Tuesday, November 24, 2015

The Appropriation of Yoga or The Revolution Eats Its Children


A pretty good analysis of how the left can eat it's own. It's not phrased that way, of course, but the meaning is basically the same. Slate does a good job identifying the problems with this particular case, that of a Canadian university banning a yoga class because of concerns about cultural appropriation, but misses what is in my view the bigger picture--that the idea of cultural appropriation is itself incoherent.


Sure, there is a real problem underlying things like black face and sorority girls wearing Native American headdresses, but the problem lies in our specific colonial and imperial history, not in some universal concept of pre-hegemonic cultural purity. You can't say with a straight face, or in the same breath, that these people are both our equals and that their cultural practices or religion or whatever is somehow more pure and sacred than any other. The history of the world is, in essence, the long story of cultural fusion of one type or another, and despite what you might think from the leftist press, there is nothing new about conquest or empires. It begs credulity of us to accept artificial divisions of this kind, and incidents like this will increase unless we liberals take a sober look at the principles we uphold.


We can, I would argue, make a better case for our opposition to things like black face by taking it on specifically due to the history in our culture of using shoe polish to belittle and dehumanize the oppressed for the very fact of their being oppressed and disadvantaged. The same is true of the drunken Indian trope, usually performed by a white actor in Native American garb, which is so heavy with the spoils of colonial triumph that in our culture it--rightly--is becoming unconscionable for inebriated college students to don the same costume in mimicry of the suffering we inflicted.

But the general rule of cultural appropriation will push us into absurdities like the one reported by Slate above.

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