GUEST BLOG: Danyl Strypey Bruce – Culture is Not Property
There has been a lot of discussion lately here in Ōtepoti about something called “cultural appropriation”. It first came to my attention when a well-meaning friend starting objecting to our plan to have a “Gypsy Party” as part of a local festival, with Eastern European and Arabic influenced music, a performance by our local belly dancer troupe, and decoration to fit the theme.
I’ve been a vocal critic of racism since I started learning Te Reo Māori at high school, and started getting hassled for pronouncing Māori words and place names correctly. But I utterly reject these attempts to police other people’s personal expression. In a democratic society, people are free to dress however they want, regardless of how other people might choose to take offence.
I am disturbed by this trend towards treating culture as the “intellectual property” of one group of people, rather than recognising that culture has always been shared and fluid. It leads us down a dark path. For example, if its ok to should we be telling off Hawaiians for “appropriating” their signature instrument – the ukulele – from another culture.
Policing people’s self-expression is a distraction from the deep institutional racism in colonial societies like New Zealand. It conveniently shifts the blame for the marginalization of ethnic and cultural minorities away from the elites, and their states and corporations which reinforce political-economic racism every day in their policing, bureaucracy, and commodification, and onto ordinary people.
Worse, often on behalf of groups they’re not actually part of, which is patronising at best.
Obviously I support anti-harassment rules which prevent threatening behaviour, like people following someone around shouting at them. But like rules that forbid assault, these are about people’s behaviour and the effect it has on others, not about policing people’s opinions or their right to express them. As Noam Chomsky said about the prosecution of history professor Robert Faurisson for holocaust denial and anti-semitism, “It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”
In the 90s we used to talk about the dominance of US pop music on NZ radio as an example of “cultural imperialism”, but our solution was to lobby for media channels to do more to promote NZ music, not to have a go at people for wearing blue jeans and white t-shirts, or dressing like US hip-hops stars.
It may be upsetting for a Māori person attending a student party to see a group of people wearing piupui and blackface. But somehow I doubt it affects them as deeply as the state enforced domination of a nothern hemisphere calender over the rhythms of our southern hemisphere lives, through statutes like the Holidays Act (see ‘The Colonization of Time’ by Giordano Nanni for an academic discussion of the imposition of British concepts of time and date on indigenous people). Or employers who don’t understand why they need to take days worth of time off work to give service at marae when anyone they are related to dies. Or the way the pollution of land, waterways, and oceans, including by “conservation” measure like 1080 poisoning, limits their ability to gather natural resources for food and medicine, as guaranteed in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, forcing them to become dependent on earning money and buying commodities to provide for their needs.
Cultural appropriation can be subtle and insidious. One example is a company using a Maori name as their brand (I’m sure I read something about this recently) or logo, and preventing Maori from using it. In effect, expropriation.
Or Walt Disney using figures from common fairy tales (Snow White, Cinderella, etc) and claiming it for their own.
Then there’s the example of McDonalds preventing people with that surname from using it as part of their business.
When it comes to intellectual property and branding, corporations will exert their financial muscle to do whatever it takes. Often at the expense of other ethnic cultures.
“should we be telling off Hawaiians for “appropriating” their signature instrument – the ukulele – from another culture.”
No, because that’s not what I’d call appropriation. Portuguese moved to Hawaii and the ukulele emerged from that contact.
I’d say appropriation exists when a dominant culture use an oppressed culture for their own means. It’s all about power, which means it’s hard to judge and people’s views can vary.
Appropriation is impossible to define objectively, so I think it’s best to err on the side of caution and listen to people from disempowered positions.
“In a democratic society, people are free to dress however they want, regardless of how other people might choose to take offence.”
I don’t think taking offence is a ‘choice’. As I said, it’s about power, which includes people’s position, our collective history, our current context, our personal experiences, and many other issues. These all shape whether or not people take offence.
