H[quote=“mindysan33, post:15, topic:366”]
Profiting off the suffering of others, from the left or the right, is a very real thing that happens.
[/quote]
It’s a boomerang. They’re not selling aboriginal children into domestic servitude. I understand that the aboriginal australians have been abused as a people and as a culture, but I don’t think making a boomerang is an extension of that abuse. I don’t think anyone needs to ask permission of anyone else (and who would they even ask?) to produce a boomerang, any more than someone would have to ask permission to make a toy katana or colt revolver. Saying someone can’t throw a boomerang if they’re white is just as bad as saying someone can’t cosplay Superman because they’re black.
I think the real reason this is offensive to people (if it is at all, and we’re not all just inventing that out of some sort of white guilt) is that it’s Chanel, which is a company that caters to wealthy people, who (apparently) are by their nature reprehensible. Or at least are reprehensible when they buy $2000 boomerangs. Cultural appropriation is just a cover for hating the rich, in this case.
As far as I’m concerned, whether it’s a $5 boomerang by Hasbro, or a $2000 one from Chanel, it’s just a toy that doesn’t harm anyone. Except of course to the person at whom it’s being thrown, or the person throwing it, if they do it wrong.
I wasn’t responding to this particular boomerang, more to the general concept of cultural appropriation being pooh-poohed. Much as @cynical noted above, I’m not in much of a position to judge whether it is or not, as I"m neither aboriginal, Australian, nor a historian of Aboriginal or Australian culture. It is pretty tacky, at best, I’d say. It seems like @come_to_mumma had some insight into what indigenous Australians have to say about it. Maybe it’s best to defer to them? I’m just noting that whenever something like this comes up, there tends to be a round of how and why it’s bullshit from people who aren’t directly connected to the culture in question.
I’m not sure I agree with that, at least not entirely. I think it’s more problematic for people coming from the more powerful culture to exclude people who have been historically forced to conform to the more powerful culture. And in the case of objects like the boomerang, it’s often the more powerful culture that ends up profiting off of the less powerful culture, too. I think it’s probably up for debate whether or not this is so in this case.
It is sort of crass commercialism, though, even if it’s not cultural appropriation.
And I think I said Gucci above rather than Chanel…
I do question the very idea of cultural appropriation. That’s not to say that I don’t think there are instances of people incorporating one culture in to another in an offensive way, or that’s in poor taste. But I think the notion of cultural appropriation - suggesting that someone has stolen something away from one culture, or someone doesn’t have a right to a certain mode of dress, hair, speech, music, or manner because of their own background, is a divisive way of thinking, and one that doesn’t recognize that cultures have always mixed and shared ideas, clothes, and yes, even weapons.
This.
Damn near every white person (and presumably other non-Aboriginal persons, too) has bought or at least thrown a boomerang, even if only as a kid at a family picnic, just to try it out. the cat’s out of the bag, here. the offensive bit is the price tag.
this may not be a perfect analogy, but it brings to mind that bit in Seinfeld where Jerry is explaining in the confessional that his dentist, having recently converted to Judaism, has begun vigorous use of Yiddish slang and the telling of Jewish humor; the dentist has seemingly converted just so he can tell the jokes.
Priest: “… And this offends you as a Jewish person?”
I think that really ignores history and people’s actually lived experiences at having their culture used for the economic gain of another person. I don’t think this has to mean that no person of European extraction person can ever engage with non-European cultures, because I think there are plenty of cases where it’s a fruitful exchange that doesn’t damage people - it’s not always cultural appropriation for sure. That doesn’t mean that we should ignore it as an issue or that it’s not a real issue. Do you think that the non-white people who bring this to public attention are not worth listening to when it comes to their culture and how it’s used, profited off, and perceived by the rest of the world? Do you really think that centuries of imperialism that included cultural destruction is entirely irrelevant to the inner workings of capitalism?
Sure, they’re worth listening to, and they can say it’s offensive or not. Some of it probably is to some people. But I don’t think that’s cultural appropriation. The term itself implies wrongdoing just in the “taking” of the culture. But that’s not how culture works. Just because someone feels like their culture was stolen from them doesn’t mean it was theirs to begin with. It’s not owned by anyone. It’s open source. It’s public domain. That some company might take an idea from a culture and use it in a commercial way might be offensive and crass, but again, that’s been happening for tens of thousands of years.
