Working my way through your archive, from the beginning, to get my money's worth on a paid sub.
You have, I suspect, quite a different ideological landscape than I do but was drawn here by your recent writing and unexpected overlap in modern pagan perspectives.
So, as a visitor from the future, my take on this post:
I'll leave out my response to the political statement of concepts like "cultural appropriation," but your discussion of the universe of forms/sacredness elevates approaching the subject quite a lot; I'm inspired to engage rather than laugh/roll my eyes/scorn it.
Here's a rhetorical question, then: what if I were some semi-feral child raised in the wilderness, given little or no information about the state of modern society on the other side of my forest, and invented, on my own, an exact replica of a kimono? Or a kinte cloth? Or a lehenga? And so on. Would I, as whitey (feral though I may be), be appropriating a culture I've never directly met, simply because I've overlapped "claimed" forms?
Ok, we could say that whitey though I may be, I'm still a feral whitey in the woods, and therefore not guilty of "whiteness," so my original sins are more minimal. But I've still copied the forms of cultures I don't "belong" to; am I still guilty? If I spontaneously recreated blue jeans, would I still be culturally appropriating, since I am only racially but not culturally whitey?
Appropriation requires at least two (maybe three) "spaces" be drawn: a distinct space for me to reside, a distinct space for you to reside, and some space in between us where we can clearly delineate that "things" have been removed from one circle and brought to another.
Delineating space is an implication of authority to do so, which is why I typically scoff without debate at the concept of cultural appropriation and similar things.
Working my way through your archive, from the beginning, to get my money's worth on a paid sub.
You have, I suspect, quite a different ideological landscape than I do but was drawn here by your recent writing and unexpected overlap in modern pagan perspectives.
So, as a visitor from the future, my take on this post:
I'll leave out my response to the political statement of concepts like "cultural appropriation," but your discussion of the universe of forms/sacredness elevates approaching the subject quite a lot; I'm inspired to engage rather than laugh/roll my eyes/scorn it.
Here's a rhetorical question, then: what if I were some semi-feral child raised in the wilderness, given little or no information about the state of modern society on the other side of my forest, and invented, on my own, an exact replica of a kimono? Or a kinte cloth? Or a lehenga? And so on. Would I, as whitey (feral though I may be), be appropriating a culture I've never directly met, simply because I've overlapped "claimed" forms?
Ok, we could say that whitey though I may be, I'm still a feral whitey in the woods, and therefore not guilty of "whiteness," so my original sins are more minimal. But I've still copied the forms of cultures I don't "belong" to; am I still guilty? If I spontaneously recreated blue jeans, would I still be culturally appropriating, since I am only racially but not culturally whitey?
Appropriation requires at least two (maybe three) "spaces" be drawn: a distinct space for me to reside, a distinct space for you to reside, and some space in between us where we can clearly delineate that "things" have been removed from one circle and brought to another.
Delineating space is an implication of authority to do so, which is why I typically scoff without debate at the concept of cultural appropriation and similar things.
Looking forward to continuing my reading.