Whatever, you probably only like “Princess Mononoke” because it’s, like, all good and shit.
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My response to this basically boils down to “I don’t care what’s in the person’s heart or their intent. What I do care about is the magpie-like theft of identity and culture by those who have the power and dominance to pick and choose what they find ‘pretty’ from my identity and society, and discard the rest like trash.”
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See there’s a tricky bit there. You’ve got cultural exchange. And you’ve got appropriation. Its hard to look at something like the movement of farming technology back and forth between Native Americans and White Colonists and scream “appropriation”. Because you’re looking at 2 groups of people living in close proximity swapping culturally bound information out of need.
Which is why I like to look at the difference in being when people deny the influence of the originating group. Great example of that is in Southern Food. Where you have an artificial and largely meaningless distinction between Country (“white”) cooking adn Soul (“black”) food. Despite them being largely the same. And a great many dishes with clear origins in black or African cultures labeled as being more generally Southern, claimed as white. Even to the point of white writers, chefs, and socialites publishing a recipe with a deep history in black kitchens, as cooked and introduced to them by their black servants, as their own whole new creation or long standing family recipe. Thus basically erasing black people from the history, codification, and discussion of black food.
ETA: The issue isn’t that white people ended up cooking black derived food. Nor that blacks ended up cooking white derived food. They were living in one culture (whatever the fucked up relative positions) and that was bound to happen. The issue is that one of those groups took pains to deny the exchange, and prevent the other from claiming it or seeing the benefits.
To bring it back to Rob. Power, privilege, lets you take the thing you’ve gained from cultural exchange and exposure. And deny the exchange ever took place.
Your examples of appropriation are a whole different sort of appropriation. And not what anyone is referring to. The adoption or reference to cultural bits and pieces for thematic or artistic purposes. No one is denying or erasing Tolkien by using his elves. Noone is angry about Nazi mocking memes or the use of fascist imagery for artistic effect because its stealing or appropriating Nazi Cultural Heritage (at least noone worth talking to).
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You seem to be describing an aspect of something that I’ve noticed, which is that some people have a hard time moving beyond the victim archetype. We can all be victims, and being aware of victimization and working against it are all good in my book. But I’ve noticed some people would rather be perpetual victims, than work toward actual change. See: Bernie or Bust folks who, had they voted for Clinton, wouldn’t be losing their shit about Trump right now. My theory is that they’d rather be “righteous victims” under Trump (some of them, anyway) than people who had to, oh my god, come to a middle ground with other progressives. I heard a woman on NPR this morning who represents the Black Women’s Caucus of the DNC flipping out on the radio this morning that Tom Perez won DNC chair in a DEMOCRATIC ELECTION. She sounded literally ready to leave the Democratic Party behind, because her guy didn’t win. Which is frightening, because we have seen that the increasingly-fascist GOP will take total advantage of this. I even wonder at times if these kinds of folks might have ulterior motives…
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A short series worth watching (for the typical bber I’d say) is Serial Experiments Lain. Still one of my faves. 
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I have watched most of the Studio Ghibli stuff and loved it. The last anime I really watched was Ghost Stories and that was mainly for the humor factor.
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I’ve heard good things of it. One of the last ones i really got into was Last Exile, i need to track down the follow up series as i heard that was pretty good as well. Though i like the original series so much i’m sort of afraid to be disappointed 
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I couldn’t agree with this more. Cultural appropriation doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You can end up in situations where both sides are able to advance from it. Take for example the incestual relationship between ska, reggae, punk, and hip-hop.
Unfortunately in many cases it would appear that appropriation works out much better for the appropriators than the appropriatees. From the originators’ contributions being lost to history to mass genocide.
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That’s the thing, though - why can’t I (or many I’s) pick and choose what I choose to believe or what traditions I choose to practice? Why does doing so somehow diminish your beliefs or what you choose to practice? Sure, If I say “These beliefs are good, these beliefs are terrible” and try to impose that on you, that’s one thing. But if me and my merry band decide to follow a melting pot of beliefs and traditions, why does the fact that “others were doing this / believing this differently before” create the right for a predecessor to be a gatekeeper of future beliefs or traditions, even remixed ones?
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Well, I’d argue that /r/gatekeeping often refers to artistic appropriation or bits of minutiae (see the Jabba post today), making it relevant to comment on, if not directly related to the OP.
Of that we can (of course!) agree, but I’d argue that this should hold true regardless of the culture involved, which is my point.
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I see and understand your point, and disagree with it virulently.
However, I will endeavor to answer this on several levels, using the specific example of Judaism, rather than abstracting it.
For the last two thousand years, Jews have been persecuted, murdered, forced to convert, butchered, had our children stolen and raised as Christians, expelled, tortured, used as scapegoats, and treated as dangerous monsters. Over that time period, an estimated 6-8 million European Jews died in the Crusades, pogroms, witch hunts, riots, and Easter massacres, as well as other routine murders and torments. This is all preceding the Holocaust, by the way.
During this time, despite the listed torments, we maintained our sense of cultural identity in the face of torturous adversity, and adapted and evolved to become who we are today. On top of that, we’re a semi-closed enthno-religion, which, by our rules, only allows the addition of outsiders into our culture under specific circumstances (which we are still debating the particulars on). But, in a very definite sense, that combined cultural identity, and the ceremonies and beliefs that go with it, are part and parcel of who we are, as the Jewish family, and our heritage and inheritance from those who came before and those who died.
But now, people who have no roots or attachment to that sense of cultural identity basically see an element that they find interesting and want to appropriate it. But they don’t have our permission to steal from our dead, or our heritage, and they are looting our inheritance for their own aggrandizement, without having to face any of the risks or torments that came (and still come) with that ethnic and cultural heritage. They didn’t suffer for it, they didn’t bleed for it, they didn’t die for it. Indeed, many of them are descended from the very tormentors who inflicted those horrors on my ancestors.
