Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Hands Off My Hips, White Girl!
Earlier this month, there was this big dust-up at Salon over white girls who belly dance. To whitesplain for a moment (if palefaces like me are even allowed to whitesplain): for white girls to do a brown girl’s dance is an act of cultural appropriation, and therefore imperialism. More generally, for Westerners to focus on any one aspect of a non-Western culture is to demean the entire culture with our shallow, Westernized understanding.
I have to give the readers of Salon credit: most of them sensibly saw right through this supposed outrage, judging by the comments they left (or humorous responses they wrote). But it did get me thinking a bit about what it is that makes something “exotic”, and why “the exotic” appeals to people, especially Westerners.
Having had an anime-addicted roommate in college, I’ve noticed that finding other cultures exotic isn’t limited to Western culture. The Japanese, for instance, seem fascinated by the symbolic trappings of Christianity in some of their cartoons – without, it seems, having much clue as to what those symbols mean. Western culture is hardly alone in showing enthusiasm for the “exotic” trappings of other cultures without really bothering to understand the cultures themselves.
I do wonder, though, whether Western culture is exceptional in the curiosity it shows towards other cultures, and whether perhaps this is part of Western culture’s strength. I don’t mean the self-loathing “curiosity” some heirs of Western culture cultivate, which consists of rejecting Western culture as “inauthentic” compared to all other cultures. I mean the curiosity that even a jingoist like Rudyard Kipling had – and had to have, to write a story as moving and perceptive as Kim. Though Kipling clearly thought West was Best, he found the whole world good and worthy of study.
So is this curiosity exceptional? And if so, where does it come from?
Does it come from a religious worldview that sees all things as part of God’s good creation? Does it pre-date that and go back to the Greek philosophers? Does it come later, from Enlightenment thinking? Or is Western curiosity about “the exotic” merely a byproduct of Western commercial and political success, as those who cry “cultural imperialism!” might claim? Not that this would make it a bad thing:
Curiosity for its own sake is something of a luxury good, not something the barely-surviving can afford. Or perhaps it’s better to call it a luxury investment, since curiosity indulged for its own sake sometimes pays unexpectedly large dividends later.
As the story goes, what got Einstein started on relativity wasn’t discrepancies between existing theory and data, but a daydream born out of boyish curiosity: what would it be like to chase a beam of light? One flight of curiosity eventually led to another – first to special relativity, then general relativity – with Einstein caring little for the practical consequences. But now we have a practical reason to care: GPS technology.
Or so I have been told. As someone who only took two years of college physics, my understanding of these theories is laughably shallow compared to the experts’. Which brings me back to belly dancing.
Yes, I’m sure white girls who belly dance often have a shallow, romanticized vision of the dance in its original cultural context(s). But then, it’s not surprising when most people’s curiosity about anything leads to only a shallow understanding: it’s the natural result of human limitations. It takes years of focused study to become an expert in another culture, just as it takes years of focused study to become an expert in physics. That not all of us pursue our curiosity to the point of such expertise doesn’t make the curiosity itself bad. Nor is it necessarily bad to have a romanticized, “exotic” vision of what we don’t fully understand, for the romance helps to entice us to further understanding.
When Tennyson wrote that “all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move,” he was writing about the romance of what isn’t fully known. And perhaps he felt that romance so deeply because he came from a culture that could afford the luxury of curiosity for its own sake. As Tennyson was a man – moreover, a Western man – it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if what he saw gleaming through that arch included the sinuous motions of girls dressed in luminous silks and exotic jewelry.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably wondering where the dancing girls are. Well, the woman who started the kerfuffle at Slate claimed that the woman in this video was one of her favorite “authentic dancers”. Note the Western-style evening gown worn in this authentic performance, a cabaret clearly designed to appeal to Westerners:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0VCc38kDKs
Here is a dancer in more, um… (since I’m not sure I can say “traditional”)… jingly attire:
(Let’s see if this last re-edit restores the videos…)
Published in General
–“Do you know Randa Jarrar has no sense of humor?”
–“No, but if you hum a few bars, I’ll fake it.”
You sound like Mark Steyn.
Here’s another great Steyn clip on multiculturalism (if you don’t mind the opening beefcake logo).
There’s nothing whiter than blogging on Slate. Is somebody going to start doing their job and tell Randa Jarrar to quit “appropriating” our culture?
Well it didn’t make it onto the list, but it IS one of the suggestions:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/
It’s been the case everywhere I’ve lived – and about everywhere I’ve heard about. It’s an initial response of interest to difference – positive or negative.
