a wolf angel is not a good angel

It’s been blogged about a lot lately — what counts as cultural appropriation, what does not. The most I ever do is make Indian(ish) or Mexican(ish) meals at home, or go to a wider variety of ethnic restaurants. Sure, I count Indian food as my favourite kind of meal but that’s probably as close as I get.

I used to make dreamcatchers, and someone told me that you can’t sell them, if you’re not Native, no one will buy them, and I said I only wanted to make them as gifts, and that’s all I ever did. Was that appropriation? Yes, and no: everyone knew, at least in principle, what they were for, and everyone put them around their beds, but we’re none of us Native — but none of us pretended to be. I don’t know, but in the end, I’ve got worse sins to atone for.

Lots of people, I found out eventually, are fascinated by Judaism. Maybe because it’s only a little Other but still often fairly unknown, because you can’t look at someone and see if they’re Jewish (or if they’re not): I don’t really know. I went to Jewish school, and even when I finished up elementary school in a public school, it was almost all Jewish. I grew up mostly around Jews.

There was this thread at Feministe about what it means to be Jewish. People also talked about having Jewish background, and feeling related to it, and Happy Feminist (whose paternal grandmother was Jewish) said something interesting:

My sense of connection to Jewish history and culture is not at all rational. We didn’t do a lot of culturally or religiously Jewish things when I was growing up but my Dad insisted that I learn Jewish history, from ancient times through the present, and we talked about Jewish religious belief and Jewish history constantly. My father’s efforts to make sure I knew “my heritage” definitely took. I have always felt that my family’s emphasis on the written word and our liberal/progressive political orientation were a result of our Jewish roots. Although those values aren’t unique to Judaism or universal within Judaism, I still think those values came into my life through my grandmother’s religion and her family’s experience as an outsider/minority group.
In my real life, I never ever mention this amorphous “sense of connection” because I can’t really justify it rationally, and it seems sort of silly and sentimental and presumptuous. But it’s a strong feeling I have nonetheless.

This is, actually, one of the most rational not-brought-up-Jewish-but-feel-connected relationships I ever heard of. I get irritated by the people who never were related to anything Jewish but had one great-grandparent Jewish, or a great-aunt killed in the Holocaust, and thus feel (without doing anything to learn about what it means) they are just as Jewish, cause, hey, Hitler would’ve killed them.

First off: Hitler doesn’t get to actually define who is Jewish. That’s sick. (Generally, I’m with the group that gives people room for self-definition, but there needs to be some standard of reasonable.)

Sure, HF wasn’t brought up Jewish, and her blog makes it clear she’s Christian. But her family studied the religion, and the history, and did it as “this is where you come from”. She grew up with it — not in the same way I did, obviously, but still she grew up with it. (And probably more thoughtfully than my family grew up with it, since we took it for granted and discussed other things. Not all families do this, but mine did.)

Last night I went through the exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (it’s free Wed nights — if you’re in Montreal at all, I strongly recommend this exhibition), where they have a Brian Jungen exhbition. He is half-Swiss and half Native — he’s a member of the Dunne-za, which are in northern and inland BC.

His work touches on cultural appropriation a lot — his masks, which were absolutely stupendous, are Haida-inspired . . . but he’s not Haida. He made whale skeletons out of patio chairs (the masks are made out of Nike shoes), talking sticks out of carved baseball bats . . . which one is natural, which one isn’t, what is real about ethnicity and what is fake and made up, borrowed, re-appropriated?

And that’s the question: what does it mean, culture or ethnicity? Is Yiddish part of my culture? Perhaps my paternal grandparents spoke it, or perhaps my maternal great- or great-great-grandparents did, but I didn’t, I only know a few words. I’ve never eaten gefilte fish. (And as I am not Sephardic, I’m not bothering with Ladino or anything else.) At what point do things become a common culture, and when are they still Othered? At what point are you stealing things, ignoring the reality of an entire culture for the easy cool of a patterned shawl. You can’t learn a culture even by travelling there unless you really spend time living there — not in the place where all the other middle-class 20-somethings backpack because it’s “more authentic than a hotel” (it isn’t, you’re just as surrounded by tourists, just tourists who prize poor-looking authenticity instead of fake-authenticity, like hotels and Disney[1]).

[1] I like Disney, though mostly because it doesn’t pretend to be anything but fake.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 11:29 am and is filed under Random bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.