So they have no more right to those beliefs and traditions than I do in claiming your children as mine. They didn’t have a great-grandfather who was tormented by Poles and Nazis after desecrating his tallit and tefillin and faced the bullet with dignity and was piled on top of the mass grave–so, no, they don’t get to take the tallit and tefillin and desecrate them with prayers to Jesus now. They didn’t have ancestors who were herded into the slaughterhouse and butchered with our own knives, so they don’t get to try to “have a Passover Seder, with more Jesus”. They are the children of the people who barricaded my ancestors in our synagogues to set the building on fire, so they don’t get to take our remembrances of those events and attempt to “get closer to Jesus” through them.
This is all we have from where we came from, and now the descendants of the butchers are trying a different tack at destroying us. Instead of murdering the people, they’ll take the ideas and make them commercialized and meaningless.
And that is why I disagree with your perspective so virulently.
There’s a difference between “appreciation” and “appropriation”. “Appreciation” is “Ooh, can you make me some of those Purim cookies and tell me the story behind them?” “Appropriation” is “Look at these cookies I made! They’re called ‘hamantaschen’ for some reason, and they have three sides, representing the Trinity!”
I have zero problems with helping other people appreciate my culture. But I will protest loudly to people appropriating it.
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@bibliophile20, I appreciate your position and your reasons for it.
I agree with you that appropriation of cultural ideals can, quite easily, lead to the diminishment of the original cultures. As one simplistic example, consider the true historic origins of the Christmas holiday (or Halloween, or many other modern holidays), and what they represent today to different people, and so on. the original pagan ritual is only hazily remembered, and the Christian co-opting of that festival is itself in danger of being co-opted by modern consumerism and non-religious use of the holiday (ironically, many with the justification that it wasn’t Christian, to begin with).
I, too, come from a culture that has both been affected by cultural appropriation and misuse of power: North American Aboriginals. My tribe is in real danger of disappearing in a generation or two, because the current generations are choosing to move away from the reservations and/or raise families outside of traditional teachings, all while the traditional beliefs of my people were first crushed by arriving Christian Europeans, then co-opted by every spiritual hippie offshoot imaginable, while simultaneously being regarded as “irrelevant” or “primitive” in belief.
That, however, doesn’t change the fact that I am perfectly fine with people choosing to hang up a dreamcatcher because it is pretty or buy traditionally made cultural garments from local Aboriginal artisans because they are “pretty” without knowing a thing about the history and culture that made them, because those very people doing the selling or creating are making their own choices about what parts of their culture they consider important. As long as the local hippie making culturally-referenced knockoff Aboriginal ceremonial masks isn’t trying to pass them off as legitimate religious objects blessed by tribal chiefs or whatnot, have at it.
My people can make the choice to preserve their culture in the face of the modern world, but most will not do so, and so the tribe itself will probably cease to exist. I don’t blame the rest of the world for this, I blame us for not seeing the importance of educating others about our culture or choosing to live without it. Because the alternative is to try and say that no one but us can have these beliefs, they are not for you - and that happens to run contrary to the very ideals of the Mohawk people, who prior to the arrival of the west did not believe in ownership of ideas or property, at all.
So, yes - I get, appreciate, and respect your wish to preserve your culture, as it has been. I would defend any attempt by anyone else to tell you that it is wrong to do so, and I genuinely hope that your efforts will be successful, because IMHO the more culture is understood by everyone, the more tolerant we can ALL be to each other.
But I do not agree that anyone has the right to tell anyone what it is, or is not ok to believe (again caveat bigotry etc etc), and I do not agree that if I decide to make yummy Hamentashen cookies without knowing their history that I have in any way diminished you. I’ve just instead had yummy cookies. (in fact, that’s a great example. I used to eat those all the time knowing nothing about them, until my partner explained the meaning to me. I’m grateful for the information but I certainly don’t feel guilty for eating them in ignorance before!)
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Obviously Wikipedia is not the most academic source, but it gives us the Sanskrit term ‘jata’ for Caucasian hair that resembles dreadlocks. It’s interesting stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadlocks
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That is pretty much exactly what I’m protesting about.
Note the specific wording of my comment above. So you make “yummy cookies”. That’s one thing, and I’m fundamentally neutral on that. My comment was
"[quote=“bibliophile20, post:52, topic:95936”]
“Look at these cookies I made! They’re called ‘hamantaschen’ for some reason, and they have three sides, representing the Trinity!”
[/quote]
Like how one of my friends was tricked into going to a “Christian seder” under false pretenses. That’s my issue. There’s a difference between “Hey, I made these cookies from a recipe on the Internet!” and "I made these cookies and purposefully divorced them from their cultural heritage so that I can shoehorn in my own heritage onto them.
And that’s before we even get into acts that can only be described as sacrilegious–like the trendy act of tattooing the Sacred Name of God onto one’s body.
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I loved LAIN. If you are on AoZora I have my watched list there with many shows with the same feel and tone. Account is garymon. It’s great for tracking what you have and haven’t watched yet. It also has a friendly community that you can get to know if you like.
Let’s see, if I tried to grow dreadlocks, based on the proportion of coil to length , even with my curly hair, the lock would have to be… (Back of the envelope scribbles)… 492 miles long.
And there would be only one.
(Actually this could be the plot for a decent B horror movie…)
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Taking something from a marginalized group without acknowledging the source further marginalizes them and makes their contributions disappear. I think Rob is right - it’s about power.
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I’d say yes. Especially given the antisemitism in Christian history.
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You know any Jews with Jew fros? I do. Hard to imagine those 'dews not locking up, if left to their own devices.
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