@MildlyAutistic You said you don't mind boring so I will preface this by saying my understanding of appropriation comes from studying aesthetics and art historical theory as well as postcolonial theory (which is much more cross-disciplinary) so people with other backgrounds may not agree.
@MildlyAutistic So, the way I most often think of appropriation is as a way for people to borrow a sense of cultural capital from a group (specifically an embodied, almost inherent-seeming sense of who they are & what they represent). People want that aura and not the tool itself.
@MildlyAutistic If you are fond of Pierre Bourdieu as I am (all the biological anthropologists have now left the thread) you may also conceptualize an appropriative act as a way for a person to make a play to be included in a group they don't have access to (a field of restricted production).
@MildlyAutistic You can see why people weaponizing the term "cultural appropriation" seems a little weird to those of us who use it to describe a thing people do. Now, whether that act is harmful to someone is another matter.
@MildlyAutistic The most common examples people use in the US are ones for which harm is clear and people make lots of money doing things that are pretty clearly harmful to others e.g. marketing white sage (which is rare) for all to smudge, racist national sports mascots, unearned headdresses.
@MildlyAutistic That doesn't mean things like religious syncretism or genuine cross-cultural exchange are bad. I would argue most of us know that, and that many people complaining about "PC culture" are doing so in bad faith, but that is my own subjective experience in public outreach work.
@MildlyAutistic In terms of your religion specifically, the threshold for what constitutes *harmful* appropriation is obviously not met by the things you reference. If someone is appropriative in a way that prevents you from accessing resources you need to practice it, that is straightforward.
@MildlyAutistic Finally, if someone's appropriative actions took off in a way that made them lots of money, got them lots of sociopolitical influence, or created significant barriers to practicing that religion while leveraging some of its disconnected bits to get there, also straightforward.
@MildlyAutistic TL;DR appropriation is a thing people do and whether it's acceptable or not is often a matter of opinion. I believe the people most affected should be the ones to share theirs, but that at a certain point, a widespread trend of appropriation is inherently exploitive and icky.
@MildlyAutistic For me personally: I consider headdresses and white sage use among non-Natives very icky and I do not make a habit of doing any of the traditional practices my Native interlocutors teach me unless they specifically tell me I should.
@MildlyAutistic I also refuse to be a member of organizations that may require me to override my collaborators' boundaries in service of preservation or informing other members of the scientific community. That's fairly unusual and it's very personal to each human.
@MildlyAutistic If you wanna read more from a much more authoritative expert on this topic than I, the blog Native Appropriations by Brown professor Dr. Adrienne Keene is an excellent resource written in an understandable format. Here's her Halloween post: nativeappropriations.com/2014/10/10-day…
@MildlyAutistic @threadreaderapp unroll this please
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