a penguin of very little brain

fireofspring:

shawnandtherunway:

Rodarte Fall 2012

Oh no, Rodarte. Tell me you didn’t put Aboriginal dot paintings on your ready-to-wear fashion… The worst thing is that, unlike the (rightful) fuss kicked up over appropriation of Native American culture, nobody seems to care enough about this to even raise a peep. This is truly shameful, guys.

“Art is one of the key rituals of Aboriginal culture and was and still is, used to mark territory, record history, and tell stories about the dreamtime. But its importance to traditional Indigenous life is difficult for non-Indigenous people to understand. To quote Morphy (1991):

“Art was, and is, a central component of the traditional Yolngu way of life, of significance in the political domain, in the relationships between clans, and in the relations between men and women. Art was and remains an important component of the system of restricted knowledge, and at a more metaphysical level is the major means of recreating ancestral events, ensuring continuity with the ancestral past, and communicating with the spirit world.”

[x]

“Doesn’t matter what sort of painting we do in this country, it still belongs to the people, all the people. This is worship, work, culture. It’s all Dreaming. The Dreaming is all over Australia. We must teach the whitefellas.”

- Wenten Rubuntja, Aboriginal Australian landscape painter

od,

torayot:

kavitiya:

anonymous asked:

is a white person eating Chinese/Indian/Thai food cultural appropriation? Serious question.

i think there are a lot of problems with the way food from non-white places / cultures is described in these all-encompassing generalized terms, when it’s often a lot more complicated. i think that all-encompassing terms (“chinese food,” “indian food,” “mexican food,” etc..) are not necessarily absolutely problematic, but they very often can be. because there are a lot of different kinds of food in our cultures and they’re not necessarily so separable (or sometimes, they’re a lot more separated within what you describe as a generalized whole, or something…) and it sucks that you only rely on stereotypes and generalizations to understand our food and customs. i am trying to work on describing certain kinds of foods instead of labels and trying to learn more about the names for foods in cultures that are marginalized

it gets me very irritated when people generalize and say for example “i like indian food” as if it’s this one thing or this one clearly discernible whole. i think south asians have the right to say this and similar things though, because we tend to be aware of the complexities of it more, though this also can get complicated but i will not discuss that in this context. also often i find that we say these things in the west and among white people, because that is the only way white / western people will understand us (not a complete truth, obviously, things vary). but yeah, it gets very annoying…

and it’s like, oh, so i’m supposed to know all the names of and the intricacies of and absolutely LOVE things like (depending on the area in the west, the western / white heritages, etc) scones (as it happens i do love scones a lot, but i digress), various western desserts, white typical thanksgiving and christmas dinners (not talking about POC variations and adaptations here), salads, names of fancy cheeses, various pasta combinations … i mean yeah the privilege of these knowledges varies depending on the hierarchy of ethnicities and cultures and heritages considered white, but, they’re still all above POC cultures and heritages. and it’s like …

oh, so i’m completely ridiculous for not knowing all the western english names for various foods, but you have not even the slightest clue about the many kinds of dal, or what lichees are, or what rasmalai is, or what paneer is, etc, etc …. and that’s totally understandable because you’re white and we’re just exotic natives to you, anyway… and you’re like “i have no idea what this is, but it’s so tasty!!!” or “oh my gosh you eat with your HANDS???!!! so disgusting… we don’t do that here” or “well we call our food a generalized ‘american food’ too” or “ewwww you eat THAT???!!!” not recognizing that the very word America is a white, western generalization for two whole continents, comprised of many many marginalized POC cultures also, both within and outside of the US (yeah, because “american food” is just various kinds of white, western food, right? because POC never count, right? /bitter sarcasm)

also it’s like… so, what kind of indian food do you like? and you do realize that countries in south asia that were mostly brutally divided during partition and through processes of western colonialism and imperialism and continue to have nation-state problems because of this … share a lot in common and so acting like “indian food” is this one thing because certain conceptualizations of india as a nation-state (excluding kashmir, excluding a lot of communities and places and minoritized religions really) can get more privileged recognition in global affairs (this is complicated and also related to hindutva nationalism) …. that this is really messed up in a lot of ways, right? because it really really is.

