Culture is Not Sacred

An actor of English/Dutch descent, wearing a Mexican poncho (thought to be derived from Colombia), in an Italian-made movie, inspired by Japanese Samurai films, about the American frontier (that was formerly Mexico, and before that, Navajo land after their migration around 1400AD)

“My culture is NOT your g*dd*mn prom dress.”

Angry Twitter-user Jeremy Lam posted this comment after seeing a high school girl wear a qipao, a Chinese-style dress, to prom. Similar controversies have sparked across the internet of people from one race “appropriating” the culture of another. But is this a real thing or just another in a long line of overblown outrages?

Cultural appropriation can be defined as “the inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, and styles of one group of people by members of another, often more socially dominant, group of people.” But this definition has been stretched and transformed to mean basically the sharing or adopting of anything from any culture to another.

Recent uproar raged over white women having braids in their hair, being accused by the black community as appropriating hairstyles rooted in African heritage. White rappers get accused of appropriating “street” fashions and lingo. People participating in the Festival of Colors (Holi) have been accused of stealing Indian rites. Headdress-wearing girls at Coachella are often accused of disrespecting Native American clothing.

But where is the line between cultural transformation and cultural tarnishing?

Really, it comes down to two truths: (1) culture is not stagnant or sacred; and (2) culture is not owned by anybody.

Culture is Not Stagnant or Sacred

Too many people treat culture as something set in stone and special. We as human beings are like babies in a way. We come into this world and think everything has always been the way it is because that’s how it was when we observed it. But cultures have never just stayed the same. There has never been a time in the history of the world where an entire peoples’ culture was placed in a glass jar to be preserved and admired, never changed or touched. So, what we deem to be part of a certain culture today wasn’t always that way.

For instance, let’s talk about braids and dreadlocks. The black community today has said that these hairstyles are inappropriate for people outside of their culture, specifically for white women. But did this community invent braids?

If we look at historical references to this hairstyle outside of the African American community, we see that the Nordic people had braids dating all the way back to 793AD, near a thousand years before the creation of the African slave trade. Did the Vikings secretly steal this from African tribes? Or was it just something they did because of its practicality in war? The latter seems more likely.

Now for the second point.

Culture in and of itself is also not sacred. Culture is just the thought process of a certain people that expands out into how they speak, how they dress, their values and religions, their customs and rites. There are parts of any culture that are sacred. The Native American headdress was both a social symbol of war prowess but also a sacred garb attached to their spirituality. So it was both cultural and sacred. But something like the moccasin was only cultural. Adopting sacred clothing or symbols from one religion and co-opting them in a disrespectful way into another is definitely sacrilegious and should be avoided.

That respect should be universal across all spiritualities though. A non-Muslim shouldn’t casually wear a hijab, just like a non-Christian shouldn’t sport Cross jewelry. Nuns shouldn’t be an acceptable Halloween costume, just like dressing up as a puja wouldn’t be. In order to create respect for one people, we need to show the same respect to another.

Culture is Not Owned by Anybody

Just as stated before, culture is an ever-changing and living thing. It takes from here and from there, shifts with technology, is destroyed and recreated by intercessions from other cultures. Nobody owns it.

A great example of this is with Rock ‘n Roll. For years, people have shouted about how white artists like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly stole from black artists of the time. People decry the adoption of blues riffs with country tones that helped form rock. But did black people own the blues? Historians believe blues music derived from Negro spirituals, which found their roots in the tunes of American slaves. But if you track it back even further, spirituals were a hybrid of African tribal chants and colloquial folk music. Where did that folk music come from?

Ireland.

The Irish, the Scottish, the English, the Welsh all were influenced by the prevailing music of the past, namely the harmonies of the Roman Empire. We can try to speculate from there, whether the Romans adopted it from the Persians or from the Greeks or from the Egyptians, but the point is, the music didn’t belong to anybody and nobody was trying to steal it. It just grew organically from the influences around it and from the technology available.

Culture isn’t some prize that is horded—it is an aether that is distributed. The only reason we believe some things were stolen from one culture by another is because we are too lazy to do the leg work in order to discover where the original culture stole it from themselves.

We adopt things here, we borrow things there. The French learn from the Spanish. The Spanish learn from the Moroccans. The Moroccans learn from the Bedouins. And on and on.

Images of the famous Mosque Cathedral of Cordoba, a stunningly beautiful visual representation of what can happen when two very different cultures “appropriate” and adopt from each other.

In today’s world, we are obsessed with cultural preservation. This is a great thing! Preserving history is one of the signature traits in all successful societies. But there seems to be a strange double standard when it comes to which cultures we want to preserve and which we don’t, which cultures get to appropriate from others, and which don’t. If we believe, as a nation and a community, that it is important to show respect for Native American clothing or Japanese characters or Samoan tribal tattoos, we need to ensure that we show that same respect to all cultures, dominant or otherwise.

Or calm down and just let people be people.