Dr Anglea Puca AP: Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to the Live Stream Symposium – a special one. A round table with some special guests that I will be introducing in just a moment. As you know…

[Dr Puca strikes the microphone]

oops, sorry, I’m a PhD and a religious study scholar and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Paganism, Shamanism and all things occult. And as you also may know this is a crowdfunded project, so if you want to help this project stay alive you will find all the ways to support this project in a pinned comment and in the info box, including Patreon, PayPal and super chats and all sorts of things that you will find in the info box. Also, today’s guests will be listed in the info box so make sure to check out over there to, you know, find all of the publications and the books and the information about our special guests that I’m going to bring on now.

So let me introduce to you our special guests today. So we have Helen Berger, Sabina Magliocco and Susan Owen and yeah, Sabina Magliocco has been widely referenced on this on this YouTube channel including on a video on cultural appropriation and Susan Owen was my PhD supervisor so you can thank her for me getting a PhD because I was a pretty helpless PhD student and also specialised in, mostly in her PhD, on cultural appropriation – the appropriation on Native American spirituality and Helen Berger is, alongside these other three amazing scholars, an expert on the matter and on Paganism and contemporary magic practices. So welcome all of you. How are you guys?

Dr Helen Berger HB: Good, thank you for having us.

Dr Sabina Magliocco SM: Thank you for having us.

AP: Yeah, so first I’d like to tell the audience, I can see there are people already asking questions in the chat and also thank you, Andrew, João and Edward for moderating the chat. I’m expecting it’s going to be intense today, so thank you in advance. And so, first of all, we are not here to police anybody’s behaviour and we are coming from a place of learning and understanding and entering a debate that I would argue is very useful. So when we talk about cultural appropriation it seems to be a topic that tends to get people quite emotionally heated, so I think that first of all I wanted to clarify, as I did in a video which is actually based on a talk by Sabina Magliocco, who we have here. What are some main points that identify what constitutes cultural appropriation as opposed to cultural exchange, although we will get into that later with my guests as well.

So the four main elements that are part of cultural appropriation are:

The fact that there is a power imbalance between the culture that appropriates and the culture that is appropriated – where the appropriating culture tends to be in a higher state of power. For instance, when a dominant cultural group appropriates from a minority group.

Then you have that the appropriation causes harm or is mocking or undermines in any way the culture that is being appropriated.

Then you have the element of this cultural element being taken without the consent of the cultural party.

And then we have the commodification of practices that may be quite sacred or have importance for those people that goes beyond the commodification aspect.

So now that I have just clarified a few main points so that people in the chat can know what we are talking about at least to begin with, I’d like to ask my guests to clarify a bit more about how we understand what constitutes cultural preparation. Do you think that these four points are helpful and what do you think, how do we understand whether something that is happening in front of our eyes is cultural appropriation or something else?

HB: I think that it’s a difficult thing in life as opposed to when we lay it out on paper and we define it. I think Sabina did an excellent job with those points and I would agree with every one of them. But when there are some things that to my mind are very easy, they’re clearly cultural appropriation and in part, this grew out of an article I wrote for The Conversation. Our conversation grew out of that, I had written an article and it was about the selling of white sage by Walmart and making it unavailable to the native population in the southwest who began using it and also having ecological effects. It is being over-harvested and resulting in animals, the possible extinction of some animals there because of the over-harvesting. Now these are not lovely animals that we all love but they’re still animals and they want to be alive. They love themselves even if we say but one of them is a rat and then I know when I say that people say who needs a rat and I’m glad you feel that way, Sabina, right? Okay good.

AP: Love for rats.

HB: I’m for this rat who’s in the desert minding its own business trying to eat some white sage to stay alive. In any case, you know, that seemed to me a no-brainer because here were people buying this and there were other ways to do purification. And when I started doing my research on Paganism in 1986, which, you know, tells you how old I am, people were using salt water and they were using rosemary so there was not this need for white sage until somewhat further along. Having said that one, of course, doesn’t want to emphasize purity because we have all those people on the right who are talking about cultural purity and that’s what I’m doing research on now and I’m very concerned about that. So we neither want to fall into purity nor do we want to say it’s a free-for-all because here we have these Native Americans who have already had their land taken away from them and now this. There’s a little bit of a fudge factor here when I look at Sabina’s list because originally some of those Native Americans did teach some of the Pagans and some New Agers about this and so it was given by somebody who was inside. And that always is a problem for me – who gets to decide that it’s being shared and who doesn’t? So you know I always think well if my mother had a secret recipe and I felt it was just our family’s to be used in the family but my brother decided to publish it online – he has an equal right to it that I do. And you know who gets it, but meanwhile, my secret recipe for stuffed cabbage has just been shared with everybody. So I raise those issues, I don’t have answers to everything. But I do think there are two extremes here and I’d like to walk the middle road and I’ll turn it over to others who have also written about this.