also, so, what does “indian food” even mean to you? does it mean food that’s more common in certain parts of south india (dosa, idli, sambhar, uttapam … or more hyderabadi food, like biryani?) or east india or west india or northern india (muttar paneer, lots of tandoori stuff, makki ki roti aur sarson ka saag…) (and all of these regions are also overgeneralizations!!!) or is it “all the same” to you and “that exotic spicy stuff”? or what? i mean seriously… [and this is an issue with a LOT of marginalized cultural food politics….]

i don’t think it is always cultural appropriation, but i think it can be and often is. the manner it is done in and the context matter a lot.

Yes. It is not just the eating to consider, but also how you talk about the experience of ordering or cooking the food. That’s important whether you’re someone who eats, or someone who eats and is a well known food blogger or TV chef.

There’s a lot of fluff about the idea of “authenticity”, which I think can verge into sort of kitchen-tourism-imperialism at times. If you look at how the food products in stores and restaurants and marketed, it’s nearly always ike, ‘Oh i can cook this/enter this restaurant and be transported to the misty mountains of Asia because it is just so authentic! how quaint all this is! this is how teh exotic brown people eat!’ - there’s always Othering. It’s not just, ‘This is awesome food from a different place,’ it’s always got to be different in a particularly way.

These food products are marketed specifically in a pseudo-authentic manner, immersing the consumer in a world which ticks all the exotic, homogenising boxes. In South London, I noticed that an ostensibly Northern Thai restaurant, which was specifically furnished with Northern Thai art to evoke specific regions customs of hospitality, did not actually serve a single Northern Thai dish. It was all central or southern Thai. Furthermore, they didn’t have names like ‘Green Curry with Chicken’ but instead used images such as ‘Jade Dragon Pearl Slivers’ - for all the talk of authenticity, this type of thing is never seen in restaurants serving Thai food in Thailand. And it’s actually very likely this restaurant is managed by Thai people. You can try to point the finger at Asians contributing to their own oppression, but you generally do not get very far if you hugely depart from the mysterious Orient stereotype when trying to sell yourself. The expectation is there.

Context is everything. If you want to try different cuisines because they look delicious, go for it. But if you want to try to get an “understanding of our people” and “experience our culture” through eating food then please kindly go away.

jhameia:

F*ck Yeah Dynastic China!: sinousine: fuckyeahhanfu: Posts 11-13 in the source contains the…

dancingonembers:

fyeahasianhistory:

sinousine:

fuckyeahhanfu:

Posts 11-13 in the source contains the material relevant to the historical reconstruction process.

The colors in this. The colors. The red and white look like velvet.

And holy shit, her lipstick reminds me of Padme Amidala’s in The Phantom Menace. Could this…

In regards to Padme, there’s a great commentary/Comedy bit by Alec Mapa on that.

Has everyone seen the new star wars film? Revenge of the Sith? … Oh wait, can we talk about this for a second? Am I the only one who thinks its strange that a long long time ago, in a Galaxy far far away, there’s all these white people walking around dressed up like Japanese people? AND NOT A SINGLE JAPANESE PERSON IN SIGHT? Does that strike anyone as slightly ungrateful? Cuz let’s face it folks, if it weren’t for Japanes people, there wouldn’t be an Obi Wan Kenobi, okay? There would be no Qui Gon Jinn. Is there some nether-region of the Galaxy where there are all these Japanese people dressed as Vikings, you know wearing lederhosen? And I’m not stingy, I’m all about sharing our culture. You know, go ahead, outfit Natalie Portman like she’s some Mongolian Princess. Dress up Liam Neeson like he’s some Samurai warrior. Let’s just acknowledge where the shit comes from, okay?

