Episode 73 - Cultural Appropriation Transcript

Ellie: 0:11

Welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:13

The podcast where two philosophers converse with one another about ideas, concepts, and the world.

Ellie: 0:20

We're your co-hosts, Ellie Anderson

David: 0:22

and David Peña-Guzmán. Ellie, shit hit the fan in 2015 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The museum had Claude Monet's 1876 painting La Japonaise, which is French for Japanese lady or Japanese woman, it's just the feminine of Japanese in French, on display as part of a larger kimono art exhibit. And as a way of creating audience engagement, they created this event called Kimono Wednesdays

Ellie: 0:53

Yeesh.

David: 0:54

in which museum goers were basically encouraged to put on a kimono that was available on site and to take selfies in front of La Japonaise.

Ellie: 1:07

There's so much to say about this, but I quickly wanna interject unrelated to our episode topic, that this is such a classic symptom of the way our society experiences art right now. Oh, we have this famous old painting, why don't you engage with it by taking a selfie in the same outfit? The selfiacation of contemporary art engagement.

David: 1:30

Yeah. In the mirroring of the person in front of the painter as the subject in front of the iPhone camera. Also the point that in order for you to appreciate are you essentially have to wear it as if you're like wrapping yourself with the canvas of the Monet painting, the form of a kimono. But as you can expect, this led to a major controversy with various people, protesting the exhibit and accusing the museum of participating in cultural appropriation and performing a kind of aesthetic yellow face.

Ellie: 2:00

The allies had to mobilize.

David: 2:02

They did indeed. Although the case got really complicated by the fact that a group of counter protestors developed, and these were Japanese individuals who showed up to defend the Kimono Wednesday exhibit. And also the exhibit itself was originally developed in Japan by a Japanese public broadcasting corporation. And they wanted to spread knowledge of Japanese culture outside of Japan, including the U.S. So it's not just that the exhibit was quote unquote sanctioned by a group of people of Japanese origin or dissent, that it itself was Japanese in origin. And so the question about this exhibit is really about authority around culture. Who gets to determine whether this is a case of cultural appropriation as the protestors believed, or a case of cultural appreciation as the counter protestors argued?

Ellie: 3:02

There's so many layers to this, one of which is that it probably felt pretty different to have this exhibit in Japan itself, and to have Japanese people wearing the kimono in front of the Claude Monet painting, which features his wife, who is blonde and white in, uh, kimono, right? There might have been something to a Japanese person standing in front of that, not that I'm like taking a selfie in front of a, a painting is like, you know, that is super revolutionary. But there was probably something a bit more subversive to that than say, having somebody who looks like me slash kind of like Monet's wife, um, who is also blonde.

David: 3:42

Monet's first wife. To be specific.

Ellie: 3:44

Okay. Okay. Camille, uh, wearing this in front of the painting, that also features a blonde woman wearing a kimono. So there's this optical dimension of it where people are reproducing a painting that by virtue of having a white French woman wearing a kimono is arguably already an example of cultural appropriation. And then, you know, putting themselves in it, which is especially cringe, let's say, to just put like a, a pure aesthetic value on it in a museum in Boston.

David: 4:17

Yeah, no, for sure. And the, the funny thing is that the museum told people to quote channel their inner Camille Monet. Uh, so really to identify with the white woman in the painting and you know, I, we, we do have to underscore the fact that the Monets are of course, French. And in the 19th century there was this social phenomenon in France called Japonisme and it's an orientalist infatuation that high French society had with Japanese culture because they were seen as coming from this far away land that is radically unlike anything that Europe has ever known. And so the painting itself in its original context was somewhat controversial because people disagreed already at the time about whether it was a critique of Japonisme or whether it was an expression of it. And I think this highlights just how hard it is to think through accusations of cultural appropriation now and in the past.

Ellie: 5:21

And especially now given a more multiethnic and globalized society than you had then. The fact that it's so easy for images of this, like to go viral, in fact that seems to have been part of the museum's idea, is, oh, let's attract museum goers to this exhibit by having them post on social media about this. And so you have this complete divorcing of context, both in the original painting I would say, or maybe not a complete divorcing of context, but uh, divorcing of context then a real divorcing of context once you get to the online images of it. Right. Which then feeds the moral outrage machine online and encourages strangers to sort of

David: 6:01

Show up and protest or like share their opinion about the painting on their own wall.

Ellie: 6:07

Yeah, which I don't, I don't say to diminish the charge that this was, uh, you know, an abhorrent example of yellow face. But rather to say that there is, I think, a certain level of complexity, but also of oversimplification maybe. There's a rematerial complexity that leads to interpretive oversimplification when you get the moral outrage tools of online discourse mixed in.

David: 6:28

Yeah, and I think that's an important point to link the moral outrage as it expresses itself today to social media and the internet, because of course the museum wanted this campaign, let's say, to go viral, but it's not just content that goes viral, it's also those charged effects that we now know create these waves of contagion in the digital world, where suddenly you just get caught up in a wave and you're sitting in your computer, you know, 50,000 kilometers away from the Monet painting, just like fuming, one way or another about this exhibit that you haven't even actually experienced in the flesh.

Ellie: 7:04

And probably don't know, was originally put on and sanctioned by a major Japanese broadcasting company.

David: 7:15

Today we are talking about cultural appropriation.

Ellie: 7:19

Most people agree that cultural appropriation is wrong, but what exactly is wrong about it?

David: 7:24

What unifies cultural groups and can we ever draw a clear line distinguishing between insiders and outsiders?

Ellie: 7:32

And should individuals be called out for cultural appropriation? If so, how? And under what conditions? It's interesting you started with an example of Japanese culture's appropriation with the kimono curfuffle because the appropriation of Japanese culture has been in the news again recently thanks to the infamous Gwen Stefani interview in Allure that earlier this year.

