Appropriation without expropriation

Over at Feministe, Piny criticizes cultural appropriators in general and one shallow-sounding one, Lynn Andrews, in particular. I'm not about to rush off to partake in the "ancient ceremony of the Pleiades" or anything, but I don't quite see what justifies the opprobrium attached to the idea of, as Piny puts it, "picking through traditions from cultures other than your own so that you can glean the safest, easiest, most comfortable bits while leaving all the dangerous and difficult stuff to its owners." Or rather: put like that, yes, such conduct is hardly admirable. But it's contemptible in a rather straightforward way: putting together the set of rituals, practices, and beliefs that will collectively give one's life meaning and significance is not something that ought to be done on the basis of safety, comfort, and ease. Doing so is like constructing one's causal theory of the universe on the basis of what one would like to be true; it misses the very point of the endeavor.

Of course, the question of how one ought to go about creating meaning for one's life is hardly an easy one. And I'm willing to acknowledge that there's a real role to play for authenticity. But I don't think this sort of authenticity can or ought to be tied too tightly to blood, soil, or upbringing. My sympathies lie somewhere in the neighborhood of a coherentist account; this draft chapter (the second one, p. 31) by Ronald Dworkin strikes a chord with me. Suppose we have someone who, for one reason or another, has trouble finding meaning in her life through the rituals and practices that make up the more popular cultural repertoires in America. Suppose even that, reacting in a somewhat Orientalist way to the evils of western colonialism, she decides to investigate Buddhism as an alternative. But suppose that, having started out with fairly naive and even perhaps problematic motives, she comes to take seriously the task of examining and reflecting over various strands of Buddhist thought and practice. She now sees herself as no longer fleeing from traditions that repulse her, but as constructing for herself an identity that she can live with, out of what materials she can find.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this sort of cultural appropriation, even if she ends up with a bricolage of materials from a half-dozen traditional sources in her quest for horizons of meaning and significance that feel authentically hers. And should she fall far short of this ideal, I still think we should hold off on too sharp a critique, for how many of us subject our own cultural baggage to the level of scrutiny we demand of the cross-cultural interloper? The unreflective cosmopolitan may seem ridiculous in her performances of Buddhist spirituality or Kabbalah mysticism, but ridiculousness does not imply moral wrongfulness.

I think in the end it really comes down to beliefs of cultural ownership. Piny, it seems, buys into this: he talks of "stealing" from the source culture. I think this is a dangerous and mistaken view to hold: dangerous because it reinforces deeply harmful ideas about intellectual property and because it implicitly acknowledges that there must be some authoritative way (perhaps through certain authoritative persons) of defining, using, and changing culture, and mistaken because it presents culture as something static or at least controllable, rather than the always-contested interpretive practice it is.

Now, I know from reading Feministe that Piny obviously doesn't think of culture as static or controlled; he's always struck me as very thoughtful about these things, probably moreso than me. Which is one reason I find the post worrisome; I once took a class on "indigenous intellectual property rights," and I think Piny's view is quite common, even (perhaps especially) among thoughtful and concerned sorts. There is no denying that indigenous groups and non-Western nations have been and continue to be treated unjustly, often appallingly so. And because so much of this unjust treatment has been in the form of blatant and bloody expropriation, it is very, very easy to see every case where the West benefits from the "rest" as fitting the same mold: just another case of taking what's not ours. But I think this intuition gets it wrong, very wrong, with cultural materials. "We" don't own the Mona Lisa; "they" don't own sweat-lodges.

(I think Russell Arben Fox's critique of Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Cosmopolitanism" has real weight to them, but even here, the importance is ensuring that communities have the capacity to shape their own culture for themselves, not that outsiders can't incorporate fragments into their own outsider-cultures.)