Mongolian formal bride dress:

Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala:

The Senate gown is derived from a Mongolian bride costume, the Foreign residence gown is similar to a Victorian mourning dress, and the Palpatine’s quarter’s gown resembles a Japanese kimono

So the answer to the question if Padme’s looks/makeup were in any way derived from East Asian dress, the answer is absolutely yes!

fuck outta here with your appropriation, george lucas.

jhameia:

crossedwires:

ohmyasian:

1473. Tangled. Because this scene is just like the one in the sky lantern festivals! Oh, and this movie is simply adorable.

well, i’d call it appropriate, myself. :/

This scene IS directly inspired by the sky lantern festivals. The festival was what inspired the movie to get made in the first place.

Somehow our festivals are good enough to make it into movies but not our people.

twkestrel:

aqrima:

what the fuck? the imperialism, and lack of any understanding of precolonial history, and cultural appropriation, and classism, and general fuckery, in this is just… ASTOUNDING… what the fuck…

AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH.

BONUS POINTS FOR MISSPELLING HIS NAME TOO, UGH. >:E

MY FACE RIGHT NOW. NO ONE WITH A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA HAS EVER CONQUERED ASIA. I JUST. I CAN’T EVEN IS THIS A JOKE.

[ Old-style painting of Genghis Khan slashing an arrow-ridden animal (inset picture of smiling young people on steps), with the text “In the early days of the 13th century Ghengis Kahn conquered all of Asia. His empire stretched 5000 miles from Budapest to Beijing. He didn’t have a high school diploma. In fact, no one with a high school diploma has ever conquered Asia. Not one high school graduate has even come close. Drop out today and success is on the way!” ]

Other New Age events manifests the movement’s desire to go native en more strikingly, and they exhibit similar problems. Across the country, for instance, New Age groups have formed “tribes.” A few of these tribes, including Vincent LaDuke’s “Medicine Bear Tribe” and Ed McGaa’s “Rainbow Tribe,” are even led by Native peoples themselves. Meanwhile, other seekers of Native wisdom flock to traditional sacred sites, often despite protests of local tribes. Yet these Native fascinations, though important, comprise only part of a panoply of desperate beliefs and practices characterizing the movement. These include UFOlogy, channeling, meditation, homeopathy, and alternative therapies and religions. Together, these practices are enormously popular. In the United States alone, tens of millions of people report engaging in some form of New Age practices, including transcendental meditation, yoga, and mysticism. By the mid-1990s, sales of New Age paraphernalia had reached one billion dollars annually, while the publishing industry brought in an equal amount from New Age literature. Ironically, given its vast profitability, the single element that unites the various strands of New Age thought is the perception that the modern capitalist world with its overemphasis on material accumulation and individual competitiveness has gone awry in spiritual, racial, economic and ecological terms. The movement, in the words of one commentator, thus ostensibly “marks a radical break with the modern condition” by offering (for sale!) “a set of values, which apparently rupture or transcend what modernity has to offer.

“

—

Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (via adailyriot)

Take note white liberals and hipsters in Guelph.

(via sheresists)

I don’t think all yoga is some New Age bullshit. My relatives run a yoga studio just because they fucking like doing.

(via thatgirlshouldhavebeenamansion)

I don’t think that the author is arguing that yoga, meditation and mysticism is new age bullshit per se, but that how they have been digested by the new age movement has created a load of bullshit consumer products which allow westerners to feel less guilty about their lives. The philosophy of yoga is complicated, beautiful and has been developing for thousands of years. It deserves to be respected and understood, at least in part, in terms of the cultural forces which created it. This is not done by many North Americans who see it simply as a way to exercise and provide instant spiritual gratification.

(via peerpleasure)

To the person who replied above peerpleasure, I think that’s the problem: taking an aspect of another person’s culture because “they like fucking doing.” This attitude reflects a gross sense of entitlement that many Westerners have over other cultures that do not belong to them. I realize that in many cases, discussions of cultural appropriation can require a nuanced position. However, the western way of “enjoying” another person’s culture has been largely unconsensual, and many aspects of these traditions have been removed from their historical and cultural specificity and repackaged to be consumed and commodified for a western audience. Many yoga studios are run by white folks, and are largely inaccessible to people who are not middle class (because it’s very expensive). First of all, it contributes to cultural genocide (because again, what was once a culturally specific practice is turned into something completely different that belongs to white folks), and second of all, it’s another instance in which white folks profit from non-western traditions, whereas the folks whose cultural traditions that they belong to, do not enjoy the same wealth that those western folks do.