Dr Susanne Owen SO: There’s quite a number of people I’ve met, Druids and others that have mentioned learning a particular ceremony from an indigenous Elder or Native American leader but when you investigate these leaders they are controversial figures within their cultural group. And there is a debate, you know, about whether those people should be sharing outside the community. But, of course, if we go back to, you know, the early 1970s with AIM, you know, American Indian Movement and they were sharing ceremonies with everyone that came. Well, certainly the Lakota where they camped out on the Lakota reservation. And a lot of ceremonies were being shared and this became one of the topics for my research on cultural appropriation. Well, as I saw there was a question about this too, what’s the difference between sharing and appropriating? Because these people were sharing their ceremonies and they were sharing them to other indigenous groups for the most part, and then those ceremonies then took place on different cultural groups’ grounds even though that ceremony was not indigenous to their, you know, their culture. So the Mi’kmaq might be using Plains Indian style ceremonies and I was quite interested in that because I saw Druids also using Native American or Plains Indian ceremonies and I wanted to know what was the difference. And it is, it’s this shared kind of experience of colonisation I think is crucial. And about how the collective kind of sharing among indigenous people has helped to regenerate, you know, the different indigenous groups because that’s precisely what happened to Mi’kmaq. They were regenerated through this sharing and to gain, you know, confidence in their own traditions again. And I think for the Druids, actually, when I was speaking to the Mi’kmaq and others in Canada, indigenous people, they weren’t so concerned about Druids doing sweat lodges or anything like that. It is more the commodification and presenting yourself as an indigenous leader or having permission to do it from a controversial Native American leader.

And so this, as you say, Helen, there’s so much sort of nuance and grey area. You can’t decide a blanket decision about things and there are other cases I want to bring up later to do with them where the difference between appreciation and appropriation as well which comes up in some discourses as well.

HB: Seti the Redcap in fact has on the chat raised that issue ‘who’s upset?’ and in the case, I was looking at Seti and to everybody else is that – oh, yes there’s his comment, is that who is complaining? It was the people, it was the Native American groups in the southwest could not get enough of the white sage for their own ceremonies and that became a real problem. They, because of the economics in America, and what happens on reservations. These are people who don’t have the money to be buying it in the same way that primarily middle-class people have been at Walmart and other places, even though we think about Walmart as cheap. But it’s still… I’m sorry Sabina.

SM: No, no, go ahead, I don’t want to interrupt but I do want to agree with you and Suzanne that determining what is and is not cultural appropriation has to be done on a case-by-case basis. It is very context-specific, it’s easy to set down parameters as I have in my writings and as I do when I teach about this in class but in essence we have to look at these things on a case-by-case basis. Seti asks who is upset. And I think that that’s a very good question and to answer that question it might be useful to look at the history of the term cultural appropriation and to talk a little bit about how cultures spread. What is the origin of the term cultural appropriation? And, you know, where does the concern about this come from?

So let’s first establish that cultures have been influencing one another for thousands of years, since there are humans on the Earth, right. And some of those influences come through trade, some come through contact, and some come through actions like warfare and conquest. We begin to have the idea that cultures can be appropriated in the 1990s, as part of a post-colonial critique of colonialism and this term arises out of the academy. We have it also arises out of the legal system. So legal scholarship, and academic scholarship in the 1990s as part of the postcolonial critique. This is where we begin to have the term appropriation, cultural appropriation used for instances in which one culture, a dominant culture uses elements from a less powerful culture, a colonised culture. And one of the things that the idea of appropriation assumes is that culture is a commodity. Even though this is part of the post-colonial critique it arises out of a commodified environment in which culture is thought of as a product that can be owned that can be bought and that can be sold. And culture behaves in a commodified environment as something that can be owned, bought and sold. So in a sense, our concern with cultural appropriation grows out of a commodified environment, a highly commodified, late capitalist environment and a post-colonial environment in which there are winners and losers, dominant cultures and cultures that have been on the receiving end of colonialism, on the receiving end of cultural genocide, on the receiving end of cultural destruction.

So again we need to understand appropriation as contextual, as arising – this discourse arises out of that milieu and it really only begins to enter popular culture in the, I would say, the early 2000s. So in the 1990s, it’s an academic Culture by the 2000s we begin to see it, you know, on chat boards, at Pagan festivals that there’s this discourse, that some cultures are not okay to appropriate, that some cultural practices should not be used by members of the dominant culture. So I think understanding this is important. I think the other thing that this brings up, and Helen, you alluded to this, is the idea that certain groups own culture as property. And that these groups are pure and not hybrid in any way and static and that’s where cultural appropriation becomes a slippery discourse, right? Because we all want to protect, for example, white sage from being depredated. I don’t think anybody wants to say, yeah, go ahead remove all the white sage, kill all the animals. You know, we agree, I think, most people would agree that we don’t want people for whom this is a sacred part of their religious ceremony, a sacred part of their heritage to not be able to use it because it’s been ecologically destroyed or because it’s only sold at Walmart and through other purveyors and they can’t afford to buy it.