David: 7:54

The one where she said, I am Japanese.

Ellie: 7:57

Indeed. Yes. Those or I think specifically I'm Japanese, did come out of her mouth even though she has no Japanese genealogy.

David: 8:05

Yeah, no genealogy whatsoever. And to make matters worse, the reporter that she said this to was herself Asian American. And later the reporter said that she felt so uncomfortable about the whole affair, that even though she is effectively a beauty reporter for Allure, she then wrote this whole article that is not just about beauty, it's a much more politicized article about this bizarre claim that Gwen Stefani made and the problem with her appropriation of Japanese culture, specifically Harajuku style.

Ellie: 8:37

So I was a teenager when the Gwen Stefani album that started it all dropped in 2004 and her album was hot the high school dance floor, so I remember this period well. Harajuku is an area of Tokyo that has become shorthand for a particular kind of amazing style. It's colorful, it's over the top. It's often cutesy and extra girly. And Gwen had four Japanese women decked out in Harajuku fashions as her backup dancers for music videos and like live shows during her Harajuku phase. And then she followed this up with a popular fragrance line, and the perfumes for the fragrance line came in these bottles that were made to look like her Harajuku backup dancers.

David: 9:21

Oh my God. Everything folds onto everything else in case of appropriation. Um, and then the music also smells like the perfume, uh, line.

Ellie: 9:29

And what we really need is for people to be able to go to the Boston Museum of Fine Art and dress up like the perfume bottles in front of the perfume bottles.

David: 9:40

But I, I think this really is an interesting example for us to use as we explore various positions on cultural appropriation in this episode, and one problem that many people bring up is how appropriation involves effectively capitalizing on another culture. Usually somebody in a position of privilege capitalizes on a culture that has been oppressed and marginalized. It's just a really bad look for Gwen, who is a white woman from California to claim to be Japanese and to make millions off of a perfume line featuring Japanese faces, Japanese bodies, Japanese style, especially in the context of California. And given how Japanese Americans were put into internment camps in California less than a century ago.

Ellie: 10:26

What you're saying, David, I think opens up at least two ways of thinking about cultural appropriation that you commonly hear today. And I'm gonna draw here on the very helpful schema that philosophers C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl offer in their article on cultural appropriation, which we're gonna discuss a bit more in detail later. So one way of thinking about cultural appropriation is that it is harmful. Appropriating cultural elements of groups that have been historically oppressed, such as Japanese Americans might perpetuate harmful stereotypes or erase cultural practices. And what's more, it might also mean that a person in a position of privilege is economically benefiting from another culture in a way that prevents someone from that culture, from benefiting.

David: 11:10

Yeah, no, and I, this is a very common view that you see in the U.S., especially in terms of the cultural appropriation of black culture by, for instance, white artists. So think about the history of black music and black people being denied economic opportunities that instead go to white appropriators. I mean, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the entire history of rock and roll is a perfect illustration of this concrete harm that happens around not just economics, but I would also say prestige, right? Because you name recognition and also the the financial benefits that come with that. So it does tie back to economics.

Ellie: 11:49

Yeah. But I think when we're talking about harm, economics is like the main argument, right? Can you be harmed by lacking prestige?

David: 11:56

If it is something that you created and that then is recognized by others, I do think you can be harmed by being prestige over something that is your original contribution. But maybe, you know, we wanna pick that apart a little more. But either way, I think, you know, we can talk about the history of rock and roll and many other musical genres, but recently similar charges have been made and I think honestly with good grounds against not just Gwen Stefani, but even people like Miley Cyrus and, uh, you know, there was a controversy around Madonna appropriating voguing from black queer culture in New York.

Ellie: 12:30

That's right. And there are many cases when the charge that cultural appropriation is harmful makes a lot of sense, such as these, and those mainly have to do with economic concerns, but also might have to do with, as I mentioned earlier, harmful stereotypes or erasing cultural practices. So the case of Madonna, for instance, erasing a cultural practice by appropriating voguing and overlooking that it's rooted in say, like black drag or ball culture. But then you also might worry that this claim of harm doesn't cover all cases of cultural appropriation. So the claim that cultural appropriation is bad because it's harmful, would leave some things out that we would probably wanna still consider cultural appropriation. Take the example of a white woman wearing box braids or another traditionally black hairstyle. She wouldn't necessarily be perpetuating harmful stereotypes, right? She could come back and say like, oh, I'm actually celebrating black culture. And arguably she wouldn't be trying to erase cultural practices if she was say, drawing attention to the fact that she's adopting this hairstyle from black cultural traditions. She's also not economically benefiting from this hairstyle.

David: 13:38

Unless you're Iggy Azalea, who has made a lot money off of appropriating black hairstyles.

Ellie: 13:43

I'm not talking about celebrities like her necessarily here. I'm thinking more about like the white girl in your sorority. And seems like we need a way to discuss how her wearing box braids would still be cultural appropriation, even though there's not a quote harm. So this leads to a second way of thinking about cultural appropriation, where cultural appropriation is a case of objectionable symbolism. When a group is oppressed, members of dominant groups shouldn't appropriate elements from the culture of those who are or have been oppressed in ways that draw attention to the power imbalance and how it benefits the appropriator.

David: 14:21

Yes. Think about how black women are often and have been historically pressured to have white hairstyles in order to conform to norms of respectability. So when you think about this climate, a white girl showing up to I, I guess the sorority charity event in box braids signals that she doesn't have this pressure on her, and hence she has more freedom and therefore more power.

Ellie: 14:47

So by virtue of being able to flaut the respectability norms, she is showing that she

David: 14:54

It doesn't cost her anything. Yeah.