(via sheresists)

The problem with yoga, as I see it, is kind of two fold. On the one hand, it’s very, very good at what The West uses it for. It’s low impact and requires no additional equipment. It’s easily graded and you can do it at your own pace. Also, by it’s very nature it’s quite relaxing, in a way that going to the gym - with all it’s focus on goals - isn’t. It’s just a very, very good all over exercise regime that anyone can do.

However, the problem lies in the way it’s marketed. If I were to start a night class in advanced stretching and positive thoughts, I’d be laughed at, but teach the same stuff as an “ancient Asian meditative practice” and I’ll be knee deep in Yuppies high on Eat.Pray.Love who are willing to spend vast amounts of money to cleanse their chakras and realign their third eye.

I have no problems with the original practises of Yoga, that’s someone elses beliefs and I believe in not being a jerk about another persons belief. But in hijacking those beliefs and distilling them to some namaste “the god within me salutes the god withing you” wank, you lose all the subtlety and meaning behind what is, after all, somebody elses beliefs.

Think of it this way. Lets say somebody in India started selling communion wafers and wine as this great new dieting regime. Just imagine the slogan “GET THE BODY OF CHRIST! WITH NEW COMMUNION WAFERS!”. Now, a diet of Communion Wafers may indeed help you lose weight, and Communion Wine may indeed have great relaxational benefits, but to take those elements of the Christian religion, and strip away all the complicated layers of meaning, and all the history that is involved, and not only to do that but to SELL it, this stuff which is considered sacred to so many, you’d say that’s wrong, right? You’d call bullshit and stage a protest.

Well, it’s kind of the same idea.

(via name-redacted)

Reblogging for AWESOME commentary.

(via tiaramerchgirl)

No, it really isn’t the same.

What would be the same is if an Indian state decided to forcibly conquer the whole of the global North using lots of violence, expropriate huge amounts of profits, force down the prices of local goods, mock and malign the languages, religions, customs, crafts, sports, arts and sciences of those societies, teach all of the people there to hate themselves except a small elite who were trained to serve the imperial state who were trained to be just like their conquerors except inferior cos they’re the wrong colour, create famines in which millions of people die by fucking with the prices of agricultural goods, destroy local industries in order to set up new ones in the imperial capital, and then sell back the industrial goods to the conquered places at higher prices, ensuring ongoing debt, outright kill a bunch of people, forcibly convert people, make their practices illegal, then establish a small elite subculture of people to fetishise those practices and profit off selling them back to white people in an expensive and exoticised package but prevent them from practicing them in their traditional ways. Then it would be like cultural appropriation.

(via ardhra)

Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is unhappy - her marriage didn’t work out, her new boyfriend isn’t what she’d hoped and she’s lost her lust for life. But she has a plan - 12 months in Italy, India and Bali to indulge and replenish herself and hopefully find some balance.

“

—

Wait, this is seriously what Eat Pray Love is about?

Suck. It. Up.

(via starsgowaltzing)

I will never think of this movie as anything but How Stella Got Her Groove Back for white people, plus extra/bonus commodification grossness, minus Taye Diggs.

(via ilykadamen)

The thing I really can’t fucking stand is finding other people’s poverty beautiful and exciting. Poverty is horrible. Its essential character doesn’t change with the place or the palette. It’s horrible. These are not simple lives on display; they are generally portraits of desperation in exotic locales. You should not moon about all, “Oh, wow, he only has one shirt! One shirt that he carefully launders by hand every night so that it is clean in the morning! What a vision of patience and forbearance! What a message for my decadent American self! How fortunate I am to witness this young man’s austerity and strength!” No. You are fortunate because you have lots of shirts. That is better than having one shirt.