I think most people would agree about that but at the same time, the discourse of cultural appropriation isn’t good at dealing with hybridity and isn’t good at dealing with the very fluid global environment that we live in right now. Where some of us see, for example, have moved 22 times in 64, 23 times in 64 years, living in many different countries, in many different places and acculturating to the places where we live, right, we are influenced by that culture. Culture takes people in, right, it influences them, and you learn new things every place that you live. And the other thing that you also spoke about Helen and Suzanne, you also spoke about this, is that within any cultural group, there are a variety of opinions about who can use certain cultural practices and who cannot. Cultural groups are not homogeneous about that and even within one family, there may be disagreements about who can have Grandma’s recipes and who cannot. So while cultural appropriation allows us to protect, for example, the practices, sacred practices of indigenous people, allow us to return the human remains of indigenous people that were appropriated by museums as part of the colonial project, returned their sacred artefacts, where they belong. It doesn’t feel well with hybridity, mobility and with the diversity that exists within any one cultural group. So that’s why I think the determination of what is and is not cultural appropriation always has to be contextual, and always has to take context into account.

HB: I couldn’t agree with you more on almost everything Sabine except one point, which is that we all agree that the issue of white sage is to be given… because I that is not true and I can tell you for a fact it’s not true, even among Pagans. I put a link to my article on a pagan listserv and I thought people would be interested in reading it, and people got furious, and these were primarily people who were Wiccan-ish or witchy groups and they said no, the Indians don’t own this, I’ve been using this, this is my practice and they threw me off because I had said this and because they found this so offensive. It was offensive to them that somebody would say to them ‘possibly’ and all I was saying was, possibly you should consider not using this and finding something else that would work for you. And, you know, I didn’t say you’re an awful human being or that, you know, I was very clear that yes some Native Americans had given this as a gift and that people were using it, sometimes felt that they were honouring the traditions that were already here. They weren’t evil people, they weren’t doing it for evil reasons but now that you know this you might want to consider it. Wow, the response I got and it was not an environmental response because my ending concern was the environmental issue.

SO: The over-harvesting.

HB: Yeah, over-harvesting and the resulting possible extinction for both the white sage and these animals. And I didn’t list what the animals were because one of them was a rat and I know people will say rats, who cares about those rats? But I know Sabina you told me before that you like rats.

SM: I like opossums. Let’s just put that to one side. I think that you raise a really important point Helen that we don’t all agree about this and maybe one of the things that we need to examine is why people feel so defensive about this. And what it is about, for example, indigenous practices or the practices of colonised peoples or the practices of people who are seen as other. What is it about these practices that make them so attractive to the dominant cultural group? I think we need to unpack that.

And I’ve been sort of keeping an eye, a little bit, on the comments and there was a mention about black hairstyles and I wanted to talk about Adele and the Bantu knots that she wore for Carnival for the Notting Hill Carnival and it was during the pandemic time so she just posted a picture because it wasn’t taking place in person. But she got a lot of criticism from people in the U.S. because she’s living in the U.S. at the moment or at least at that time. But all the Jamaicans who lived in Tottenham rose up and defended her, well at least then the ones that were making their voices heard, defending her as a Tottenham person, that she is one of our own and she’s part of our culture. So it’s interesting that where someone could call out you’re appropriating the Bantu knot hairstyle. Whereas those from her own community who are Jamaican said this is, you know, showing appreciation, she’s one of us. And so it is so difficult to navigate and luckily I think, Adele kept quiet through all of this debate through social media which is probably the right thing to do.

SM: Yeah, I want to go back to that question that I raised about what makes certain practices attractive to the people who are adopting them and you raised the issue of appreciation, Suzanne, when is it appreciation? I think one of the underlying things that we’re sort of dancing around is the fact that, as part of colonialism, the cultures of the colonised peoples do get erased, they do get overwhelmed by the dominant culture. But at the same time, there is an impulse on the part of the dominant culture to idealise certain aspects of the colonised cultures and to then view these aspects as more authentic, as mystical, as magical, as being more in touch with the sacred or the Earth or, you know, something authentic. And this strange combination, right, because it’s two sides of the same coin, this combination where on the one hand you colonise another culture and you may be committing cultural genocide or you may have committed your ancestors, may have committed cultural genocide against that culture hundreds of years ago. And that may continue through practices like residential schools, through practices like taking away indigenous children and forcing them into foster care at three, four, five times the rate of non-indigenous children. So you’ve got that on the one hand, on the other hand, you have this idea that they are magical Indians and I’m using that term consciously, right, conscious of the fact that many indigenous people reject that term but for the dominant culture indigenous cultures, non-dominant cultures then often become magicalised and this is an uncomfortable intersection for people who are in that dominated position, right. On the one hand to have had your relatives taken away from their families, put in foster care, put in residential schools to have them die as a result of neglect and foster care in residential schools. And then on the other hand to have the same dominant culture say, oh let yourself be mystical and magical, you know, you’re in touch with something special, it’s uncomfortable, right? It’s not seeing the full culture, it’s disrespectful and this is I think at the crux of some of these accusations of, you know, we don’t want to have our hairstyles our sacred practices our sacred objects etc. fetishized in this way.

