posted April 10, 2012 11:33 AM            

Opinions may differ on this but as long as we are offering "opinions" it`s all good

posted April 10, 2012 05:59 PM            

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Originally posted by Frozen Queen:
Sand,

I'm already aware of your examples but as already stated, appropriation is offensive in the context of a minority culture's mores being used by a majority. So tartan and plaid are out. Paisley patterns on clothes are okay but not henna designs made to look like tattoos so the wearer may "look cool".

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yes today they may be out but back then perhaps they were the equivalent of wearing henna i mean. i am sure paisley was worn to "look cool" as well. i mean it was very popular in the 60's coz they twirled around when you took lsd. (umm.. ryt?) or maybe everyone knew the hindu connection and appropriated them. i dunno really i was born in the 80's. but shouldn't that be similarly offensive especially when u read it has roots with hinduism? so what is the difference between back then and now?

quentin rocking a barong.

posted April 11, 2012 07:34 AM            

As a another "mixed bag" here, would you find it offensive if I occassionally mehndi my hands even though it's not for a special event?

Why do I do it? Not to look cool but it's a reminder of my "roots" since I'm in a different country now and not surrounded by the familiar normalties I would be exposed to if I were back home.

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Remember, love can conquer the influences of the planets....It can even eliminate karma.

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posted April 11, 2012 11:35 AM              

This thread is starting to take on a weird angle. It's not that people of a specific culture can't choose to dress within their own cultural clothing or any other cultural attire, it's the intention behind the act that becomes of concern. I'm South African and I like to wear pieces representative of many cultures including my own, as a sign of respect and appreciation for the beauty and art of many of these cultural pieces.

There are those however who wear cultural clothing to ridicule a specific culture, for example on Halloween making the decision to dress like a specific culture or race. That's highly unethical. Those intentions aren't pure, but because this practice has become so mainstream people forget about ethics. Not too long ago it was okay to do black face as a way to ridicule African Americans. Was that ethical? Heck no. Was it practiced so much it became normative. Yep. Just because a practice has become mainstream does not make it ethical.

posted April 11, 2012 12:00 PM            

Anyway, FQ, you know me and what I meant.

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Remember, love can conquer the influences of the planets....It can even eliminate karma.

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posted April 11, 2012 04:31 PM            

"Numerous artifacts from Iraq, Palestine, Greece, Egypt, Crete and Rome from 1400 BCE to 1 CE show women with henna patterns on their hands."
So perhaps it is not just an Indian tradition Or is it only found in India today?

Either way, it is elegantly beautiful.
http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum17/HTML/002100.html

posted April 11, 2012 04:40 PM            

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Remember, love can conquer the influences of the planets....It can even eliminate karma.

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posted May 03, 2012 11:02 AM            

From one come many.

posted June 02, 2012 01:50 AM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
But I won't be watching it.

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posted August 09, 2012 07:50 AM            

Where does it end, really? Suffice to say that I don't agree with the idea that you can't draw inspiration from a culture. Nothing is ever entirely original and new. Everything has an origin. Cultures borrow from each other all of the time and always have. To say that no one can be inspired by anything else is extremist. We would lose so much art and beauty in the world if no one was allowed to be inspired.

There is a big difference between inspiration and mockery. Not all inspiration or admiration is fetishizing or mockery. I think that for me, that is where I draw the line.

On top of that, cultures do evolve and change, and things do sometimes change their meaning--or have multiple meanings. And in cases where cultures share objects or symbols, they could mean different things to different people, so there is no one set meaning for every single item, in all cases.

posted August 09, 2012 08:03 AM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
Snookie and Jwow get their own show this fall.

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posted August 09, 2012 04:21 PM            

For example, the Russian Americans who held to their culture still kissed each other on the cheek. This is considered absurdly old fashion by many Russians in Russia.

Mexican Americans are pretty much the same way, dressing in ways or celebrating days that don't happen much in Mexico anymore, and holding onto attitudes (like hating gays whereas in Mexico being gay is a lot more accepted these days). Maybe I'll see if I can find an old email from a Mexican email friend of mine as she explained the different cultures of Mexico and Mexican Americans, I recall I found it very interesting...

posted August 09, 2012 04:39 PM            

My mother's side of the family were Swedes who settled in East Texas in the 19th century, and while there have been marriages with others, many Swedish settlers married others from the same place and to this day Swedish surnames (like Solberg and Thorsen) predominate. My mom took great pride in being descended from Swedes (though only because she likes being a platinum blonde so much, and she actually looks down on other blondes in the family who aren't platinum). Does that make Sweden our culture?

