“

The problem isn’t that cultures intermingle, it’s the terms on which they do so and the part that plays in the power relations between cultures. The problem isn’t “taking” or “borrowing”, the problem is racism, imperialism, white supremacy, and colonialism. The problem is how elements of culture get taken up in disempowering, unequal ways that deny oppressed people autonomy and dignity. Cultural appropriation only occurs in the context of the domination of one society over another, otherwise known as imperialism. Cultural appropriation is an act of domination, which is distinct from ‘borrowing’, syncretism, hybrid cultures, the cultures of assimilated/integrated populations, and the reappropriation of dominant cultures by oppressed peoples.

What’s being appropriated in *cultural appropriation* isn’t the things themselves — the images, stories, artefacts, themes, etc. — it’s the capacity of people of oppressed groups to determine the meaning, scope, usage, and future of those things. Cultural appropriation involves taking over peoples’ control over representations of themselves. Cultural appropriation is an attack on cultural autonomy and self-determination, backed up by historically constructed domination.

”

— 

What is cultural appropriation. (via bricorama)

Just for emphasis: 

What’s being appropriated in *cultural appropriation* isn’t the things themselves — the images, stories, artefacts, themes, etc. — it’s the capacity of people of oppressed groups to determine the meaning, scope, usage, and future of those things. Cultural appropriation involves taking over peoples’ control over representations of themselves. Cultural appropriation is an attack on cultural autonomy and self-determination, backed up by historically constructed domination

(via somerset)

“No interviewee gave ethnic or clan identity as the reason for her tattoos, and no two women from the same ethnic group or clan had identical sets of scars. Nor did they portray tinhlanga as aimed primarily at transforming girls into sexually desirable wives. While many women laughingly confided that tattoos “make your husband happy” because when a man strokes a woman’s scarred body he instantly “wakes up” (that is, achieves erection), interviewees clearly linked heightened male excitement with their own sexual satisfaction: tinhlanga not only induced a man to spend more time caressing his wife during foreplay, but they also helped to ensure that he “woke up” (when his penis “rested” against her abdomen or thighs) for a second round of intercourse. Perhaps more telling, many women had their first tattoos cut long before puberty, and some went on accumulating them through adulthood even after a failed marriage had convinced them to live without men.”

— 

BOUNDARIES OF BEAUTY
Tattooed Secrets of Women’s History in Magude District,
Southern Mozambique
Heidi Gengenbach

2003 INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, VOL. 14 NO. 4 (WINTER)

(Source: cosmicyoruba)

“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”

— 

Margaret Mead (1901-1978)  This is the best explanation I know for why we need good ethnography. (via literary-ethnography)

In my urban anthropology class, we read a few excerpts from Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear and City of Quartz and discussion ended up centering on the fact that Davis didn’t leave enough room for the individual’s voice and whether there was a need for say, more Zorbaugh, more characters in understanding the city.

But maybe that systemic, structural, emotional approach might be better for a city-oriented ethnography, because if the crowd is the essence of the city then the group might be the best way to articulate the lived city. Or at least better than a type-based ethnography. 

“However, Caribbean immigrants perceive a status loss when they assimilate or become Black American. Coming from societies where they constitute the racial majority, where Blacks are in positions of leadership and authority, and where the social meaning of race is influenced by color and class distinctions, the ascription of a minority status is perceived as a step down (BryceLaporte 1972; Kasinitz 1992; Laguerre 1984; Vickerman 1994; Woldemikael 1989). “If White immigrants,” as Philip Kasinitz (1992) remarks, “tend to gain status by becoming American — by assimilating into a higher status group — Black immigrants may actually lose status if they lose their cultural distinctiveness.”

— Caribbean Immigrants and the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity: Limits of the Assimilation Perspective by Regine Ostine (via jamaican-supremacist)

“One experience that the overwhelming majority of maternity-home residents, and many white unwed mothers who did not make it to these homes, did share was the experience of giving their babies up for adoption. In the years before Roe v. Wade the experts were, again, pretty unanimously agreed that only the most profoundly disturbed unwed mothers kept their babies, instead of turning them over to a nice, middle-class man and woman who could provide the baby with a proper family. Leontine Young, the prominent authority on social casework theory in the are of unwed mothers, cautioned in 1953, “the caseworker has to clarify for herself the differences between the feelings of the normal [married] woman for her baby and the fantasy use of the child by the neurotic unmarried mother.”

For complex cultural, historical, and economic reasons, black, single pregnant women were not, in general, spurned by their families or shunted out of their communities into maternity homes, which usually had “white only” policies in any case. For the most part, black families accepted the pregnancy and made a place for the new mother and child. As one Chicago mother of a single black pregnant teenager said at the time, “It would be immortal to place the baby [for adoption]. That would be throwing away your own flesh and blood.” In contrast to the very large percentage of white girls and women who gave up their babies for adoption, about nine out of ten blacks kept theirs. In a postwar New York study, 96 percent of blacks keeping their babies reported deep satisfaction with this decision eighteen months later. Yet welfare and social caseworkers persisted for years in their claims that the only reason why blacks kept their babies was that no one would want them.

Social workers and other human service professionals claimed repeatedly that black single pregnancy was the product of family and community disorganization. Yet in comparing the family and community responses and blacks and whites to out-of-wedlock pregnant and childbearing, it is striking how the black community organized itself to accommodate mother and child while the white community was totally unwilling and unable to do so. The white community simply organized itself to expel them Still, black girls and women who became pregnant while single faced a forceful array of prejudices and policies threatening to the well-being of poor, minority, single mothers and their children.”

— 

Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade

I’ve barely started this book and already have a bunch of passages marked.

(via thecurvature)

“

From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.

The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.

I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

”

— 

Teju Cole, dropping truth-bombs all over the place.

Cole is a Nigerian-born writer and journalist who now lives in Brooklyn. You can follow him on twitter here. 

(via anedumacation)

Added the Iraq war one. Disturbed that the tweet was omitted…

(via swintons)

“The situation for archaeology in countries where native peoples have been largely or wholly supplanted by European colonists is considerably more complex and involves new ways of either symbolically coopting or continuing to ignore native people in changing social conditions.”

— Bruce G. Trigger. “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist,” 1984. (via gardant)