This summer, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts staged a “Kimono Wednesdays” event where visitors were invited to don the traditional Japanese garb and pose with a Claude Monet painting of his wife wearing a kimono. But the museum was taken aback when protestors showed up in force, accusing the event of perpetuating dehumanizing “exotification” of Asian culture. Ironically, the Japanese cultural attachรฉ didn’t see what the big deal was:
“We actually do not quite understand what their point of protest is,” said Jiro Usui, the Deputy Consul General of Japan in Boston. “We tried to listen to those people who are protesting, but we think together with the MFA we should encourage that Japanese culture be appreciated in a positive way.”
A similar fracas broke out in Canada last month over the cancellation of a yoga class at the University of Ottawa. Student leaders put the program on hold, citing fears that it constituted Western appropriation of Indian culture, and debating a proposal to rename the class “mindful stretching”.
Even more than the Boston kimono controversy, this doubtless came from good intentions, but it shows a stark ignorance of the history of yoga. As Michelle Goldberg points out, the Indian monks and nationalists who created yoga as we know it worked hard to spread it to other countries – that was the whole point. They wanted to see yoga practiced as widely as possible, as a means of encouraging Westerners to appreciate and respect Indian culture.
These controversies have gotten me thinking about the concepts of cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism. What they all have in common is the belief that each human culture has its own customs, its own beliefs, its own practices, and that it’s morally wrong – rude and insensitive at best, racist at worst – for outsiders to take and use them in unapproved ways.
The point I’m stuck on is this: If culture can be appropriated, who is it appropriated from? In other words, what defines who the “rightful” owners of a cultural practice are? Is it based on race, nationality, country of birth, or something else entirely?
For instance, if I were an ethnically white person adopted by Japanese parents and raised in Japan, would it be cultural appropriation for me to wear kimonos or collect Japanese art? Conversely, what if I were ethnically Japanese but born and raised in America with no particular connection to Japan? Would I be exempted from charges of cultural appropriation, just based on the DNA I happened to be born with?
My point is that there isn’t and couldn’t be a definitive answer to these questions. There’s no high arbiter of culture to rule on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Some people may be happy to see their cultural innovations appreciated and adopted by outsiders; others may be staunchly opposed; still others may be indifferent. None of these opinions are more right or more wrong than the others, and if it seems wrong to mock or fetishize another culture, it seems equally wrong to grant a heckler’s veto to anyone in the world who wants to stake a claim on the matter.
It’s always a good idea to approach cultures not your own with respect and sensitivity. But an overly rigid insistence on sharp lines of demarcation strikes me as suspect. It perpetuates the essentialist fallacy that cultures are distinct and homogeneous groups of people who are all like each other and unlike everyone else. Such balkanization has no basis in reality: there’s no unique essence that all Japanese people, all Indian people, or all American people have in common. Every culture is enormously diverse; every culture blends with and bleeds into others at the edges.
Ultimately, all human culture is a remix. Starting from childhood, we learn by imitating others around us. Civilizations intermingle and cross-pollinate, absorbing ideas from each other, regardless of whether they meet through trade, migration or war. We borrow and adapt words, food, fashion, art, music, religion. Almost everything we do “comes from” somewhere else, and I’d be willing to bet that’s true of every human cultural practice or invention, going back to the knowledge of how to knap flint into spear points. Cultures only seem distinct and static on the short timescale of individual lives; over many generations, they diffuse into each other until it’s impossible to answer the question of who came up with what.
Obviously, there are some important caveats to this. Flat-out racism is always wrong: you shouldn’t do things like wear blackface (invented to reinforce gross racial stereotypes) or name your sports team after an ethnic slur. We should also avoid clumsy condescension like labeling other cultures “exotic” or “weird” or “mysterious” (every culture is familiar and normal to the people brought up in it). And innovators should get the recognition they deserve. It’s always wrong to take and use someone else’s ideas without crediting them.
But the point I want to emphasize the most is that, while cultural sensitivity is generally a good thing, it can be taken to a harmful extreme. Calls for respecting cultural purity become positively evil when concepts like LGBT rights, women’s equality, free speech, democracy, or atheism are denounced as “Western” values being imposed on societies that don’t believe in them and don’t want them.
For example, there’s this column which claims that Saudi Arabian women don’t want the right to drive. When President Obama visited Kenya this year, there were protests by religious and cultural leaders who are opposed to gay rights, claiming that homosexuality is a Western invention. There are also those who claim that Islamic societies can’t be expected to embrace freedom of speech and secularism like the U.S. does.
This points toward a deeper problem, which is that, when we try to identify cultural gatekeepers – the people who define what’s normal and acceptable for a culture – it almost always ends up privileging the most conservative and reactionary. Proposals to establish sharia courts in Muslim communities inevitably suffer from this. The same is true of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, as one researcher wrote:
This is a community, or, better, a culture, in which the watchword appears to be “to any proposal for change say ‘no’; to any inquiry about the application of a rule always choose the more stringent alternative”.
The answer, as I’ve said in the past, is that people have rights, but ideas don’t. We should strive to treat each other with empathy and respect, but a culture doesn’t have rights separate from the individual rights of the people who make it up. Even if it’s true that not all Saudi Arabian or Hasidic Jewish women want to drive or vote or attend school, that shouldn’t and can’t be used as an excuse to withhold those rights from those who do. The protection and preservation of a culture, however worthy a goal in the abstract, can never trump people’s freedom to make choices about their own lives.