I started thinking about this I guess a month or so ago when I saw a Swede comment on a comic about how corporal punishment was outlawed in Sweden, which she fully supported and thought we Americans were barbaric for still having it. But my family, who came from Sweden (and from back when they were big fans of corporal punishment themselves), still hold to it. So have we preserved Swedish culture better than the Swedes? Or are my family now fully assimilated as Americans (more precisely, Texans)? And if the latter would it be wrong for me to dress in some traditional Swedish costume?

My father is a Cochran. Does that give me a claim to Scottish heritage (and the right to dress up in some stereotypical Scottish costume and perhaps imitate the accent)?

And does that make me more Scandinavian/Germanic or Celtic in origin? (Granted, there's been so much mixing between the two culturally & biologically the last 2 thousand years.) Heck, my Swedish side is mostly blonde and my father's side has a lot of redheads and I'm strawberry blonde, a little of both sides.

Maybe it's just I'm "white" now. That seems so bland to me. If I'm gonna be categorized then I'd rather be Celtic or Swedish or something rather than a generic white.

But as my BFF said, something similar happened to create "black culture" here in the USA. Originally slaves were sold by enemy tribes (who returned the favor by capturing and selling members of the other tribes to slavers) and when they came to the Americas they weren't unified at all, most of them hated each other as rival clans & tribes and even when they didn't they often couldn't speak the same language. Their white masters, proving white people are mind boggling stupid, feared that their slaves could communicate without their masters knowing what they said (and thus plot against them) so brutally crushed their culture and their language, and were so successful that the slaves stopped seeing themselves by any one tribe and all came to speak the same language and thus what their idiotic white masters feared started happening (because whites made it possible): slave revolts, communication between the formally feuding clans (who forgot their former hostility to each other), and also the ability to escape much more effectively. They had become a generic black culture, and my BFF is saying I have likewise become a generic white.

So isn't it ironic that there are generic blacks & whites who want to "preserve their race" in the USA when we're already a blind mix for the most part and only became our own culture within the last couple of centuries? We're already a bunch of mongrels.

posted August 09, 2012 07:52 PM            

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Originally posted by PixieJane:
Maybe I'll see if I can find an old email from a Mexican email friend of mine as she explained the different cultures of Mexico and Mexican Americans, I recall I found it very interesting...

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Here's that email (or the relevant part anyway) from my Mexican friend:

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Actually I spent a lot of time in Austin (it was my former fiance's hometown) and generally around Texas touring with my college band. The differences between the south and the southwest always fascinated me. People in Austin or Houston appeared to me very conscious of race. When I was in college, back in the late nineties, being PC was still considered more or less the polite thing to do, though. So I got a lot of condescending comments rather than racists ones. A lot of people told me it was a shame that I was a Mexican, which they sincerely meant as a compliment. Actually in the south that was sort of the highest compliment I ever got. The difference between the racialism and racism is so subtle and complex in Texas, I find it fascinating. I've always wondered where the line actually lies. Actually the history of Texas itself is something I've been looking into for some time.

As for Chicanos, Mexicans have a phrase from them: "Ni de aqui, ni de alla". Neither from here nor from there. They are in many ways as different from Mexicans as they are from Americans. A subculture into their own. Many of them are at least 3rd generation American citizens and keep traditions from Mexico that are at least 50 years out of date, about the same amount of time they have been out of touch with actual Mexican traditions. They usual feel just as lost in Mexico as anyone else from the US, or even more so, since the moment they step foot on our soil for the first time they realize that we hardly speak the same language, anymore. You call it "spanglish", we call it "pocho". And the further away you are from the border towns, the harder it is to understand it, anyway.

Latinos come from every country in the world that speaks a language derived from Romance languages. It has nothing to do with race. Italian as latinos as, say, Brazilians. In time it has sort of become a blanket term for all the citizens of North America who are not white and not native english speakers. Also, in certain countries in the Americas is considered a derogatory term.

Hispanics are descendants of Spaniards, and that's about it. Again, nothing to do with race. Mexicans often identify with being hispanic as opposed to latinos or chicanos. As much as we tried to distance ourselves from Spain, it is still considered the motherland.

And Mexicans? We are none of the above. Neither are we Costa Rican, Guatemalan or Nicaraguan or all the same race. They really don't appreciate being lumped in with us, anyway. Then there's the border dwellers like myself, who are a completely different sort of creature, just like you are not a typical Texan. Probably one of the weirdest thing to be is a border dweller. As the saying goes: "So far from God, so close to the United States"

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