Ellie: 14:56

Yeah. And in that sense, she's advancing an objectionable symbolism. She is appropriating something in a way that further entrenches her power as a privileged group while paradoxically trading off of the innovations of an oppressed group.

David: 15:09

Yeah, and I, and I think that sense of like being able to do it without paying the cost that people who have been trying to move the other way can't is what really gets at this notion of symbolism. And I think we can see this in the Stefani example, in the sense that she gets to play with the style of Harajuku in a freer way than arguably Japanese women. Not only because of her fame and because of her economic prowess, but also because as a white woman, I think she could be perceived as having a strong voice, even as she wears cutesy clothing, while Asian and Asian American women are often stereotyped as being submissive or girlish.

Ellie: 15:49

And in this case, her Japanese backup dancers literally have no voice. She's the one singing.

David: 15:54

Well, I arguably though the backup dancers in this case didn't have that much of an issue with Stefani's actions because they freely agreed to work with her. Right.

Ellie: 16:03

Yeah, but I don't know. The, the metaphor still works.

David: 16:06

Now I couldn't find much about how Japanese people view Gwen Stefani, but we can imagine that maybe many of them are supportive of her. After all, she did bring worldwide attention to Harajuku style by virtue of wielding the power of American cultural hegemony and her own fame to give this style an international platform. And so in that case, could we still call this cultural appropriation? Um, wouldn't it be arguably a case of cultural appreciation?

Ellie: 16:41

I think this gets into the question of who we're including when we're talking about an oppressed group. Cultural appropriation claims really only get off the ground when we're talking about asymmetrical, historical and social conditions of oppression, colonialism, genocide, et cetera. This is why I can't say that people using the word like are appropriating my culture as a white southern Californian.

David: 17:04

Justice for Valley Girls.

Ellie: 17:06

I know. Exactly, exactly.

David: 17:07

I, and I mean, what you're saying sounds exactly right to me. Uh, that we would have to think about it in the context of imbalance. And I think this question of who counts, we need to recognize how relevant it is. For one, there is a lot of conflation in discussions about cultural appropriation between things like culture, race, and ethnicity. They get thrown into a mix in a weird way sometimes. So, for example, the reporter of the Gwen Stefani story talked about her own experience as an Asian American first admiring the Harajuku girl's perfume line when she was younger, but then ultimately coming to find problems with it and how it reflected on her own identity. And the reporter herself was not Japanese. She was Filipino-American. She's therefore talking more about race than about culture, right? Because what she shares arguably with Japanese individuals is some racial features rather than a shared culture. Even though I still think her claim about cultural appropriation stands.

Ellie: 18:13

This is worth unpacking. Even though what we are talking about with cultural appropriation is indeed culture, which we'll say a little bit more about later this episode. I think there are situations in which it reasonably gets conflated with race because of the way that colonialism and white supremacy work. For instance, if you take the example of the stereotypes, the stereotypes that Americans have around Asian women are arguably less related to culture and more related to race, or at least, I dunno if I wanna say more and less, but, but they're implicated in a certain way, right? There stereotypes that American culture has towards Asian women rather than those stereotypes being extraordinarily culturally specific. There might localized differences, but the really problematic stereotype is against Asian or Asian American women, not against say like Japanese women versus Filipino women and those stereotypes are functions of the legacy and continuing existence of white supremacy, which is linked with colonialism, but of course not reducible to it. So I do think there's this kind of complex melting pot, dare I say in an episode on culture, of culture, race, and ethnicity, such that some of the charges of cultural appropriation are actually better articulated as charges of racism. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't also talk about them as cases of cultural appropriation, even though the lines can be pretty blurred.

David: 19:56

The philosophers, C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl have written a really exciting article on cultural appropriation. And for our listeners, you might recognize C. Thi Nguyen from our previous episode on games and gaming.

Ellie: 20:09

Games and gamification.

David: 20:11

Games and gamification. Thank you.

Ellie: 20:13

Don't wanna lead listeners into thinking they're gonna get tips for playing Eldon ring. Like, oh, it's an episode on gaming. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry.

David: 20:20

No. And so we've had C. Thi Nguyen on our podcast before, and we will have a very soon Matthew Strohl with us for a surprise episode. We don't wanna ruin the surprise there, but these two wonderful philosophers decided to do a collaboration and publish an article on the philosophy of cultural appropriation. And in this article, they worry that standard approaches to cultural appropriations, such as the ones that we discussed, the one based on harm and the one based on symbolism and objectionable stereotypes, they're all missing something important and they suggest that a new perspective on cultural appropriation is needed, and that's what they call the intimacy approach. Ellie, let's chat about this approach and our takes on it.

Ellie: 21:09

All right. According to Nguyen and Strohl,cultural groups are held together by relations of intimacy much in the same way that interpersonal relationships are. When you're in an interpersonal relationship with someone, it's through building intimacy that you come to feel at home in the relationship and comfortable around that person. And this intimacy is forged through sharing things in common and to the exclusion of other people who are outside intimate sphere, such as jokes, certain rituals, certain activities, certain secrets even.

David: 21:43

And when someone else is given access to those intimate practices that you share just with the other person that is in that intimate relationship, we would say that there has been a breach of intimacy and Nguyen and Strohl give the example of love letters. If my partner and I write love letters to one another as an expression of our undying, uh, romantic attachment to one another, there's an expectation there that we cherish those letters and that we keep them within this sphere of intimacy. So, for example, if I write these amazing letters and then I find out that my partner decided to post them on Facebook, I would, I mean, I would pass a kidney stone on the spot.

Ellie: 22:30

More updated version would be like nude photos.

