I’ve just seen a photo of a Peter and Jane book published in 1964. (Peter and Jane 1a, Keywords reading scheme, if you want to look it up.)
In the illustration, Peter and Jane are in a homemade “teepee” and Peter is wearing a children’s play version of a Plains Nation eagle feather bonnet.
When that book was published, Indigenous kids were still being sent to residential schools and dying there. The last residential schools closed in the mid/late 1990s.
Continue readingFantastic article by River Enodian from the Tea-Addicted Witch blog.
Explains how eclectic Wicca and initiatory Wicca are two different things; discusses cultural appropriation in Wicca; looks at the Wiccan Rede and the Threefold Law; and explains Wicca’s relationship with Crowley, Thelema, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I’ve tackled some of these topics myself but this is an excellent overview.
Some time back I posted a video about cultural appropriation and Lora O’Brien pointed out that the modern Wiccan and Pagan usage of Sabbat names is appropriated from Irish culture and language.
Gerald Gardner and other early Wiccans did not use the Irish names for these festivals — that happened later. Wicca is not a Celtic religion.
It does seem wrong to lift these festivals out of context. There are other old names for these festivals in England and Wales (the Scots Gaelic has similar names to the Irish Gaelic, but pronounced differently).
Continue readingOne of the highlights of my week is the Folklore Thursday hashtag on Twitter. I’ve not had time to look at it for a few weeks though, so it seems I missed the occasion when some völkisch fascists tried to hijack it, much to the horror of the regular participants.
One of them accordingly started a second hashtag, Folklore Against Fascism, and several participants tweeted about their opposition to fascism and commitment to inclusive folklore.
This excellent perspective on cultural appropriation was offered by David Policar in a public post on Facebook. I thought it was worth sharing.
Rachel Dolezal is not Black, and she is not “transracial”.
Nine million women did not die in the Burning Times.
What is the connection between these two statements? They are both a refutation of people trying to appropriate other people’s pain.
I have now written several articles on cultural appropriation. When people comment on articles on this topic, I have observed several recurring themes.
Silos, Acatlán, Hidalgo, México. Photo by Diego Delso [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Frequently, people assume that talk of cultural appropriation means that no-one can ever use an idea from another culture. This would rule out situations of cultural fusion, where two cultures which are on an equal footing come together to create a new amalgam of ideas, music, cuisine, or ritual. It would also rule out cultural exchange, where two cultures on an equal footing acquire new ideas, practices, or rituals from each other. These situations are clearly not problematic, because the two cultures are on an equal footing. The key feature here is theequality of the cultures.
People also talk as if those who are trying to draw attention to the issue of cultural approppriation are behaving as though culture is a monolith or silo, where nothing can ever be transferred from one culture to another. Obviously, this is not the case, and offering examples of cultural fusion or cultural exchange between cultures which are on an equal footing is not an argument for dismissing claims of cultural appropriation.
Some people claim that what makes you part of a culture is that you are genetically related to the people who produced that culture. On the basis of this claim, the idea of cultural appropriation has been distorted by people with a racist or alt-right agenda, who want to keep people of colour out of revived European religious traditions. We should strenuously resist the idea that culture is genetically trasnmitted, as it is legitimises racism.
Culture is transmitted through acculturation, via books, films, conversation, storytelling, dance, and traditional practices. People who immerse themselves in another culture can become part of it, and can legitimately take part in its practices and rituals, though if the culture is a living culture, then they should approach living representatives of that culture in order to become part of it.
Another recurring theme is the idea that culture is universal and somehow open-source. This is derived from two particularly pernicious ideologies.
The first of these is colonialism, which has taken many forms over the centuries, and consists of the dominant or hegemonic culture assuming that it is superior to the conquered culture, and therefore has a right to the goods, services, resources, lands, and ideas of the conquered culture.
The second of these ideologies seems benign, but isn’t. It is sometimes called the perennial philosophy, and sometimes called universalism – the idea that there is a universal essence of every idea or practice that can be extracted from it and re-embedded in another context. This is the idea behind Michael Harner’s “core shamanism” – the idea that there is a universal shamanistic practice which can be extracted from Siberian shamanism, and re-clothed in the trappings of another culture, and thereby can become the shamanism of the new culture.
However, whilst ideas from one culture can be transferred to another if proper care is taken, quite often they are transferred with little appreciation or care for the original culture from which the idea came, or cherry-picked whilst ignoring other aspects of the source culture which are too ‘difficult’, and become distorted in the process of transfer. The transfer of ideas becomes problematic and culturally appropriative when the appropriating culture has more power than the source culture.
Many people who struggle with the idea of cultural appropriation fail to see that it happens when the appropriating culture has more power than the source culture.
What does it mean to say that one culture has more power than another? When a culture is seen as normative (in the current context white, European, heterosexual, male, and cisgender are the “norm” or unmarked default), it has more power than non-normative cultures.
Cultures acquire normative status by conquering other cultures. In the ancient world, the Graeco-Roman culture was the normative culture, against which other cultures were measured and found to be barbaric or exotic. In the modern world, the Western culture of Europe and America is the normative culture against which other cultures are seen as relatively exotic or even barbaric.
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my books.
Why cultural appropriation doesn’t work
A culture, and a religion, is a massively complex system of interlocking ideas, philosophies, symbols, and practices.
If you take one of these ideas out of context and try to shoehorn it into another tradition, it’s like taking a complex part out of a clock, and trying to put it in a completely different clock, or even a completely different machine.
Prague Astronomical Clock. Photo by Steve Collis. CC-BY-SA2.0 (wikimedia)
Or it’s like an organ transplant – the new organ may be rejected and you need to take lots of drugs to get your body to accept it.
The New Age, which has lots of different parts cobbled together, is basically Frankenstein’s monster.
Or it’s like looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle and taking one beautiful rose from the middle of the picture and trying to put it in a completely different jigsaw. No two pieces are exactly the same, and it doesn’t fit the picture in the other jigsaw anyway, and so you have to hit it with a hammer and file off the edges to get it to fit in the other jigsaw.
Thanks to Bob for the ideas of the jigsaw and the organ transplant.
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my books.
Dowsing for Divinity 