AP: Yeah, I was thinking about one of the comments that people tend to ask, you know, one of the questions is that, I think that people don’t quite understand and I think it is indeed difficult to understand what really constitutes cultural appropriation and why only certain cultures are brought into the, you know, the conversation when it comes to cultural appropriation and why others aren’t. So, for instance, I had some patrons and some viewers who said why do you not talk about cultural appropriation when it comes to white people? Or when it comes to Yoga? Or when it comes to other practices that are not indigenous. So is it something that is only taking place when it comes to indigenous people in North America and in relation to the Western World? So what are the cultures that can be appropriated and are there only certain cultures that can be appropriated?

SM: But again I think the answer to this question depends very much on context. So there is a strong discourse, for example, within the Asian and Asian-Canadian, Asian-American communities about the appropriation of Yoga and other spiritual practices from Asia exactly because they have been fetishized by the West. Or the appropriation of certain aspects of let’s say Yoga or meditation without understanding the entire philosophy, the entire religious system that underlies them. So any culture can be appropriated, right? What matters is the context, what matters is the relationship between the two cultures and whether one is in a relationship of power over the other and then how that item, that cultural item is being used. I mean to go back to the hairstyle, Suzanne raised the question of the hairstyle. When I was a university student my summer job was to work in a summer camp and we often worked with children from urban neighbourhoods. And in one of the cabins that I had for a period of time during one summer, we had a majority of well, all of the girls in my cabin were African-American and they would braid each other’s hair at night – it was an act of social bonding. One night towards the end of the camp period when I had formed a close relationship with these girls, they were in my cabin for a couple of weeks, and they decided that they wanted to braid my hair. Is that cultural appropriation? I mean in that setting, even though there is a relationship of power between the white camp counsellor and the African-American children, between the camps that are run by white people and the African-American kids who are participating in that summer camp as an enrichment activity. I would argue that that was an act of social bonding, that those young girls extended to me a kind of social relationship when they said, Sabina, we want to braid your hair.

All right and that was not me trying to have a hairstyle that would somehow use something that was part of their culture or perform a kind of identity or be cool or, you know, any of that stuff. It was an act of social bonding, that if I had braided my hair that way to be more like them or just show that I was a cool camp counsellor, then that would have been cultural appropriation because it would have come from a very different place. And that’s what I mean when I say that we need to look at the context very carefully because the very same act can be cultural appropriation in certain cases and not at all in others.

HB: And I would like to go back to the issue of Yoga because that is an uncomfortable one and I think what we want to talk about here are things that are uncomfortable to some degree. And we keep saying, well it’s not easy. So I think about Yoga, which has become pretty ubiquitous in America and England and sometimes you’re not even aware that you’re doing an exercise and that it comes from Yoga or at least some of us are unaware that, if you haven’t studied Yoga and you’re just doing something on a YouTube, you may not know that that’s where it came from – it’s just an exercise to help with whatever, your lumbar or something else and that, and you say, okay that’s a good exercise I’ll do that. You’re not even aware that you’re culturally appropriating, it’s just a YouTube doing some… these exercises are good for X and you do them. Some of them are clearly Yoga and they’re not in any way connected to the spiritual, they’re connected to helping stretch your hamstring or something else.

And meditation, certainly that has been recommended for a number of illnesses, that people should meditate because it helps to bring down their blood pressure, it helps with heart problems, it helps with a number of things and it’s completely devoid of a spiritual aspect. If I know…

SO: The mindfulness industry is like that.

HB: Yes, the mindfulness industry, which is connected here at least to some aspects of the medical system in which their hospitals are teaching meditation, not as a spiritual activity, as something to help with your autoimmune disease or your heart condition or your migraine. So I’m thinking of three that I know of offhand, there are probably other illnesses.

SO: Yeah and it’s being prescribed. Yeah.

HB: Yeah, and there are others. And I think about Sabina, you’re so nicely talking about colonisation, you did that beautifully but you know, of course, India was colonised, and we know that the Indians would tell you that if you missed it. And it was colonised for a very long time and so it is a postcolonial nation and suffering somewhat from that and we could talk about how that’s true. And yet these things have been taken and how would you put that rabbit back into the hat? You can’t, I mean at this point it’s people are doing Yoga without even knowing they’re doing Yoga they’re just doing an exercise.

