The last
post objected to the term “cultural appropriation” for its inaccuracy, as well
as for being itself the appropriation of a word with specific meanings. But the claim of any culture to “own”
something in an exclusive way is itself a historical and cultural
absurdity. With a vanishingly small set
of exceptions, which we’ll get to later, all cultures exist by taking from
other cultures. No culture (except
perhaps some literal or metaphoric islands) is an island.
Let’s take
a few of the most common markers of a culture, and see why appropriation is
essential to them.
Religion
Are you a
Christian or a Muslim? Then you’re a
massive expropriator – Christians from Judaism, and Islam from both. These are
incontrovertible historical facts.
Christians lifted the Ten Commandments, the Psalms, Proverbs, Prophets,
and other stories directly from the Hebrew Bible, and Islam took the same
figures, from Abraham (Ibrahim) to Solomon (Suleiman) to Jesus (Isa) from its
two predecessors. In fact, Mohammed may
be the greatest individual appropriator of all time, since he alone did what it
took Jesus, Paul, Peter, and countless others to do.
On the
other side of the globe, Southeast and East Asia took Buddhism from India, and
India re-took the Buddha for a place in the Hindu pantheon (just as Islam takes
Jesus as a prophet.) Numerous syncretic
religions – Rastafarianism, Jainism, Bahai, have also taken significant parts
of other religions. Can you accept the
claim that a Muslim must be an Arab, a Rastafarian must be a Jamaican, or a
Christian must be a former Jew? If not, then you are comfortable with these
huge appropriations.
Language
Perhaps the
greatest source of appropriation of them all.
There was, perhaps, an Ur-language that borrowed from no other, but that
is assuredly unrecoverable. Language
only esxists because a hearer or many hearers decide to use a word they have
heard from another – an appropriation. Whether
language was monogenic or polygenic, it ramified quickly into innumerable
branches of a few trunks. The
Indo-European language, for example, has over 400 living successors, and many
more that are extinct. English has taken
between 26% and 29% of its words from Latin, German, or French, and about one
in six words from other languages.
“English”
by the way is a perfect example of cultural evolution: as a country it derives
its name from the Angles, one of the several peoples of England before 1066
(along with the Saxons, Jutes, Celts, and probably Danes). Their language is almost entirely
incomprehensible to modern day English speakers, or even to the people loving
in England during Chaucer’s day (The first poem recorded in “English” begins: “Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard metudæs
maecti end his modgidanc. “).
Just trying
to parse out and return language to its originators and their descendants leads
to absurdity. Jeans are Genoese – return
the word to my Italian ancestors, please.
Wearing jams? Not unless you’re
Indian. You may live on a bayou, but you
can’t say it unless you’re Choctaw. If
you’re of African descent, you can ask for banjo, gumbo, and safari back, but
you’ll have to give up piano, grits, and diaspora. Nor can you even curse whites who use the
n-word, at least not by using the f-word. You can’t even say language
appropriation is taboo unless you’re
of Oceanic/Polynesian descent.
Art
This is one
of the most common battlefields of cultural appropriation. Apparently one may only cover material that
belongs to one’s ethnicity or one’s ancestors, and may only use artistic
methods indigenous to such groups. From
Homer to Shakespeare, writers have taken subject matter from other cultures –
Shakespeare, for example, wrote only 4 ½ non-history plays in Britain, but 6 in
Italy (and 4 in ancient Rome), 4 in ancient Greece (6 if you include Troy and
Tyre), and 5 in other continental sites.
Rome copied Greek sculpture and architecture, everyone in Europe copied
each others’ painting methods and ancient themes, and on and on, to Picasso and
others of his era’s borrowings from African art.
Without
appropriation: no domes, no Greek columns, no arcades, no caryatids, no Gothic,
Federalist, Georgian, etc. etc. Only 20th
and 21st century architecture everywhere: Gehry, Gaudi (in Spain or maybe only
Catalonia); no Michelangelo David or Moses, no translations of Dante,
Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Proust, Goethe.
(And let’s not let anyone else have Shakespeare, either.)
Food
As we say
in Brooklyn, Fuhgedaboudit. No tomato
sauce in Italy, no olive oil in America, no hot peppers in Asia, no potatoes or
corn outside of the Americas, no coffee north of the Tropic of Cancer?
I have polled people from Japan and from the several Islamic countries
and pizza and spaghetti always are the majority’s favorite foods. Thank God the digestive system does not
discriminate on the basis of anything but digestibility
But enough naysaying -- next time: When it IS appropriation, or at least offensive.
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