More secure individuals do enjoy that luxury. And perhaps the situation of a culture has something to do with the proportion of secure individuals within it. But there is considerable variation within cultures – some people can deal with other cultures without being automatically competitive or defensive or aggressive – others seem to find that difficult. I think the difference stems from level of security – perhaps because of success? – but there may be other explanations,
I disagree with Zafar.
Consistently, only Westerners have been interested in all other cultures. Consider the famous Chinese example: They built the world’s greatest Armada, explored for thousands of miles around and then… quit. China turned inward, where they remained until the West came knocking.
Why?
The reason, to my mind, comes down to a view of history and man’s role in it. If the world is governed by cyclical time and/or fate, then growth is not meaningfully important. But if there is a sense of a future that we can help to shape, then our choices become of primary importance. “This is how it has always been” does not sell to an ambitious capitalist risk-taker.
Competition also breeds insecurity, which in turn spawns risk-taking and interest in learning new things.
Not true. I could, once.
Then God smote me with a Chrysler New Yorker for my hubris.
I’ve generally come across two theories about this:
I love it when two forms of politically correct silliness collide.
Also: I wonder how many of the people complaining about “cultural appropriation” do yoga.
British food wasn’t always bland. Indeed, if you look at medieval recipes, they’re over-flavored. As with most ways in which Britain diverged from the US (destruction of the historical constitution, gun control, a larger social safety net, massively socialized medicine, most of a century of taxes even more absurd than LBJ’s, etc. etc. etc.), this can be blamed on Churchill. By retaining rationing long after WWII had ended, and even longer informally than formally, the artisanal cheese industry and other luxury foodstuffs were wiped out.
The waves of immigrants that brought better food with them weren’t bringing food that was dramatically better than traditional English food, just dramatically better than the impoverished gunk that was government cheese. With Thatcher, things improved; Britain now has some of the world’s finest chefs, whose molecular gastronomy is distinctively indigenous.
This is certainly a common narrative, but Blavatsky and the Theosophists came and went before the First World War. The 19th century saw regular waves of enthusiasm for China, Egypt, Greece, and Japan. The 1920s and 1930s aren’t particularly unusual in that. There was yet another wave of Egyptomania following King Tut’s discovery (not the superior Steve Martin version, but an old dead white male), but what else? There were some artists who sought out foreign images, but those images are mostly just used as grotesques, rather than being vehicles for any serious examination of foreign cultures. Gauguin’s pre-war perverse fantasies at least persuaded him to show an interest in his subject, in a way that Picasso and pals never bothered with.
The thing that gives this narrative strength is that the liberals who hated Britain also hated (not coincidentally) the First World War. This narrative allowed them to combine two of their favorite forms of slanderous invention (Keynes and the Bloomsbury Set were perhaps the worst offenders).
And knowing is half the battle.
44 comments in and no defense of Jarrar?
Well, OK, here goes:
Obviously Jarrar is kind of a bigot. This isn’t going to be a very full throated defense. That said, cultural appropriation can be harmful, and it can be reasonable to be upset by it. When the hegemonic culture adopts one’s concept, the concept as adopted can become the model. So, for instance, secular Westerners (including some nominal Christians) have been able to transform Easter, the central festival of Christianity, into something that is very few Christians understand.
Talk to a lot of educated believers about why you eat eggs and you’ll get funny looks or, worse, some garbage about it being pagan. When we let Coca Cola produce its version of St. Nicholas, we really did lose some of our ability as Christians to define him in a way that promoted our Christian understanding of charity. One common liberal way of understanding or communicating objections to SSM is through a narrative of cultural appropriation; it isn’t unusual for people to talk about stealing of cultural capital in this context on Ricochet, which is part of the same thing.
Ironically, belly dancing is Greek, and American culture is (ultimately, albeit with a lot of intervening stages) built on Greek culture, so it’s not really foreign. More importantly, Jarrar doesn’t describe the harm. Not all cultural adoption is harmful, and it’s not clear to me that this is.
I know people who think of belly dancing as a fitness regimen, and I can see how that might be irritating to people whose identity was attached to dance. I knew a girl who, on discovering that I was Orthodox, was happy because she liked Othodox liturgies, too. Specifically, she enjoyed engaging in promiscuous fornication with the liturgy as a soundtrack. My gut response of “Arrrgh! That’s not what that’s for!” was, I feel, understandable and legitimate. I get the impression that Jarrar’s reasonable discomfort has melded in her mind with a more high minded objection that doesn’t seem to apply here. This isn’t an unusual mental process; how many of us have objected to a liberal meme on the basis of some high minded principle that has nothing to do with that meme?