David: 22:33

Yes. Nude photos really, but even jokes, right? There's something wrong about letting other people in on an insider joke that you have with other people. Uh, that you have only with like your loved one, for example. Now let me go back to the letters. Rabih, if you're listening, I'm sorry that I've never actually written you a letter, but the point is not that the letters can never be public, but rather that decisions about who gets to read them can only be ethically made by my partner and I together.

Ellie: 23:04

So, to make this clear, the reason we're talking about this here, love letter digression, is that this is actually an example from the article. And Nguyen and Strohl interpret cultural appropriation in the same way. It is a breach, not so much of personal intimacy, but of the collective intimacy that holds cultural groups together.

David: 23:24

Yes. So when somebody does something culturally appropriative, uh, culturally appropriationist, how do you say that? Culturally appropriation sounds right? Oh, yes. Okay. Yes. Culturally, appropriative, um, and

Ellie: 23:39

I will let you into the intimacy of, uh, having English as your native language, David.

David: 23:44

Of linguistic conventions. But when somebody does something like that, like wear a dress from a culture they don't belong to, or they make a film depicting members of another culture in a very ignorant way, et cetera, et cetera, what they're doing on Nguyen and Strohl's account is inserting themselves into a sphere of cultural intimacy that is not their own. And so they're basically being like a cultural third wheel. They are inviting themselves to somebody else's candle lit to romantic dinner, and killing the mood and reading the love letters that are not for them. And they're kind of ruining that cultural intimacy for, for everybody else.

Ellie: 24:26

Well, and also like maybe going and actually stealing the food and giving it out, making people pay for it on the streets. If you're Iggy Azalea in this analogy.

David: 24:35

Yes. And so what I wanna ask you, Ellie, in connection to this article that we read, is what are your thoughts about this large scale analogy that these authors make between intimacy as the best way to understand what is wrong with cultural appropriation in connection to group dynamics?

Ellie: 24:57

I wanna talk a little about my own family here. I have one sister, Joni. Hi.

David: 25:03

Hi. Hi, Joni

Ellie: 25:05

And Joni has a fiance named Krishna.

David: 25:08

Hi, Krishna.

Ellie: 25:09

A partner, hi Krishna. Um, I also have a partner named Trevor who I've mentioned more than once on the podcast.

David: 25:14

Hi Trevor.

Ellie: 25:18

Trevor does listen to every episode and is really excited when

David: 25:21

That's we shout him out. Krishna and Joni, do not listen to every episode, but I'm they will listen to this one cuz they know that I'm gonna talk about a conversation we discussed on this episode. Bye Joni. Bye Krishna

Ellie: 25:31

Bye. Okay. Krishna is Indian. He moved to the US when he was a kid and his family is Hindu. They're from Odisha, uh, state, formerly colonized by the British. Trevor. My partner is half Indian. He's from the US and his dad is white while his mom moved from Mumbai as an adult. And her family comes from Mangalore, which is an area of India that was colonized by the Portuguese and is mostly Catholic. Krishna's family has really invited all of us into their very strong cultural traditions. So when his parents host an engagement party for Joni and Krishna, they bought me a traditional outfit to wear and offered me a Bindi, which is the little red dot that women wear on their forehead, which Gwen Stefani actually got in hot water for wearing in the nineties

David: 26:16

Oh my God.

Ellie: 26:16

In her Harajuku phase. In any case. The, the ceremony at their engagement party was Hindu and their wedding will be as well. And my extremely Caucasian parents and Joni performed parts of the Hindu ritual.

David: 26:30

What I wanna know is what color was the outfit that you wore? Because a thing about Indian garb is that it is colorfully stunning.

Ellie: 26:38

I know mine was a beautiful burgundy. I did feel a little weird wearing it, but I think that was mostly because I was imagining what randos on social media would think of it. Also, I did find out that none of Krishna's female cousins were wearing the Bindi, and so I was like, oh, no, that, even though you offered me one, maybe it was like cool to not wear it. In case, I, I think like I did have this little bit of a sense of, okay, so I'm wearing this outfit that has been purchased for me by extended family members and this is their culture. But if some rando on Twitter saw me wearing this, like they would see a cringe white lady. There was also this one other white millennial woman at the party and none of the Indian people seem to think anything of my wearing this outfit. Other than anything positive, like I got a lot of compliments on it and like saying, you know, you look great in this, but I did have this moment of being like, oh, there's this one other white millennial lady not wearing Indian carb. Does she think I'm cringe?

David: 27:37

You were afraid, not of the Indian gaze, but of the other white lady gaze as, as you becoming the object of, of her gaze.

Ellie: 27:44

I think this speaks exactly to cultural appropriation discourse because my sisters's take on all of this is that white women are not only the worst at cultural appropriation, but also the worst about calling people out on cultural appropriation in inappropriate context.

David: 27:59

I will not disagree necessarily with that, but you know, this makes me think also about how even though cultural appropriation discourse technically revolves around oppressed groups' capacities for determing for themselves on their own grounds if something is or isn't appropriation. Often in practice it's people who aren't in the group who cringe if something even seems appropriative. And that's what happened, for example, in the Boston Museum, right, that a lot of the protestors against the exhibit with the Kimono Wednesdays were not Japanese. And uh, many of the counter protestors were. Um, and so it, there seems to be a parallel here.

Ellie: 28:43

Yeah. Although I would also say that there's, I think that the idea of something being cringe implies that it's really just like a bad look rather than necessarily having a deeper problem to it. But I think also, David, you're right that there probably an element of cringe involved.