Someone should tell that to the many corporations that profit off of culture, then. This is part of the problem, that when it comes to native culture, it’s treated as a public resource, but many aspects of modern, western culture is treated as a commercial goods that are in need of legal protections.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Culture in capitalism, especially when you’re talking about sound and visual culture works in very different ways than it used to. See, for example how the advent of sound recording changed how we interact with music as a cultural good (David Suisman talks about this in the US in his book Selling Sounds). In fact, this is a good example, precisely because the people who benefited from sound recordings of African American music were often white men (I think the example of the 1920s and 30s label Black Swan, run by African Americans for their community is an exception that proves the rule here). They are the ones who sold the records and generally only paid the people making the music a pittance. It’s a classic example of cultural exploitation. And even when African Americans listened to and incorporated what was considered white music (primarily hillbilly music), it was still white record executives who primarily financially benefited. And it was white musicians who were the first to benefit from a shift in how we understood the role of the musician in popular music, that they are the creative genius who deserved to be compensated for their labor. Well into the 60s and 70s, many labels routinely ripped off black artists at much higher rates than whites. We all know the recording industry historically works on a pretty exploitative basis, but the ones who were able to break out of that and make sure artists were more fairly compensated were white initially, because they had the cultural capital to agitate for their rights much more effectively than black musicians up to fairly recently.
It’s not at all the same thing as people of different races sitting around together, playing music and learning from each other. That’s most certainly healthy cultural exchange and isn’t really what we’re talking about here. That’s not commercialization of a cultural good, it’s individuals sharing music together and learning from one another.
This. I’m against cultural appropriation in general, but I also know of some cases of misplaced outrage – either because someone thought something had always been particular to their culture and they were wrong, or because they made incorrect assumptions about a minority and objected when they were portrayed accurately.
The worst is when someone calls someone else out for appropriation… and the thing in question is a traditional part of their culture, only the accuser didn’t know that and makes assumptions.
Yeah. It’s a complicated and fraught subject in general. This is why I didn’t want to say that I thought it was appropriation, but rather that it’s an issue in the world that we shouldn’t be so eager to see as just political correctness gone mad or something that’s already been “fixed” in the modern age. I don’t think it is, but I’m all about deferring to the people who have a real stake in the game. If I can help by signal boosting, I think that’s great. If I need to shut it, I’ll happily do that.
Every corporation, perhaps every commercial transaction since the beginning of human trade, is based on profiting off of culture. Culture is what makes one thing more valuable there than here - it’s the reason that everything from tea and tartans to Mozart and moonshine are traded. Culture is at the heart of commerce. The value that other people see in other cultures is expressed in trade. Trade is not a bad thing.
I feel that the general idea of cultural appropriation is a useful tool for discussion but far too often said discussions get mired in gatekeeping. “Does person X have the right do to thing Y?” That can either be from the permission standpoint (Person A from this culture says it’s okay while person B from the same culture says it’s not) or from the membership aspect (Does person X belong to group Z?). Both arguments tend to drown out the actual discussion of whether or not a particular qualifies as appropriation or not, especially on the internet.
I’m not really sure I agree with that, actually. I’d suspect much of trade up until the modern era was about people obtaining the necessities of life, with elites being more likely to trade in culture. Maybe you need to define for me how you’re using the term culture, since it’s one of those words that can be rather squishy. For example, I’d say food itself, especially in a raw form isn’t culture, while food made into a dish is culture. And again, I’d argue that the modern capitalist system is fundamentally different from trade in earlier eras, because it’s more likely to be done through large scale corporations rather than more localized and individual.
Exploitation is though, and in the modern age, much of capitalism is predicated on exploitation of one person or another, the exploitation of workers with no other choices for their labor (whether that is in the form of slavery or wage labor, although there are obviously different levels of exploitation), the exploitation colonies for their raw materials and as an end market for goods (often displacing the craftmen and women of the local population - cotton in India, for example, with cheaper British culture decimating the native Indian weaving trade), the exploitation of natural resources, etc. Trade is a part of human life and always has been. Capitalism is not synonymous with all forms of trade.
Quaker Oats is a good example. The company has never been affiliated with the Religious Society of Friends, yet it uses the Quaker image, trading upon a reputation for “honesty, integrity, purity and strength” that does not belong to it. All that Quakers have received in exchange is an association to oatmeal that they didn’t want and don’t particularly appreciate. The company, moreover, has engaged in promotions which Quakers see as glorifying violence, thereby using their identity in a manner which is contrary to their values.
As @mindysan33 points out, there’s trade, and then there’s exploitation.
I agree with everything you’ve said in this thread, but I’m also concerned that, at the opposite extreme, oversensitivity tends to reassert the power relationship by declining to engage with the other culture on equal terms. In other words, aborigines might find all this condescending and wonder why we can’t just be as comfortable with boomerangs as we are with katanas.
I don’t agree. I think it’s cultural appropriation if a cultural object is used to misrepresent a culture. Considering it so simply because someone from culture A doesn’t want it used by culture B would allow the US to complain that the construction of nuclear weapons is cultural appropriation.
@Haystack - I think I’m agreeing with you. If Quaker Oats had tried it in recent years they would have had their asses sued off them - in a non-threatening, non-violent way of course.