Conversation on this topic is important, since appropriation is near impossible to define. And people need to engage in this conversation without throwing around labels, such as ‘racist’. Most of the time it’s lack of awareness and events & clothing are done with the best of intentions. So good on you for discussing this here – nice post!
100% FATTY.
Everything is not all “black ^ White: and at least you will know what I mean.
So many narrow minds around today.
Smells like white privilege…
Hm. But if you’re having a “Gypsy Party”, aren’t you guilty of treating another culture as property? As in, making light of things that may have genuinely serious significance to some?
For me it’s a matter of cultural sensitivity: don’t take lightly what you don’t necessarily fully understand. If you fully understand it, then you’re not at risk for treating it disrespectfully, for you understand the full gravity of it’s meaning to those who take it seriously.
For example, if others are using something precious to me in insensitive ways, then I justifiably have the right to be outraged. Calling the expression of my outrage “policing” is just an excuse not to examine your own motivations, prejudices and behaviour, which were inconsiderate; and quoting Noam Chomsky makes no difference. A perfect example of this that came to mind from the attached image, from a few years ago, is that of Navajo activist Amanda Blackhorse who got the American football trademark “Redskins” revoked, which IIRC was a slur originally based in the scalping of native Americans. Is that cultural “policing”? ie. Should Amanda Blackhorse have simply accepted that “now it’s a football team brand”, due to the “shared and fluid” nature of culture? Because to me her actions seem pretty damned sensible.
It sounds to me like you’re angry that someone thought your actions might be inconsiderate, and so you’re justifying your ignorance by saying, apropos, “in a democratic society people can do whatever they want”, or more accurately, “I can do whatever I want”. In reality, it’s more reasonable to suggest that “you can do whatever you want, so long as it does not harm others”. And to not harm others requires depth, understanding, and compassion.
It’s a tough one. Generally I think it comes down to power balance and context and domination.
It is clearly wrong for some company to take over another’s culture and merchandise it and even more revolting make some commercial claim so the indigenous culture can not use it any more. This should be banned immediately.
This is even worse with medicine. Taking local plants etc and then patenting them to take the profit while those who have traditionally used it are shut out.
I think in the context of a non commerical party, people can afford to loosen up, unless it is blatantly offensive, But sensitivity should be key.
If people were taught about history, appropriation and culture then maybe things would be better.
This is the dumbest thing I have read in a very, very long time
The term ‘gypsy’ is racist for starters. That isn’t even up for debate anymore it just is. Also, white hippies can’t just do whatever they want because they think that the violence of appropriation is less harmful than other racism. You also can’t compare wearing white jeans to appropriating the cultures of people literally dying from systemic racism. It’s like defending reverse racism. It’s a non-argument. This is too stupid for mainstream media let alone the daily blog. Seriously who published this.
blue jeans egg. blue jeans. who wears white jeans?
Left out of the text sent to Bomber was a reference to a book called ‘Who Owns Native Culture’ by anthropologist Michael Brown. He grounds this discussion in a series of real world cases, illustrating the wide range of ways the phrase “cultural appropriation” has been employed around the world.
My main objection to the phrase is the way it is used to appropriate a grab-bag of other peoples’ issues by a mostly white, mostly middle class “progressive” elite, composed of both “progressives” and “[neo]-liberals”. These issues are real, and in his book Brown decries numerous examples of the institutional racism I referred to in the blog piece. But middle class discourses about racism strip it of its class character (the ongoing process of colonization and assimilation), and reduce it to a failure of manners, which allows deniers to talk about “reverse racism” when individual members of oppressed racial classes make rude comments about those of more dominant racial classes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoG4pNWUVZw
Those whose knee-jerk reaction to the discussion I’ve started is to spit back phrases like “white privilege”, need to take some time to explain which parts of what I’ve written exploit privilege, and how. Then perhaps we can have a discussion, rather than just using chunks of language as shaming sticks.