SM: I want to point out that in the case of Yoga, we specifically have historical information about how Yoga, Hatha Yoga came to the West and that was through the intervention of Swami Vivekananda and later Iyengar…

SO: Iyengar, yeah.

SM: Are both South Asians who wanted to introduce non-spiritual aspects of Yoga, the mudras, the physicians, to Westerners for health benefits, right? So again this is one of those instances in which we come up against disagreements within the culture where some people want to share these practices and maybe even market these practices to outsiders and others are saying, no these are now decontextualised, you’ve taken spiritual, the religious aspects out of these and basically you’ve sold our culture down the river. You can’t put that rabbit back into the hat right now. It’s too late, right. It is too late is what I think and yet there it is and indeed there who gets to make the decision? I think it is one of the things that feel uncomfortable. So one of my students’ mothers was very happy that I was doing Yoga but for her, it was the first step towards spiritual enlightenment that she was hoping I would reach. And I love her mother and so that it’s all good. But I understand for her this is part of a spiritual activity and that my doing it, she feels, will lead to my having this spiritual experience.

AP: Yeah and also for some people they would start with the physical aspect where the non-spiritual element and exercise and then they will get interested in the spiritual and religious aspects as well. So it’s possible that I actually contributed, for instance, to the study of Indian philosophies in the 20th century and the development of Indology and how fast it grew. Like for instance, in Italy, as you may know, I studied Sanskrit and Tibetan and lots of my peers that went into studying Sanskrit and Tibetan or Indology, Tibetology and so on came from the point of view of being interested in those practices and then they got into studying them academically and understanding the nuances and all these things that we are discussing today. But in a way, sometimes you can also find that even the impoverished aspect of that practice can be an anchor or a way, a gateway for people to get into get interested and understanding the complexity and the nuances.

SO: I think there was some, I was just for some reason thinking about this case where someone I knew was running a Vision Quest in Wales and I wrote about this. And he learned it from, you know, a Native American person, an individual. And I thought well the difference is like when it’s done because I’d been on reservations and there’s usually a follow-up, you know, they meet with elders and they talk about it and there’s a lot of sort of community support for the process. And this person in Wales I saw was actually doing that and keeping in touch with the people that had been on it for any follow-up, you know, talks and just on the phone, ring them anytime. When I met him for a coffee someone rang him up, you know, to talk about it. And I thought, okay and he’s not doing it in a terrible way and he also did work with youth groups as well. And this is where it starts to get, I think, quite muddy. And I think there was a group in the US that got in trouble for using Vision Quest, a youth group – I mean a Youth Organisation to help disenfranchised youths and it gets really kind of complicated because there may have been native people involved, to begin with, or happy to, you know, to help youth in the US. So this is a question, I guess, that I would still have, you know. It’s really hard to judge. I can’t as I say, Helen, you said at the beginning you like to tread the middle a little bit with some of these things. I think the person in Wales, he seems to be a good person and he’s not well known, you know, he’s not with websites and making tons of money. So just let them be in some cases.

AP: Yeah and I was thinking since there are people who have also questioned why is it useful to talk about cultural appropriation, why it matters to have this kind of conversation. Because some people have said, in a way, borrowing from one of the problematic aspects of cultural appropriation as Sabina, as well explains, you know, and Susanne and Helen as well the aspect of commodification. They would say that culture cannot be appropriated because nobody owns culture, so why are we even talking about cultural appropriation if culture cannot be owned? So what would you answer to that objection?

SO: One of the things that I realised was that a lot of these ceremonies and practices were illegal for native people to actually do and yet it was okay for the dominant culture to do them. And so there is an element of oppression that has been going on for a long time and was it either Helen or Sabine or both talking about losing land, losing lots of things, losing their childhood, their connection with the community and it’s just another straw for many of these people that’s a long line of, sort of, the disappearance of the culture of people. And I think this is why it matters, is that in some ways it’s like saying that ignorance is okay but actually it’s not. Once you start to be aware of it, it’s about making judgments. I mean no one’s telling you not to do something but it’s about respect basically. You know if somebody’s hurting and suffering I would want to listen to find out why.

HB: I think that’s a good way of looking at it. And indeed some things we do say that people outside can’t do, whether they do it or not are separate. But some Native American groups to whom the eagle feathers are sacred have been given permission to use eagle feathers in the United States and the bald-headed eagle and that has not been permitted to anybody outside of that tribe. And so it certainly people do it any way but, you know, people do many things that are illegal including murdering people. So, you know, the fact that something is done, it still may be illegal but it’s… But legally only Native Americans are permitted to take those feathers. So I think there are some things that we do recognise here, that belong to Native Americans, very little, but there are some things that it has been limited to others outside. And so, do you own a culture? Well, it’s not exactly ownership. I think we have to start using more subtle language.

