It feels to me there is a really Orientalist perspective to talk about the “ancient art of X” because it assumes that the place where it originated is “ancient” and that they aren’t cultures that shift and change and develop new things.
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Like I wouldn’t call Queen Elizabeth I an “ancient queen” and yet she lived in the same period, for context.
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It also seems to tie into the way the West interacts with the East: a place full of “ancient wisdom” and “ancient art” and “ancient crafts” and then it gets packaged and commodified and sold and appropriated by the West for Western (white) consumption.
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I would also say that British crafters often appropriate crafts that are not for them (like dreamcatchers), but they are also so divorced from the context and there is a persistent attitude here that Indigenous people in NA are “ancient” and they no longer exist.
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I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the British crafters I have seen make and sell dreamcatchers have never heard of Ojibwe people.
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Especially since white Canadians and Americans often don’t. I remember being “taught” about dreamcatchers and we didn’t learn a goddamn thing about Ojibwe people.
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who wants to learn the ancient and beautiful craft of slash-and-puff sleeves
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Or ruff making?
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Especially when there's so much great info by Japanese fibre artists on the history and culture that lead to the development of sashiko and then boro!
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Yeah exactly.
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