.

There are still some people who would like to go back to the old days.
They regard multiculturalism as a Bad Thing, and say that things were
so much better when we had apartheid.

Things seem to have played out somewhat differently in North America,
where, according to my blogging friend Jonathan Allen, it seems that
the concept of cultural appropriation has itself become trivialised.
He recently wrote on Facebook:

Culture is, and always will be, wrapped up in unequal and unstable
dynamics of power. The hijab that the offended author, Yassmin
Abdel-Magied, wears is a case in point: to simplify greatly, it
originated through the appropriation by victorious and newly dominant
Arab Islamic polities of elite Byzantine practices of veiling women,
refracted through the emergent legal and religious norms of Islam,
itself formed through appropriative acts, from the recycling of Jewish
popular traditions, to the destruction of Coptic Orthodox churches in
order to acquire spolia for early mosques. But of course the history
and meaning of a cultural artifact like the hijab doesn’t stop there,
and cannot be reduced to a story of cultural appropriation, or
patriarchal dominance, or religious piety, or postcolonial assertions
of feminism. It is all of those, and, perhaps, none of them, depending
on the context, the people involved, and the meanings that emerge out
of that matrix. Neither Abdel Magied nor anyone else is to blame for
all of the matrices of appropriation, power, privilege, and so on we
are all entangled in- which is why I don’t think charges of
‘hypocrisy’ are very helpful here or in most cases. Everything we do
is, in some way, political, and is connected to multiple dynamics of
power, privilege, and production, in ways that cannot be reduced to
easy moral answers, or to moral answers at all even (though we
shouldn’t then simply ignore potential moral questions). Many of the
attempts to police identity, even if borne out of praiseworthy
sentiments initially, tend to ignore or erase this dynamism, and
instead become practices of merely securing political and cultural
power over others- even if that is not the intention of the actors
involved.

He links to this article, Will the Left Survive the Millennials?,
according to which it seems that some are demanding that fiction
writers write only about people of their own culture, and that if they
write about people of other cultures they are guilty of cultural
appropriation. That view is ascribed to the “left”, though it sounds
like Dr Verwoerd’s most happy dreams. I think that only goes to show
that terms like “left” and “right” in politics have long been meaningless.

And all that leads me to think that it is time to revive the somewhat
outmoded concept of a synchroblog, and for a group of people to blog
on the same day about appropriate and inappropriate forms of cultural appropriation, and where the difference lies. I think George Tinker’s article, cited in my earlier blog post, might be a good starting
point. It’s a good question for missiologists. Any takers?

http://tinyurl.com/jsfj4ou


--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com

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