So I remember reading and I’m probably going to get this not quite right because it’s off the top of my head but when the colonisers landed on the east coast of the United States many of the native people didn’t have a concept of owning land. It was foreign to them, you know, that was not and so when people were buying the land from them the people who were buying it knew exactly what they were doing and they may well not have realised the people they were buying it from didn’t have this concept because we regularly think that everybody knows what we know, right. We go into classrooms and students presume that we know all sorts of things that we may know nothing about because they know about them.

SM: And vice versa.

HB: And vice versa, absolutely worse, vice versa because that our job is to do something else but we’re guilty too. But, you know, very often students presume, well, of course, you know this. And I remember saying to one student, how do you imagine I would know what was going on in the dorms? I don’t live there, and I don’t go into the dorms, so how did you think I knew this? And he actually stopped and thought about it and said well, now that you say that I guess you wouldn’t know about it. I said, so now you’re telling me about it, so that’s how I’ll know about it. But I think that’s very common. So I think the people who came thought well of course, you know, this buying and selling of land, that’s quote-unquote natural. And the people to whom it was being done had no concept of that. It was the use of land, it was a different way of being, so I think with the culture we need to start thinking of it that way. It’s not exactly ownership, it’s not a piece of paper that says this is mine and if you’re going to use it… and we have copyrights which say that if you’re going to use a piece of this video, I don’t know, Angela may own it and it may be that we need to ask her permission and maybe even pay to use it. I don’t know if that’s true or not true.

AP: No, it’s not true. You can use every part of my video. But that’s why, but you know…

HB: But certainly some TV shows it’s not true and the actors get paid something for it being re-shown. And so you could say it’s a cultural thing

but we talk about it having value and people getting something for that value. So I think we have to start thinking more subtly about this. It’s not that it’s a free-for-all or it’s owned. Maybe we can think about another language and I don’t have the words and possibly Sabina does.

SO: Yeah, I think one of the examples is champagne, for instance. They fought hard to make sure that you can’t sell like California champagne.

I’ve seen that and it was popular when I was a child, I wasn’t drinking it of course, but now it’s I guess it’s called sparkling wine because you know they lost that battle and so there’s kind of cultural protections now. You know Champagne by that label comes from Champagne and so forth. We can do that with cheese probably…

AP: Or with pizza with pineapple and not calling it something else.

[Laughter]

SM: But actually pizza with pineapple is a great example. Let me back up in a second. I think that this example is telling us, it’s showing us that is that, yes, culture it’s, on one level, cannot be owned just as land, in a sense, cannot be owned. We’re just borrowing it, actually. But we do live in a commodified environment in which culture is regularly exploited and sold for money and benefits, money that benefits one particular person or one particular group of people and not another. And that’s the environment in which the whole idea of cultural appropriation arose, right? We have it arising in the late ‘90s as part of the post-colonial critique, as part of, you know, that takes place against the backdrop of late capitalism. So we have both at the same time. Culture can and cannot be owned and Suzanne’s examples are great examples of how certain aspects of culture have been copyrighted. The methode-champenoise, for example, is the method for making champagne and the word Champagne – by the way, it’s the same for Prosecco you can’t call yourself Prosecco right unless you are DOC you have a particular method developed in Italy. So we do have examples of things that have been copyrighted I think the question we need to ask is what then gives a person, a group the right to a practice, right?

How? How do we acquire rights to a practice? And for me, that is again very much a matter of context it is a matter of that culture is transmitted from one person to another through cultural contact, through cultural exchange. So, for example, I used to play American folk music and bluegrass music in various bands, okay. Why? Because I actually spent part of my youth in the Ohio Valley where a lot of my friends came, you know, their families came up from the mountains of Kentucky and they played that music, they brought that music with them. I learned that music because I was hanging out with these people when I was an early teen learning to play the guitar. And so that’s where my interest in and competence in playing and singing that particular music comes from. So my connection with American folk music and with bluegrass music is quite organic, right? It came from my living in a particular area for a particular period of time, hanging out and playing music with other people whose music it was. It’s a little bit different if I were to learn it only from recordings, never hanging out or playing with other people who play this kind of music, whose music it is. And then, you know, try to go out on the stage in a coffee house or something like that and say that I am an authentic Italian player and singer of bluegrass music, right? It’s a little bit different because then the contact isn’t direct.

So for me when we have direct contact with a cultural milieu then culture is being passed on in a very organic way. When we’re learning it from a YouTube video it doesn’t mean that we can’t do it in the privacy of our own homes. But when we then go out and try to market that, right. Or represent ourselves as a member of that particular cultural group, that’s when I think that things get tricky, that’s when accusations of oh, you’re taking our culture are likely to happen.