David: 28:56

Yeah. And so, I mean, thinking about cringe, we're talking about Indian outfits. So about three, let me tell you a story here about how this played out in my life quite recently. About three months ago, I went to this queer, trans Indian party in San Francisco at a bar, an acquaintance of mine who is an Indian activist, put this together. And I went with, I have a group of Indian queer friends. I call them the, uh, messy Desi brigade, um, and, uh, you know, like we hang out, we've done a couple of like brunches and things like that, or with Indian food. And then we go out and in this case, we went to this party. Now the flyer for the event said we want everyone to show up in traditional Indian garb. And they explicitly said, look, we don't care who you are, we don't care if you're brown or white, we want you to wear whatever Indian clothes you can get your paws on. And so when I was getting ready for the party, my Indian friends were asking me what I was going to wear. And I had this moment of hesitation because I, I do have some clothes that I bought in India. They're not like traditionally looking Indian clothes. They're more like the Fab India kind of like line.

Ellie: 30:10

Wait. You like went to H and M in Mumbai.

David: 30:14

No, No, not, not at all. And I, I said, you know, I, I actually just wanna wear what I normally wear to any party, so it's not gonna change my clothing decisions. And I asked them what they were going to wear, and they're like, we're just gonna wear our regular Western clothes that we also always wear to parties.

Ellie: 30:32

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David: 30:33

Anyways, long story short, we show up to this Bollywood themed queer party. And I swear to God, Ellie, every single person that showed up, decked out in Indian clothes with henna tattoos with the nose to ear chain. They were all the whitest, blondest, most cis gay men I've ever met. And only them, only, they were the ones showed up in the traditional garb.

Ellie: 31:03

Oh, really?

David: 31:04

Yes. Nobody else did. No brown person was in traditional garb.

Ellie: 31:07

Wait, but not, the Indian people were?

David: 31:10

No, no. The Indian people were not in garb. Oh, oh.

Ellie: 31:14

The host was?

David: 31:15

Yes, the host of the people who just showed up to the party and paid the entrance fee. It was a very clear imbalance. was a little cringe, but I, again, you know, like what can you say about that?

Ellie: 31:25

Well, yeah, cause the white people had been invited by host. But then it's interesting because then were other Indian members of the party, even though they weren't hosting still part of this group, who would get to decide whether or not this counted as a cultural appropriation? Uh, I know I I would feel really, I mean, first off, I probably wouldn't show up wearing that to begin with. I would maybe like, go for some fusion. No, the fusion outfit's gonna be even worse. I dunno what the answer is.

David: 31:52

Yeah, I don't know. And it, it just goes to this question of like, who has the authority to decide what is appropriation versus appreciation, especially when there is an overt invitation in from somebody that clearly does have authority. I guess the question is whether that authority is transferrable to others.

Ellie: 32:12

And this is why I bring up the example of Joni, Trevor, and Krishna in talking about what constitutes this group. Because I was talking with the three of them about their views on this. They gave me permission to share some details of our conversation on the podcast episode. And for his part, Krishna said he never minds when anyone adopts elements of Indian culture with one exception, if it perpetuates really misguided stereotypes about Indians. He mentioned the Indiana Jones movie where Indians are depicted as savages eating monkey brains when India has one of the most sophisticated and delicious cuisines in the world, or many of them, let's say.

David: 32:51

Oh, say yes. And that seems to be the objectionable stereotype view of appropriation, which, you know, in this case is limited to maybe, like this movie in particular.

Ellie: 33:02

Yeah. Indiana Jones canceled. But Krishna's view, aside from this Indiana Jones movie, is that he basically never minds any adoption of Indian culture. And in fact, he often appreciates it, which I think also does raise questions about whether he's qualified to speak for all aspects of Indian culture, let alone obviously like not all Indian people. But in the same conversation, my partner Trevor, who's half Indian, raised some interesting points about how he feels like he's not entitled to a lot of aspects of Indian culture. There are lots of aspects of it that aren't his to adopt, and this is partly because he's only ever lived in the U.S. and his mom very actively assimilated into American culture when she moved here for college. So he always jokes that he has less knowledge of Indian culture than I do because I've studied yoga and some meditation that's based in Vedanta tradition since I was a teenager. And it might also partly be because he's white passing, so other Indian folks don't necessarily treat Trevor as one of them unless they know his background. He said it even feels like cultural appropriation to him when his aunt started asking him to call her Auntie.

David: 34:15

Really, he doesn't wanna call her Auntie cuz he feels it's culturally appropriation.

Ellie: 34:19

Yeah. And, and he thinks it's partly because his aunt started linking up more with Indian communities in Cincinnati where she lives, where everybody calls each other Auntie all the time. But he not having really grown up in an Indian community in California feels like it's appropriation for him to say Auntie.

David: 34:34

Oh my God. I call all the members of my messy Desi brigade, aunties, without even being half Indian myself.

Ellie: 34:41

Well, and of course Auntie is not just an Indian term in English, like it's also, there's like a long Auntie tradition in black culture and in other brown communities in the U.S. et cetera. But yeah, one example.

David: 34:51

But this is still a really interesting example and it bleeds into a worry that I actually have with this article that we read about cultural appropriation as a form of breach of intimacy. And my worry is that there is just no good way to decide membership in the group. So, you know, we might say that Krishna is very clearly a member of the group that arguably decides what should happen. The case of Trevor, as you point out, is more complicated. You know, there are some ways in which Trevor is part of the group Indians, if we just, you know, project category by virtue of genealogy, by virtue of the fact that he came from a certain family lineage of people that were colonized by Europeans, cetera, et cetera. But then there are these other ways that you mention in which he himself suggests that he may not be part of that group, or at least of its intimate practices. And it's not just because he's half white, but rather because his Indian heritage is not specifically the kind of heritage that registers in the U.S. as quote unquote Indian culture. So for example, you mentioned that he actually was Catholic, and he came from a place that was colonized by the Portuguese rather than by the British.

