Cultural appropriation anxiety

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I've been having anxiety about appopriating several cultures. For a while I had an obsession with Jewish people. For some reason I felt connected to them and I was scared I would suddenly convert and go crazy.

I now have a new obsession. I'm worried about appopriating Native American culture. I appreciate Native American culture and to make things harder my school has a high Native American population.

To make things even harder I'm more in a gray area. With the Jewish and Scandinavian obsession it was more obvious that I was an outsider. I knew my place. Now it's harder. Since I'm ethnically Ecuadorian I am genetically part Native American.

As far as I know I don't have any recent Native American ancestors. My dad said a branch of his family lived somewhere very rural, but he was very vague. I'm also culturally white, so that makes me not Native American as well. For now I'll just consider myself a white person who apperciates some Native American culture. I also have spiritual beliefs that are kind of similar to Native American people, but that's probably a coincidence.

You're not "appropriating" a culture when you actually have elements of that culture in you.

What's wrong with embracing some aspects of Native American culture? Maybe you DO derive your spiritual beliefs from the Native American side of you? Carl Jung, famous psychologists, states that there is a "collective unconscious," and that culture is passed from generation to generation through that "collective unconscious."

As long as it doesn't harm you, and long as you don't harm anybody, there's nothing wrong with embracing a culture for which you have an affinity.

You mean like this?



Or maybe you mean like this.



Although I suppose it could be this.



Or even this.



I suppose it doesn't really matter. White culture all seems the same to me.

The whole idea of appropriation is a pet peeve of mine. When someone appreciates another culture it's a good thing. Being pizzed about it is like saying you don't like being liked. And anyway, people can wear whatever clothes they want, and do their hair however they like, and listen to whatever music they choose. It's no one else's business.
So do your thing, girl.

Yep...If I want to embrace some aspect of the culture of the Yanomami of the Amazon, I will do so.

It's appropriate, to me, to appropriate.

What I mean is I've lived in Canada for my whole life. My parents did have some Ecuadorian decorations and spoke Spanish when I was growing up, all of that fell apart when they got divorced. I had to stop speaking Spanish because I started spending more time around non-Spanish speakers.

I now have a crippling fear of speaking Spanish. It was very depressing going to Ecuador and having too much anxiety to speak Spanish and truly connect with my family. I tried once to speak Spanish in Ecuador about three years ago, but I ended up stuttering like crazy. I never stutter in English.

I'm now feeling pretty resentful because the Persian people still spoke Persian, but I didn't speak Spanish.

It sounds like you still have a decent amount of knowledge of Spanish. Are you able to understand much of it?

It's very, very useful to know Spanish in parts of the US.

I blame the bloody Romans and their shenanigans!

Feys favorite piece of "white" culture

Last edited by Feyokien on 09 May 2016, 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I blame those darn Indo-Europeans! If only they stayed in the Caucasus!

Since Spanish has a lot of dialects my ability to understand it varies. I can usually understand TV Spanish pretty easily. I've never been that good at reading Spanish. I often come across words I don't understand when they're written down, but I do understand if I hear them. It's weird.

Cultural appropriation doesn't exist, you can't be racist by appreciating and liking things from other cultures

the people that harp about cultural appropriation essentially support segregation

I work with somebody from Ecuador.

She's a supervisor, though not my supervisor.

The South American dialect of Spanish, supposedly, has more "prestige" than other Spanish dialects.

Not sure what exactly it is that you're worried about.

Maybe part of the problem is that you think that there is something wrong with getting interested in another culture. So then it becomes a forbidden thing thats impossible to resist.

Maybe if you took a course in cultural anthropology, and were assigned the task of studying another culture. maybe get assigned the task of interviewing folks of that other culture (local native Americans, or Greek immigrants, or whatever)- then it would switch from seeming like a forbidden thing- to being a onerous task. And you would snap out of getting obsessed with other cultures.

Or maybe the opposite: you would excel so much at it that you would become the next Margaret Mead!

I've admired Margaret Mead since the 1970s.

I became obsessed with Louis Leakey and Olduvai Gorge when I was in sixth grade. Ages 11 and 12.

I used to pretend to be a Neanderthal Man in the street, and even in the supermarket.

You know, scientists have discovered that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens reproduced together, and that many people today have some Neanderthal DNA. So maybe you weren't pretending.

The "cultural appropriation" idea is a flawed concept. Often those that accuse those of it are themselves bigots.

In the case of the assault on the white guy with dreadlocks, they failed relapse that Rastafarian itself is cultural appropriation.

I lived in Jamaica for a couple of years. Rasta is a modern religion unrelated to Ethiopian Orthodox which is much more conservative.

In the 1930s some people look for an identity, decided Haile Selassie was the Messiah. When he actually visited Jamaica he confided in Norman Manley that he didn't know why these people were worshiping him, and he never claimed to be the Messiah.

Rastas are some chill people, nothing against them. However their account of their roots is somewhat historically incorrect (although this is understandable). They descend from west African cultures not east African. So in the respect Vodun of Haiti is closer to their cultural background.

Every culture appropriates something that is how culture formed.