The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

This yoga thing

I sort of *got* the appropriation concept when it seemed to be about privileged white kids adopting hip-hop slang and stuff, but even there I felt weird about it, like you have this pop culture that is being sold to white kids as what's cool and cutting edge but then they should also be shamed for imitating it?

Have agreed with stuff I've read about native american kids challenging clothing companies who put that skull-in-feather-head-dress image on their stuff, mind

Dunno, complicated

i think i'm on record on ilx as being anti the appropriation idea. it goes against everything i've ever learned about how art + music + literature + religion + language works which is it spreads everywhere and touches everything and so fighting against that seems like fighting against how all human culture works. i can understand how infuriated an historically suppressed minority who developed their own culture would be seeing a white guy getting millions of dollars for imitating that culture while they were kept out. but really the bad part of that is that the minority group is being suppressed! if they could freely participate in the economy then who would care if a white guy was influenced by them. but then to apply this to every expression of every ethnic culture in history? it's insane.

well who really owns culture?

i can speak most specifically to what i studied which is eastern european jewish music which had broad and significant exchanges with other local populations and is incomprehensible as an ethnically specific style of music. this is esp true w/ the arts where artists are often the most cosmopolitan ppl in their community.

Have agreed with stuff I've read about native american kids challenging clothing companies who put that skull-in-feather-head-dress image on their stuff, mind

― cardamon, Monday, November 23, 2015 5:10 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I mean I think there's a type of "appropriation" that can properly just be called "racism"? Like calling your team the Redskins or having Chief Wahoo as a mascot is not really just "appropriating" anymore. I do get that there's a mild form of orientalism going on in a lot of yoga classes, but it strikes me as relatively benign, and I haven't actually heard a lot of Indian people say they feel harmed by it, but IDK?

I guess the best Jewish analog would be celebrity infatuation with Kabbalah, which I think is sort of dumb but I also just put in this separate box and don't give much thought to.

idk in the context of i.e. music appropriation is a way for ppl to make money off other people's work

its not so much about when fans use a slang word as it is when a million selling white artist does by using the ideas of the not million selling nonwhite artist (nb this is obviously a simplification—bc its also about the labels benefitting & et al)

which is to say its about ppl being disconnected from the places that could channel their labor into proper remuneration, then that labor is skimmed by others who benefit massively from it...

this is not to say all cries of appropriation are created equal but that there are legitimate grievances in the current system & the people who benefit from creative labor are not the people who do the creative labor

i said 'nonwhite' but i mean black

yeah I get that, although it seems like it was a more salient charge when black artists legitimately did not have full access to the music marketplace, whereas now they mostly do.

now that the marketplace has been destroyed

thx obama!

"here we burned this place down... I guess you can come in now"

Still waiting on that 'full access' too

i feel like every time the cultural appropriation topic comes up people are like "but elvis covered ray brown and ray brown didn't get any royalties!" which is, you know, less a matter of elvis "appropriating" a style of music and more a matter of the record industry being imbued with racism through and through. two different things.

i mean there's no such thing as discrete 'black' and 'white' musics anyhow, it's all intertwined. obviously. or it should be obvious.

I agree that the problem isn't really artists stealing from each other, it's generalized stealing from artists, which also happens to reflect institutionalized racism in the society at large.

Cultural exchange is exploitative under capitalism because cultures never encounter one another on equal terms. This is a symptom of the inequality rather than its cause. It doesn't make sense to be against cultural exchange because of this, instead we should be against inequality.

Really, the alternative to a world full of cultural appropriation is one in which white people willfully close themselves off to other cultures. This seems way worse for everyone involved. It would create artificial divisions among people, for one, and also avoiding influences from other cultures for fear of "harming them" just seems gross and condescending, like white people would be viewing other cultures as if they were specimens that needed to be preserved in their pure form

Alternatively, things and stuff and oh look the world

Cultural exchange is exploitative under capitalism because cultures never encounter one another on equal terms. This is a symptom of the inequality rather than its cause. It doesn't make sense to be against cultural exchange because of this, instead we should be against inequality.

^^ I like this, thanks

yeah, booming post treeship.

I feel like we should hand that post out on a flyer at student protests

OTM. I was trying to work out some of those things when reading about this story, although I don't know all sides yet: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/university-ottawa-yoga-cultural-sensitivity-1.3330441

Really, the alternative to a world full of cultural appropriation is one in which white people willfully close themselves off to other cultures.

― Treeship, Monday, November 23, 2015 8:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would like to think those aren't the only two alternatives

also i mean fuck lulumon and also this is sort of a made up non-story?

In a French-language interview with Radio-Canada, student federation president Roméo Ahimakin said there were no direct complaints about the class, more general questions about the issues and ideas around it.

Ahimakin said they suspended the class as part of a review of all their programs to make them more interesting, accessible, inclusive and responsive to the needs of students.

lululemon i mean.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-gregoire/what-the-fck-was-lululemon-thinking_b_4138754.html

also i mean fuck lulumon and also this is sort of a made up non-story?

_In a French-language interview with Radio-Canada, student federation president Roméo Ahimakin said there were no direct complaints about the class, more general questions about the issues and ideas around it.

Ahimakin said they suspended the class as part of a review of all their programs to make them more interesting, accessible, inclusive and responsive to the needs of students.
_

That's the post-facto "nothing to see here" spin. The email correspondence that's been published tells a different story. He'd be better off saying "hey, we don't know anything about yoga but we've heard some things and we wanted to pause this program until we can get our facts straight."

but yeah that's sort of what they did say yeah?