I guess my defense amounts to: Jarrar appears kinda dumb, or at least needs to expand on the concept quite a lot, but the mistakes Jarrar made don’t seem unusual or particularly unreasonable to me.
[deleted after hopeless formatting issues]
&blockquote>Podkayne of Israel: “I wish I was a Negro, with lots of Negro soul/So I could stay true to my ethnic roots and still play rock-and-roll/If I was a funky Negro eating soul food barbecue/I wouldn’t have to sing the middle class liberal well-intentioned blues/Intentioned blues/Intentioned blues” –Well-Intentioned Blues, National Lampoon Review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ehoomjQjfI
And so is Japanese culture, too. Witness “kimono”, from the Greek word for winter :-)
Honestly, between the Egyptians, the Turks, the Rom, and so on, it’s not clear where belly dancing actually comes from. As one lady put it (and I think she might know, as her superior dancing attracted her an Egyptian husband), “They call it ‘raqs sharqi’, meaning ‘dance of the east’. So wherever you are, it comes from some place east of you.”
And I know an Orthodox theologian who wrote a really thick book on the aesthetics of Christian truth.
To be blunt, it is hard for musically-sensitive protestants to convert to Orthodoxy until they have some appreciation for the music they’ll have to endure :-)
i had never thought about the “hands off” attitude of one of protectionist and trying to maintain purity. I have to say, it is easy to bastardize a cultural feature, like dance, music, art, etc when one is not fully aware of the full scope of that cultural feature within the original society and its history. I’d like to think that sharing and exploring of “exotic” cultures can be done with an attitude of mutual respect.
Sounds like The Truth.
James, I just realized I may have parsed your wording the wrong way.
I read what wrote as saying that treating liturgical music as soundtrack (that is, listening to liturgical music in no particular order, divorced from the greater context of a church service, purely for individual pleasure) amounted to “engaging in promiscuous fornication with the liturgy”.
And I immediately felt guilty and defensive, because I regularly do this.
It only now occurred to me that you might have met someone who engaged in actual fornication – with another naked human – while playing liturgical music on the stereo to set the mood…
Does this means I have to quit eating India fry bread?
I’m not saying that it was uniquely Greek, but our earliest records of it are Greek, meaning that Americans can trace back their cultural history to belly dancers just as far back as Egyptians can. “Turkish culture” that’s not steppe nomadic is a euphemism for Greek culture.
As I mentioned to you with regard to early music, I’m nerdy about a relatively narrow range of topics, and stereotypes of culture attached to my accent are entirely misleading. That said, your refusal to accept how Neanderthal I am and thus misattribute higher meanings to my words remains charming, so carry on.
I’m aware that the distinction between “Greek” and “Turkish” is somewhat arbitrary, though sketchy on why exactly this is (I think several wars had something to do with it). And if the Greeks want to claim this guy as one of their own, they are welcome to him:
After all, he may or may not be gay, which I’ve heard is very Greek. At least if the ancient Greeks are what we should go by.
If your mentioning a gal who likes to get squelchy while playing sacred music in the background is Neanderthal, I don’t know what that makes me.
Most people, when they hear about sex with music, don’t immediately think of sex with the music. That it’s the first thing to spring to my mind suggests that my relationship with music is rather fraught, to say the least.
The Turks, a poor nomadic people, took over a Greek urban culture and assimilated, as generally happens when nomads move into urban civilizations. Modern Turks have a lot of Greek genes.
It’s true that there is cultural stuff like this that has been adopted from the West, which might be termed non-Greek (although Greeks are doing the same thing in similar ways).
I’m sure that you don’t mean to imply that Tarkan’s sexuality is similar to the sexual and romantic relationships between grown men and young boys in classical Greece, the expression of which sexuality is today a felony in Turkey and the rest of the civilized world.
Incidentally, you might want to edit your other thread’s fornication comment.
It suggests that you’re artistic and spiritual. I don’t think that it’s so unusual an idiom that you read into my words, merely dependent on my not being a tacky troglodyte. It also suggests that Easter is, while tantalizingly close, still too far away. Pretty soon you will be reading “this poll looks good for Pryor, but when you look at the cross tabs, his base may be drifting away” as being a poetic way of discussing the consumption of chocolate.
That would just be silly. And I would never be silly.