Yoga class cancelled at University of Ottawa over 'cultural issues'

[FarrenH]

9. The foolishness of this is especially apparent

Last edited Mon Nov 23, 2015, 07:23 PM - Edit history (5)

when you realize that modern yoga evolved on the world stage in the modern era. Despite the claims of some practitioners, it is not a 5,000-year-old practice. It has some roots in antiquity, in multiple different regional practices and ideas. Yoga is a modern synthesis. A majority of the poses were developed in the last 150 years and many of them were developed in places like the USA.

Personally I'm hostile to claims that appropriation is a negative at all except when it meets a very narrow set of conditions. To wit, when symbols that are considered sacred in some sense are used in a way that is disrespectful to their cultural significance in the culture of origin, or when people appropriate in a way that treats the source as an exotic source of entertainment or shallow stereotype, insulting the people they borrowed from in the process.

But when cultural sharing borne of respect and admiration are met with accusations of appropriation (and that it is held to be an unqualified wrong), such accusations are frequently deployed in the same manner and for the same apparent motivation as a high school kid getting annoyed because someone they dislike adopted what they think of as their unique dress style. In-culture, this "our thing" instinct is strong. You see it in the teens who get mad in the youtube comments at all the people who "only now that its trendy" get into some obscure band that they attached some of their identity to. Hegemony or no hegemony, its a mean-spirited impulse that shouldn't be indulged.

It is born of a selfishness, negative identity politics, grudges and the desire to deny others who adopt practices and symbols out of respect and admiration any benefit, asthetic, spiritual, or physical, from them. It's essentially a segregationist and anti-egalitarian attitude born of insecurity and a desire to punish people for making you feel less special.

When the whole white women belly-dancing spat briefly consumed various internet forums in the wake of a angry article by an Arab dancer in Salon, I just thought she was a mean-spirited cow. Especially since she claimed to speak for all other Arab belly-dancers and claimed that they only taught white women because of economic hardship. While my friend's (his family came from Egypt) mom who was an actual Egyptian belly-dancer in her youth thoroughly disagreed.

That and a lot of other flare-ups have convinced me that cultural appropriation is a sorely abused concept often employed by resentful assholes. As I said above, there are a narrow set of conditions where complaints are certainly valid, but I don't think we should be indulging ideas that in very obvious ways actually divide human beings, deny our common humanity and prevent us from learning from each other and being collectively better off for it.