SO: Yeah, I agree with that, yeah. It’s the representational aspect as well because if you’re representing bluegrass that means the bluegrass musicians are being muted by that. So they’re being ignored or underappreciated because someone who’s not from that tradition has learned to do it and is making a big show, you know, and benefiting from that culture, which the culture does not benefit from.

HB: So on the chat and it’s a long way off somebody had asked about or commented on Elvis Presley and of course, Elvis Presley was criticized for taking what had been primarily black music and changing it to his own thing and then making a lot of money on it. And he was fairly open in some interviews about this, that he did indeed go to black nightclubs or jazz clubs and he did learn a good deal there. So he did not hide this, there was nothing hidden about it. It’s not just that people are claiming this, it’s that he himself claimed this. So what do we do with this? I mean Elvis is long dead but nonetheless, the person raised what is a very interesting issue I think. An example of Elvis himself, of the King.

SM: I mean when we think about rockabilly when we think about rock and roll when we think about actually a lot of the American musical traditions.

HB: Jazz.

SM: I mean Jazz comes directly from the African-American traditions. Jazz is African-American music that was then popularised, and appropriated, we can say unpopularised by white recording artists who sometimes eclipsed the black recording artists in terms of their popularity and in terms of their income. Their income stream from those recordings, when we think about hybrid traditions like rock and roll, like rockabilly, like bluegrass itself, right? Because the banjo is an African instrument that was imported by people who were taken into slavery and brought to the New World. These traditions, these traditions are hybrid traditions and hybridity comes out of that intercultural contact. This is where I talk about appropriations dealing poorly with the whole issue of hybridity.

One of the things that we sort of assume is that in the new world, and I’m talking here about North America, different cultural traditions existed completely separate from one another but that’s not true. Because the African-American tradition, for example, had a tremendous influence on American culture, all kinds of things that, you know, that people take for granted and that people listen to and eat every day actually come from African and African-American traditions. And how did that happen? Because people were not separate, in spite of segregation, people influence one another culturally. In the South, even in the times of Jim Crow deep segregation – music, foodways, and other types of folklore, people were interacting with one another across the racial divide and so were these forms of expressive culture especially music, foodways and Magic. Those are the three that are the most fluid, in a sense we’re constantly influencing one another in spite of segregation giving us these hybrid cultural forms, these hybrid foodways, hybrid music, and hybrid magical forms.

AP: So how do we distinguish between cultural hybridity or syncretism and cultural appropriation?

SM: A very important question, right? Very important question. I think that direct contact and the development of a cultural form in a region through generations of direct contact is one way that we distinguish syncretism or cultural hybridity from cultural appropriations.

HB: And I think speed is part of it therefore that some of this is very fast – this would be fun, let me just take it.

SO: I was just thinking in Elvis’s case, obviously in those days there wasn’t quite the consciousness about it but I think if someone like that was around today I would hope that they would promote those acts that they borrowed from and that’s one way to mitigate against it, I guess. This is what I guess authors who are borrowing from Chinese culture for their fantasy fiction but if they promote Chinese authors and give them shout-outs, you know, that may mitigate a little bit, you know, and certainly consulting with Chinese, you know, if that’s the culture that you’ve taken from.

HB: The content is the context and I think for Elvis he thought he was honouring, you know, in the South that he was growing up in the fact that he was going to these jazz clubs, he was interacting with people who were there and then honour and he would have seen it and possibly the people he was taking from would have seen it as his honouring their traditions by using them. Because so much at that time that came from African-American people and cultures was seen negatively. And he was saying wow this music is wonderful, wow everybody should be hearing it. Well, I’m gonna start using it and playing it. I think on his part was something that he saw as honouring them. Whether it would be viewed that way now and whether the people who he took from who said well, you know, Ed Sullivan will have Elvis on TV but he won’t have me here on TV, may feel differently and they may have felt that way then, but they may have been aware of that the music wouldn’t have gotten out at all if it wasn’t…

AP: Yeah, there is an interesting comment in the chat from Courtney. I wonder about borrowing from ancient culture. Is it the same if it’s 250 or 2000 years ago?

So that kind of begs the question; is cultural appropriation about the contemporary world only?

SO: Obviously that they’re not living cultures, so it has to be through scholarship or research or something and then that way academics are kind of complicit. And I’m thinking of Shamanism in particular, where Shamanism was taught through anthropologists, you know, for a large part like Michael Harner, Carlos Castaneda – they’re all anthropologists and becoming Shamans.

SM: So even before that, I mean Shamanism is largely a western cultural construct, right? I mean this word is common as an emic word, it comes from the people of Siberia but right from the beginning, I mean starting in the 1600s with the first travel writers, to report this term, right? The Western fascination with these practices that were seen as very other by Westerners and there was this construction of this idea of Shamanism this projection of shamanism into the past as the earliest religion, this mystification of these practices and this application of a set of techniques to this idea that they applied to all indigenous cultures, right. And that’s a Western Religious Studies and anthropological construct from the 19^th century that created the situation in which people like Michael Harner and Carlos Castaneda can ply their wares.