Ellie: 36:02

Yeah. The foods in his family are not foods that you're likely to find in Indian restaurants in the U.S. there's like maybe only a few. All of his family's names are Americanized names or Portuguese, names of Portuguese descent, like Selma. Their last name is de Jesus. Hi Selma. If you're listening to this.

David: 36:19

We're just saying hi to everybody today.

Ellie: 36:21

I know anyway, whereas like Krishna is obviously that's a very recognizable Hindu name of a God.

David: 36:27

Yeah. And so you know, are Krishna and Trevor members of this intimate group that is Indian culture.

Ellie: 36:36

And I'll tell you just, you know, anecdotally as we're, you know, talking about this anecdote, when I first met Trevor, Krishna joked he saw a picture of him and he was like, that dude is not Indian. And it he really like disavowed that Trevor was part of his same cultural group. And then the second he met Trevor , first off, he was like, oh, okay, now I can tell he's Indian because of his bone structure. So there were like certain visual elements of his appearance that he felt he could recognize in person, but not through photos. But I think also through connecting in various other ways, it became clear that Krishna came to recognize Trevor as part of the same cultural group, whereas I think Trevor feels a little bit more uneasy about that. And then like my sister and I are obviously not part of that cultural group, but we have been invited in to certain practices, intimate practices, and once Krishna and Joni get married, they'll have a certain additional bond.

David: 37:31

And I mean, the notion of being invited is also that I noticed in pictures about the Boston Museum kerfuffle where a Japanese person basically had a thing that said, I'm not offended by anybody doing it. Everybody go ahead and appreciate Japanese culture as much as you want. Although that kind of open-ended invitation is very different than a more targeted personalized invitation in like the one that you got in this case, by virtue of marriage. Right. Or a proposal, whatever it was.

Ellie: 37:57

Yeah, and I, and I also think that part of the difficulty here goes back to that online feature too. Whereas in previous generations there weren't a lot of opportunities to even know about what cultural practices beyond your own were. Right? When we like didn't live in a globalized world, there were also fewer opportunities to judge and be judged by strangers about your partaking in these practices. There just would have been more obvious norms around when something was appropriate and when something wasn't appropriate because there was so much more context. Now there's like such an absence of context. It's not at all clear who's allowed to do what and when and who's the arbiter of that. It's the loudest person on Twitter, which doesn't really seem like a good move.

David: 38:41

Yeah, and I mean, that's why I think the category of intimacy, I struggle with using it to think about cultural appropriation on the one hand, because when you're thinking about an interpersonal relationship, like me and my partner, we can very clearly identify who is and is not a member of that relationship.

Ellie: 38:58

Exactly.

David: 38:58

Like, Ellie, you're not in it. Like you, you, you are welcome to like, join for dinner, but then you have to go to your own house. And so nobody's confused about that. Beyond that, I would add that one challenge with thinking about intimacy here is that when I think about a personal relationship, in order for the relationship to continue and for me to still be a couple with my partner, we have to actively do rituals of intimacy, right? If we stop hanging out, if we stop talking, it's hard to say that we're not in our relationship anymore. So it requires this continuing involvement on the part of the parties, and I just don't think the same thing applies to cultural identity with groups. Think about assimilation, right? Let's say that I decide to just fully assimilate into American culture. I decide to stop speaking Spanish. I decide to no longer hang out with other brown peeps, nobody would deny the claim that I'm still Mexican, right? I'm I'm still Mexican by virtue of my past, not by virtue necessarily, of my present activities. And so I just think that the analogy between interpersonal relationships and group dynamics kind of breaks down at this point.

Ellie: 40:15

I actually thought you were gonna go in a different direction than you ended on, because it sounded to me like what you were saying, David, is that if you lose your connection to your culture, then you are no longer part of that group. Right. And it sounded like you ended up saying that you were still a part of that culture or still a part of that group, even if you no longer have that continuing involvement. Is that right?

David: 40:39

Yeah, no, what I mean is that you are still part of that group. So if Krishna, example, decides not to speak, let's say Hindi anymore, and not to practice his Hindu religion, nobody would deny that he's still Indian because we associate that with a kind of past, and maybe it, it speaks again to that confusion between ethnicity, race, and culture.

Ellie: 40:59

Yeah. Yeah.

David: 40:59

But again, I, I worry that the analogy to interpersonal relationships gets complicated because interpersonal relationships don't continue by default. Right? It's not like, oh, well I was dating somebody for a long time before, therefore we will always be a couple, even we no longer do everything that marks a couple.

Ellie: 41:20

I think that's a really great analogy, David, and yet I think I am actually inclined to draw a different conclusion, but maybe on a bigger time scale than you. So I'm, I'm not denying your claim that if you stopped hanging out with brown people you would no longer be Mexican.

David: 41:36

You're like, you're not Mexican anymore.

Ellie: 41:38

But for instance, I mentioned the three quarters of my heritage as Norwegian and I have virtually no connection to Norwegian culture. That was something that happened over the span of generations. I wouldn't say that I'm part of the cultural group of Norwegians now, even though I have that heritage, maybe like a few generations back it stopped. And I do think part of Trevor's feelings of discomfort around cultural appropriation within Indian culture is that in some ways he doesn't feel culturally Indian. There are certain ways in which he does, certainly there are some family traditions, there's a lot of cuisine traditions that are Indian, but like. He doesn't feel connected to a lot of other elements as well, in part because his mom assimilated and so when he was born, like he doesn't have that continuing involvement.

David: 42:24

Yeah, but that's, that's common to all immigrants, right? That sense unease and a sense of a kind of break edge with the original culture and the, the point of origin. But I also would draw a distinction between a transgenerational or like evolution away from a culture versus a timeline of the individual. So I wanna think only in the time, in the time scale of an individual. Um, whereas I agree that who knows, maybe like 50 generations from now, if I ever had kids and they had kids, so on and so forth, maybe they wouldn't be Mexican anymore at some point. But in the course of my lifetime, I don't think my claim to to Mexican hood will ever be in question simply by virtue of the fact that I grew up there and was born there.