Nothing really strikes me as new about campus activists declaring semi-meaningless solidarity with unrelated causes (other than it being in hashtag rather than written statement form), but the "cultural appropriation" fight seems to have been taken to levels that were not there when I was in college.

Bear in mind though that "students do something foolish" can go around the world (particularly to those receptive) far quicker than even a decade before.

Cultural exchange is exploitative under capitalism because cultures never encounter one another on equal terms.

Disagree w/this. Its very hard to encounter anything foreign on equal terms because its...foreign and distant. Its why we have cultural institutes to try and mediate that interaction in a thoughtful way but that is only the beginning of a complicated process.

It'd be more accurate to say that it's regularly exploitative - English tourists in France who return with, and modify, French culture are in a position where French tourists to England can see the results and comment on it, start a dialogue (okay, okay, in theory). "Here's something I saw on my gap year in East Asia, can I get it on a tshirt?", not so much.

Well, just to expand on my point the way yoga is adopted - and places that host yoga classes are effectively a cultural centre (lol gyms). They can teach one style of yoga (that in itself is problematic as some styles are creatively developed - not just Iyengar but other ones like Shadow yoga, or at least from the little I know of it, and then there are others developed cynically (Bikram)) and do work in the community (offer cheaper 'community' classes). Like the place I do yoga will do that but also has a bunch of 'yummy mummy' classes. Other classes take place in Buddhist centres.

Some of this could be classified as exploitation but its often distance - people coming back from trips to India (not for a holiday but to do some proper work and study) - and then teaching it to others. Some styles are more regulated than others as well. That isn't just capitalism, but distance and the multiple ways people engage with something like yoga - and then volume of people (a lot more people do yoga than in the 70s) taking up the thing.

feel like there's a p easy straw(wo)man for yoga as cultural appropriation in "yummy mummy' etc - i mean whatever that is. like a lot of women who have kids do yoga, but then it's like it's lumped in with other hated things like "detox" or spa breaks or whatever. feels kind of strange. dunno if there is anything wrong with these things per se, even if there may be some people out there spending £££ on yoga and spa breaks or something, but even that isn't really worthy of hate in a society in which people are spending £££ on various things every day.

in any case there are prob loads of clueless men with kids doing yoga too - do we have a name for them?

limberjacks

btw when I mentioned that 'yummy mummy' class that's where a few of the criticisms of cultural appropriation come from - claases aimed at pregnant women ('pregnancy yoga') but nothing I see it as wrong. Again that is part of the thing of yoga being for everybody and catering for specific needs. I assume in that class people don't do inversions and that's why it is set-up that way.

re: Buddhist centres. Iyengar was a Hindu and the nationalist-led Indian government also tried to appropriate yoga as soemthing coming from the Hindu tradition. But I have been taught yoga in a very secular way (we only chant the ohm at the beginning because its a nice thing to do together).

yummy mummy is probably more of an egyptian appropriation, rather than indian.

iirc The Mummy was shit

this guy was the Elvis of yoga:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hittleman

http://www.prasanayoga.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Richard-Hittleman-4-Album-Cover.jpg

"But the person who introduced more Americans to yoga than any other in those days was Richard Hittleman, who in 1950 returned from studies in India to teach yoga in New York. He not only sold millions of copies of his books and pioneered yoga on television in 1961, but he influenced how yoga has been taught ever since. Although he was a student of the sage Ramana Maharshi and very much a “spiritual” yogi, he presented a nonreligious yoga for the American mainstream, with an emphasis on its physical benefits. He hoped students would then be motivated to learn yoga philosophy and meditation."

http://www.yogajournal.com/article/history-of-yoga/yogas-trip-america/

i usually don't care what people steal, but i am all for the banning of "gypsy jazz" groups from college campuses. someone should start a committee. talk about oppressed minorities with no voice! especially since a lot of "gypsy jazz" performers began their musical careers by desecrating the rich Jamaican legacy of ska.

lol

If there's anything we can do to combat Magic!, future generations will judge us harshly if we fail to act.

this article gives some good information i didn't know about india's role in exporting yoga abroad:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/11/university_canceled_yoga_class_no_it_s_not_cultural_appropriation_to_practice.html

Thanks.

But the way that some contemporary activists would silo different cultures—as if anything that travels from outside the West is too fragile to survive a collision with raucous mixed-up modernity—is provincialism masquerading as sensitivity.

This is a partic good bit.

raucous mixed-up modernity is in the water over here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8poH4WgZvI

this guy was the Elvis of yoga:

Hey man, Elvis was the Elvis of yoga:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pro7XpRpU04

is there anything that man couldn't steal!? god love him.

Cultural exchange is exploitative under capitalism because cultures never encounter one another on equal terms. This is a symptom of the inequality rather than its cause. It doesn't make sense to be against cultural exchange because of this, instead we should be against inequality.

Really, the alternative to a world full of cultural appropriation is one in which white people willfully close themselves off to other cultures. This seems way worse for everyone involved. It would create artificial divisions among people, for one, and also avoiding influences from other cultures for fear of "harming them" just seems gross and condescending, like white people would be viewing other cultures as if they were specimens that needed to be preserved in their pure form

― Treeship, Monday, November 23, 2015 7:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who said they were against cultural exchange? what is this all or nothing logic