cultural appropriation has gotten deeply confused as a topic, and it doesn't help that it was poorly named; it was never about appropriating things from other cultures, which happens all the time. it's about profaning what other cultures regard as sacred
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nobody could say this at the time that the cultural appropriation discourse was taking off because the zeitgeist did not have a conception of sacredness; there wasn't yet a Malcolm Gladwell to give a reductionistic explanation of sacredness in terms of signaling or whatever
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profaning-the-sacred is clearly at work in one of the most archetypal examples of cultural appropriation, the wearing by non-native americans of native american war headdresses; the point is not just that these belong to a different culture, it's that they are *sacred* there
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
My go to example for sacred American culture is the Purple Heart.
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Replying to @_StevenFan
only sacred to the Red Tribe, i think? in the
@slatestarcodex sense:https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ …1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
True. At first I thought it might be more universal because of the sacrifice associated with it, but then I realized one man's sacrifice is another's colonialist expedition.
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"Nasty little Buddhist"
Seeking via neuroscience and psychology informed dharma.