So What's A White Boy To Do?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The idea that charging money for something strips its sacred nature is very prevalent in Native culture, actually, which makes all these hippie drum shops with "Native American ceremonial drums" and sage and sweetgrass and all that shit that much more laughable.

[McMegaDeff]

Back to Europe...find ye your roots.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Back to Europe...find ye your roots.

Who, me?

[McMegaDeff]

No, I only read the initial top of this thread...

I think the american white man gets confused, lacking connection to the mother countries. I certainly feel this way and am just drawn to Europe for reasons I can't exactly name other than a pull to reconnect with my roots..

I think when anything gets out of hands it's good to get back to square one and remember who you are...

roots...cuz we all have them

[McMegaDeff]

obviously, return to the islands if that's your heritage...so on and so forth.

[Freeky]

roots...cuz we all have them

Nope.


Or if everyone did, I'm willing to bet a lot of people discovered them severed, never to be regrown ever ever ever.  Like tumbleweeds, only they aren't dead people.

[McMegaDeff]

that's stupid. You've missed the point.

[Freeky]

that's stupid.

I was inspired.

[Phox]

that's stupid. You've missed the point.

Erm. I don't think that you have any idea what the topic at hand is, friend. So... uh. I suggest you carefully go back and read all of the related posts, without making up your mind what the question is supposed based solely on the thread's title. Because uh, Freeky's point is much more accurate than whatever point you were making to the current discussion. Contemporary American culture is so far removed from the ancestral European customs (and since a large majority of Americans are many generations removed from immigration, the contemporary cultures don't necessarily match up to the "roots", so to speak), that it is not as simple as all that, since there isn't nearly as much of a connection between an American of Polish descent and an actual Polish citizen as one would like to think. In fact, most of the time when Americans attempt to go back to their ethnic roots, they end up with a horribly bastardized version of the culture they try to claim. (See: 90% of "Irish" Americans).

[Faust]

Back to Europe...find ye your roots.

Europe's not great.

I mean I have a lot to be thankful for. if it wasn't for public policy on grants I wouldn't have been able to go to college band now I'm on a high paying job. Ireland has excellent health care education etc and is a really safe place to live but the culture is composed of two polar opposites, the old catholic rigor and the young homogenized youth who are fed American media which they lap up.
it's sad, it's a nation that has been free for less then 100 years and it hasn't yet found its direction or shaken off the church.

[Dildo Argentino]

I find this thread verry interresting.

All of it, and in particular this claim:

Also, abandoning one's culture is impossible.

I'm not so sure.

I think there is a way in which it is trivially true: it is not possible to undo what has already happened, the childhood encounter with one's culture and some variety of enculturation into that culture.

There is also a way in which it is trivially false: people have switched cultures a lot, especially in the last several hundred years. This guy became an honorary Inuit and the first representative of Inuit people in the Canadian parliament, despite the fact that he was born and raised a Scotsman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Pryde.

This guy:

http://static.polityka.pl/_resource/res/path/ea/12/ea127c69-97ab-41ae-89f4-5888b062e6c0_260x

Was born in Canada to a Native American chief father and Polish mother (who was drawn there by a gold rush). He spent his first 10 years or so as a Native American tribeschild. Then his mother got homesick and went home to Poland, taking him, the only fair-haired, blue-eyed one among her three half-Shawnee kids. They got home for WWII. He spent a lifetime being Polish, but writing books about his Shawnee childhood - which culture is his one? When, much later, having become a sailor, he visited his tribe, they shunned him - because he, already a man with a name, had abandoned the tribe. And I am sure that while most people don't go very far from the culture they are raised in, many do.

Is there a sense in which it is non-trivially true?

It certainly seems to be the case that it is impossible to abandon one's language. I don't mean it is not possible to take a vow of silence and keep it: but as long as you keep thinking like a human being, indeed keep making sense of the world around you as a human being, I think you can't but use the linguistic competencies and habits that you acquired when you first learned to speak. And language, after all, is a cultural construct, so in that sense, yes, as long as you remain a human being, you remain a user of cultural competencies and habits.

My only worry there is the status of enlightened people who sit in deep meditation for years, without a thought: have they abandoned language? Are they still human?

And the other question here is, are there other cultural traits that are essential constituents of being human, or at least being a particular human person? Was Duncan Pryde the honorary Inuit and representative of his people the same Duncan Pryde that, at the tender age of 18, responded to a newspaper ad for trading reps in Canada? He would probably have said yes.

It reminds me of the old philosophical conundrum about the ship which sails for decades, and every single piece of wood and iron and canvas that composes it is replaced, bit by bit, as it suffers damage and is repaired. Is it still the same ship?

And the answer, of course, as it often is, is: "depends how you look at it".

My two cents and all that.

[Dildo Argentino]

that's stupid.

I was inspired.

[LMNO]

What I think I'm hearing a lot of in this thread sounds similar to, "If I'm offended, it's offensive."  Which sounds like a tautology, I know.  But there seems to be some adoption of cultures that's tolerable, and others that's intolerable.

If it's only appropriation when the one being taken from is on the low side of a power imbalance, and only if the one being taken from is offended by it, then does it only take one offended oppressed person to invalidate the whole thing, or does it take a certain consensus before a particular act, mode of dress, or phrase becomes offensive?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

that's stupid. You've missed the point.

SHE HAZ LOW BLUD SUGAH.

NEEDS POTARZ

[The Good Reverend Roger]

that's stupid. You've missed the point.

Erm. I don't think that you have any idea what the topic at hand is, friend. So... uh. I suggest you carefully go back and read all of the related posts, without making up your mind what the question is supposed based solely on the thread's title.

That's not what he's here for, Phox.

You know that.