Ellie: 43:07

Can Trevor call his aunt Auntie?

David: 43:09

No, but I can, if she comes to those Bollywood gay parties in San Francisco with me and becomes a member of the messy Desi brigade. If you're enjoying Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content and more.

Ellie: 43:45

We've talked about some potential difficulties with assuming that we know what a cultural group even is. I don't think we ended the last part of our discussion, David, by figuring out how we draw the boundaries. I think it might be helpful here to get a definition of culture in the mix and Overthink listeners will perhaps be surprised that I have waited this long in the episode do this, since I usually insist on getting the definitions out early. I'm gonna use one from anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who is a kind of OG pioneer in the field, which is, you know, quite problematic in some ways, but also I think enlightening in others. Geertz defined culture as a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, as well as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. This is, again, historically transmitted pattern of meanings and symbols, and so it has to do with worldviews and symbolic forms. Some anthropologists have suggested that this is maybe a little too immaterial and we need to think more about embodied material practices.

David: 44:57

It sounds super conceptualist.

Ellie: 44:58

It is, and I'm obviously not an anthropology expert, but I did read that, that he had been critiqued on this point. Even still, I think the question might be whether we could even get to a super satisfying definition of culture if we did add the embodied practices element, either because post-Colonial theory has pressed on the question of whether we even can create a clear conceptual definition of culture. I'm thinking in particular about the work of Homi Bhabha, who in his book, The Location of Culture takes a kind of anti-essentialist approach. Bhabha says that culture only emerges as a problem. At the point at which there was a loss of meaning in the contestation and articulation of everyday life. So more or less, if you are so immersed in cultural practices and conceptions and, and you're living like in a homogenous society, culture won't even appear as a problem for you at all. Nor will cultural authority. Nobody's saying like, oh, you are appropriating this element of my culture, or That's your culture, but not mine. And I must respect that in situations where there is a clear context of meaning in everyday life.

David: 46:09

I like the way Bhabha thinks about this in terms of those instances where meaning is lost. And uh, it makes me think about the context of immigration a lot because I find that a lot of times immigrants actually become, uh, more rooted in their cultural traditions precisely when they have left their country of origin. As though in diaspora we want to hold on to what we would otherwise lose in moving away from our homeland. And is something that I experienced in the flesh very intensely when I moved to the U.S. You know, the idea of like, am I acting or being or looking Mexican never emerged when I was a Mexican in Mexico. It's only in the U.S. that I suddenly began to see myself as a Mexican with that cultural marker being somehow much more central to my identity than maybe other markers that I could have chosen for it. And suddenly when my family moved to the U.S., we started doing things that we never did before. So for example, I remember when I was 15, my mother insisted that we suddenly go to church, which had not been in the picture before, but it, I, I think it was her way of, of coping with, again, with what Homi Bhabha calls the loss of meaning. And the, the cultural filler for that loss of meaning really became anything that could mark us as Mexicans who are in the company of other Mexicans, speaking Spanish. And so that was, for example, the church that also included other things, like we're suddenly listening to like traditional ballads that in Mexico nobody listens to. Nobody wants to listen to traditional stuff. And suddenly we're moving backwards historically when we are in the U.S. And so I, I see that loss of meaning as something that happens precisely when there is movement. And when there is movement, that means that boundaries get a little bit blurry.

Ellie: 48:08

This throws us back on a tough question then, which is if we aren't cultural essentials, if we recognize that say the essence quote of Mexican culture only emerges as salient in context of diaspora or of a loss of meaning, then how do we make sense of cultural appropriation beyond maybe just saying, well, it's only really intelligible in like this super limited set of cases where there is like a quote melting pot. Can we still make claims about cultural appropriation in the absence of cultural essential?

David: 48:44

This is a really important question and it's a question that is at the center of this article and cultural appropriation that was written by the philosopher Erich Hatala Matthes. He says there is another way of thinking about the harm of cultural appropriation, and that is through the concept of what he calls dominating speech, and it's a kind of speech that insured culminates in epistemic injustice. Matthes says, the problem with acts of cultural appropriation is that the appropriator by definition always targets a marginalized community and effectively appoints himself or herself as the spokesperson for the culture that grows out of that community. And when you position yourself as the spokesperson for a certain culture that is not yours, you at the same time silence the members of that community. And you don't just silence them in general, but you silence them about the most important thing that can exist, which is you silence them about themselves, about who they are. You take away the right to autonomously and collectively define themselves and express themselves. And at the same time, it creates a credibility deficit in members of the community that has been exploited. So suddenly people don't believe, let's say, Indians, about what Indianness is. They believe the white guy or the white woman who has been acting in culturally appropriate ways.

Ellie: 50:18

But would we really say that the white sorority girl wearing box braids is appointing herself the spokesperson for black culture? That seems like a really big stretch to me. I don't think it's fair to say that cultural appropriation is silencing the community from which the culture elements are appropriated, at least not in all cases. I think there are other wrongs, but I don't think silencing them about themselves seems necessarily to be one of. For instance, I don't think a black woman wearing box braids would suffer a credibility deficit because of the white woman wearing box braids. I think she would still be believed over the white woman about the significance of box braids in black culture.

