Culture and Appropriation

One of the weirder aspects of the event I highlighted in yesterday's post was the cultural appropriation of the Palestinian cause and its flag to whatever seems to concern western activists.  Were I Palestinian I think I would find it quite offensive, which these days is a feeling automatically implied by the term "cultural appropriation."

However, it does not always have to be so. 

The implication comes from Edward Said's Orientalism, which introduced the idea as a form of colonial oppression, and seems to be in the vocabulary of lots of "woke" who presumably taught the term in university (although I wonder how many have read the book, which I thought was really not a good read.

The trouble with seeing the world in these terms is it discourages study of other cultures and adapting aspects of them.  It also tends to be corrosive of institutions such as the British Museum that seek to put different cultures together.  It also tends to run up against the fact that many of the most interesting and dynamic achievements of the arts are just such mash ups of other elements.  Where they don't come from foreign elements, they often come from the past _ like the Renaissance (which could be seen a massive appropriation of Greco-Roman culture by subsequent Europeans.