(Or no shirt, which is also common, but I understand that totally shirtless people are less appealing from a writer’s point of view. What sort of story is that? How can you wash no shirt? It’s just depressing.)

Maybe you could offer to give him a shirt as a token of your gratitude for his picturesque life. Or, I don’t know, give him one of your royalty checks, which would enable him to buy many shirts. Since you have preserved his single-shirted existence in parable form for posterity, he can alternate shirts without compromising valuable American-oriented lessons about simpler lives.

There are other options, but they would probably make it more difficult for you to hang out in India without thinking too much. But if you really must preserve his poverty for your viewing pleasure, at least shut the fuck up about how amazing it is that he makes do with one shirt, which is the only shirt that he has, because the last thing someone with one shirt needs is some stupid white lady valorizing existence with one change of clothes and a bucket.

I read the book!

And to the lady’s credit, she does do something for two poor people in Bali. But not for the guy with one shirt, who is an inspiration to us all, unlike Elizabeth Gilbert, who is obnoxious.

(via pastimperfection)

one time a trailer for the movie came on and my mom said that every time she saw that commercial a little part of her soul died.

i pretty much agree with that.

(via isabelthespy)

Ok people, if you eat tacos I don’t think you’re a racist.

ihatethismess:

Cultural appropriation: something from another culture that you’re using with no knowledge or understanding or care for its initial significance.

People of marginalized groups are insulted and othered for the clothes they wear but then hipster white kids start donning their clothes and all of a sudden it’s cool. See keffiyehs.

Sticking a couple of feathers in your hair and saying “you’re celebrating Native American culture” is fucking ignorant. Does it seem appropriate to take things from someone else’s culture while completely disregarding the sacredness it may hold, like warbonnets?

Context: Remember the whole genocide thing, sterilization of Native women, and living on stolen land? Stuff you should have learned in American History? You think it’s cool to wear war paint?

Also, it’s not cool to “dress up” as a race. Please. It’s like blackface.

Can you appreciate a culture without being a racist asshole? Of course. It’s just that Americans feel like they don’t have their own culture, they are just soooo boring. They just take from other people’s cultures without giving it a single thought. Again, marginalized people have been discriminated against and made to feel like outsiders. They have no choice over this, but hipster white kids can decide to be a part of another person’s culture thoughtlessly. It’s objectifying people into a headdress, a keffiyeh, war paint, or a kimono. It reduces them into stereotypes. It dismisses their culture and feelings. That is messed up.

Did I cover everything?

on cultural appropriation oh yeah

I totally recommend clicking through for the entirety of this post, but I wanted to take a moment to highlight this bit (bolding mine):

tranzient:

OKAY. I’M NOT SIGNING UP FOR A DISQUS ACCOUNT BUT HERE WE SEE MORE “OH POO. HOW U NO SHE NOT NA?” BECAUSE SHE’S FUCKING DOING IT WRONG, THAT’S HOW. AND EVEN IF SHE IS NATIVE AMERICAN, DOES IT REALLY MATTER? SHE’S STILL DOING IT FUCKING WRONG.

I have, at many points, been asked, where do you draw the line between appreciation and appropriation? And I have answered this many times, in many ways, because I want people to get it right! And yet, after spending all those words explaining this stuff, here it is, in eight glorious words. Less, even.

mycultureisnotatrend:

I’m just here to encourage you to think critically about fashion trends that alienate and rob a culture, especially if that culture is already significantly marginalised.

Regarding the “but white culture is boring” arguement - I hear this one all the time. People see “white culture” as boring because it is mainstream. It is the gold standard. It is “normal.” This statement comes from someone who is unable to see their own privilege. I’m not trying to shame anyone here, but if your culture is so well represented that you can become bored of it, you need to think twice about what it is you’re doing when you “borrow” from other cultures and people you have the position to deem “exotic.”

Oh cultural appropriation, you’re my favourite. Check out the mycultureisnotatrend tumblr if you haven’t already; some good stuff on appropriation. And some ragey stuff. But some good stuff.