David: 50:56

Well, but now because of the power imbalance and the difference in the testimony between the black woman and the white woman about the meaning of the braids, there is a cultural deficit. So if the white woman who is wearing braids makes the claim again with the weight of white privilege behind her speech, that braids are just a hairstyle and nothing more, and a black woman says no, it's actually a lot more than that. It does seem to create a problem here in terms of whose speech we believe. Now, you and I would of course go to theblack woman's testimony and give that more authority. But his point is that in general, people maybe wouldn't. So when it plays out on a larger social field, simply by virtue of appropriating it with disregard for its history and for its context, there is a kind of silencing about the meaning of the practice in question.

Ellie: 51:53

I'm just not sure I buy that because the black woman who's wearing box braids provided that that is rooted in like an ongoing cultural tradition for her is gonna have way better reasons for articulating the significance of box braids than the white woman is. And so I would like to think that we would defer to her authority and like, I just think we would, I think the white woman wearing box braids would look kind of silly. And I'm by no means trying to underestimate the epistemic advantage that white people have under white privilege. Like I definitely think that's an important point to make, but I don't think that that would rise to the level of producing a credibility deficit for somebody who's obviously part of a cultural in-group.

David: 52:31

Again, I think it depends on who you're envisioning as the audience, because I can't imagine, uh, you know, this happening in, let's say a random town in who knows Oklahoma or Kansas or Nevada, where somebody, uh, is wearing braids who is white, and then a question is raised by a black person and they're like, oh, you're overthinking this. This is not a big deal. It's just a hairstyle, so stop a big deal about this. And so that already entails like a certain kind of credibility deficit or at least a certain lack of one speech carrying the same way that it should have.

Ellie: 53:04

I guess my worry just is then that this is a helpful way of thinking about epistemic injustice, but it might not be a helpful way of thinking about cultural appropriation.

David: 53:11

Well, depends on what kind of cultural appropriation we're talking about. So this a good way to think about the role of representation and representational content. So there are some forms of cultural appropriation that hinge on the appropriator producing representations of the appropriated culture. And so for example, when a white person makes a movie depicting Indians as eating monkey brains, then that white director is believed, like his testimony about who Indians are suddenly does have more weight. And then when Indians say, oh, well that's not who we are, somebody on the street is like, oh, well I saw that Clint Eastwood movie.

Ellie: 53:52

Okay. That's really helpful. The representational context.

David: 53:55

Yes. And so then the question then becomes whether, in the case of the braids, there is a similar kind of representation of the marginalized culture going on, and I think Matthes would say yes in the case of braids probably, but he recognizes that there are some things that get talked about in debates about cultural appropriation where this gets really tricky because they're not really about representing the other culture. And the example that he gives is actually food. He says the reason that debates about cultural appropriation around food get so messy is because food doesn't have representational content. Now, Matthes' worry ultimately is the following. He says, yes, cultural appropriation is very harmful, even if it's not economic, there is this epistemic injustice happening. The problem is that when we get to any concrete case of an accusation of cultural appropriation, we cannot enter into that debate without identifying who are the insiders and the outsiders of the relevant marginalized group. You have to do that in order to adjudicate these contested cases, and that's where we get into the problem of essentialism. Either we say that yes, there is some essence that all members of a culture share in common. Maybe it's some physionomic markers. Maybe it's a place of birth.

Ellie: 55:30

Now, it would have to be a conception if we're going by Geertz's definition at least.

David: 55:34

Yeah. Or maybe a, a certain conception of the world. And he says, the, the problem is that you can never find that for any culture. Cultures are too porous and they are too pliable and protian in order to have a core. So if you really wanna be an essentialist, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle. And he ends in a really interesting place where he says that, I think we just need to avoid essentialism altogether. And if we avoid essentialism altogether, we actually have to give up on the idea of calling out individuals for cases of cultural appropriation because we have no way of objectively determining who is and who is not a member of a particular culture.

Ellie: 56:22

What about the white girl who's wearing a Native American Halloween costume?

David: 56:27

What if we objectively find out that she is like 1/16 Cherokee? Uh, genetically speaking.

Ellie: 56:33

Well, then she's racially Native American, but not culturally.

David: 56:37

Yeah. But again, there might be some people for whom that ethnic belonging might already be enough for a cultural belonging. Cuz we talked about those two merging quite frequently. And so what if, for example, she was a white woman who was adopted into a Native American family.

Ellie: 56:55

Then I think it would probably be part of her culture.

David: 56:57

This is exactly the problem that Matthes wants to avoid at all costs because it just gets too messy and it is irresolvable.

Ellie: 57:06

Well then how do we have a cul, an upshot of cultural appropriation without essentialism on his view?

David: 57:11

So instead of saying, Ellie, you culturally appropriated a culture by doing this or that, we just say, Ellie cultural appropriation is a force of structural domination that we should avoid. Just like kind of tiptoeing around the issue.

Ellie: 57:29

That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that like an undergrad would find very soothing because it would allow them to go about their lives in the exact same way as they had and not worry about their implications in structural injustice.

David: 57:42

And I think that's a, a fair criticism of Matthes' position, which is that when it comes to cultural appropriation, because it almost always comes up through the actions of individuals, we need a way

Ellie: 57:56

Yeah.

David: 57:56

to call out those individuals so as to either criticize them or, or make them stop. Like, stop this right now.

Ellie: 58:05

David, I feel like we're ending this episode on more of a note of aporia than usual. Like I feel like I'm still lacking some basic clarity on some of the ideas we're talking about here. I just wanna be clear about that. For our listeners, the absence, be clear about the absence of clarity because I think this has raised more questions than it has resolved. But in the meantime, I would say that next time you get invited to a messy Desi party and are invited by an Indian person to wear Indian garb, why not?

David: 58:36

I'm gonna show up as Kali herself.

Ellie: 58:39

The goddess with belt of skulls.

David: 58:46

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 58:54

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David: 58:59

To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @overthink_pod

Ellie: 59:09

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music

David: 59:16

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.