AP: So would that be cultural appropriation or is it a completely different phenomenon?

SO: It is related because you’re employing a term that was a Western construct but it’s still kind of – I guess it’s romanticism in some ways. But

there’s a whole load of sort of things going on there, I think.

HB: There is, I knew Michael Harner, I knew him, yeah. And on one hand, he was a very nice man and he was very, very sincere in this and he put together a series of techniques that came from multiple different cultures in his own manner so he was taking all these bits and pieces and putting it together that’s what he did he created sort of this homogenised Shamanism. So it was not from any one culture, it was from cultures and I don’t know. And he certainly made it into a business but I think he also was a great believer that it was a way of helping people and so it was a very complex thing for him too is that he wasn’t doing… because he had an academic position which he gave up to start teaching Shamanism.

[Laughter]

SO: I think, you know, I mean I was fascinated with Egypt quite strongly. You know, the exhibition of King Tutankhamun came through San Francisco Bay Area when I was a child and I was just totally taken by it. But a lot of it is through our own creativity and Imagination what we’re doing. And I think there’s they’re very different from contemporary Egyptians because you know the people of ancient Egypt are very different population-wise to contemporary Egyptians. So it depends, I guess, what you’re doing with it and how you’re representing it, I suppose.

AP: I think my understanding of cultural appropriation since there is the matter of power imbalance that we described, to me it seems more like a contemporary phenomenon because of that. Because my understanding of cultural appropriation is that it is a lot about avoiding oppression as much as possible through culture and through the use of culture and so if that is the case then it would make it more of a contemporary phenomenon rather than being applicable to borrowing things from an ancient past.

SM: Yeah, I don’t disagree. If you are borrowing things from an ancient past you are already so removed from the people who practice these things you are…

AP: Not affecting them as much.

SM: Yeah, you’re recreating them in a sense. You’re recreating them in a contemporary context and this is the process of tradition at the same time what I would say is to be aware of the connection that can be present. So if you are reappropriating the worship of Hecate, let’s say, or the worship of the Morrigan – it’s a great queen of British, Britanno-Celtic mythology, you’re reinventing things. But if you want to reappropriate let’s say or recreate ancient Mayan religion be aware that there are practitioners who practice Mayan religion in continuity with the past, right? And that religion never died under colonialism, that it has continued to be practised and that there are live practitioners today. So just kind of be aware, you know, I mean I have some questions that people can ask themselves when they’re thinking about whether is it cultural appropriation, you know.

Whose practice is this and are there living people today for whom this practice is sacred or a key feature of their cultural or religious identity? And what are the power relationships between your culture and the culture of the practitioners? Is there a history of colonial domination between your culture and the people who are practising this thing? Are there differences in class, race or ethnicity such that one holds much more power or prestige than the other? And finally, what’s your relationship with members of this practitioner group? How are you learning the practice? Is there that immersion that we were talking about before, that direct connection? Are people freely teaching and disseminating this practice to members of your cultural group? And how are you compensating group members for the use of their practice?

So these are some things that people can ask themselves if they are concerned. Is what I’m practising cultural appropriation and then some other things to consider are, you know, why do you want to use this practice or object? Is romanticism or the search for authenticity a motivator? Are you projecting magical qualities or authenticity onto a culture that has been dominated? Are you trying to pass as a member of the community whose practice you are doing? You know, are you mocking or making fun of the practice? Those things are really never in good taste whatever we want to call them if you’re passing yourself off or trying to imitate or mock somebody that’s not cool, just not cool. How does your use of this practice affect the community of practitioners, right? Are you depriving them of its use or are you profiting where members of the community should be the ones profiting? Just, you know, you’re asking, you need to ask yourself if this is true. And finally, is your use of this practice private or public? I mean what you do in your own home is your business, right? You wanna, I don’t know, privately worship a Mayan deity? Okay, knock yourself out, in the privacy of your home. You do what you want. It’s a little bit different when you begin to publicly perform this stuff when you begin to represent another culture and then you have to ask yourself some of these questions that I raised before.

SO: And as I said that when I was talking to some of the people in First Nations I was speaking to, they weren’t so concerned about a group of Druids running a sweat lodge for themselves in England, you know, it’s more about whether they’re going to do it publicly and could lead to harm because they don’t actually know perhaps how to prepare for it properly. As it has happened with Sedona, the famous case in Sedona where a sweat lodge leader did things improperly and it led to the death of participants. This was debated at the American Academy of Religion later that year and I was present, you know, it’s mainly indigenous scholars that were discussing it and there was none of them blamed the participants. It was the leader exploiting people. But they did say that there must be a way, that it’s education we need to, you know, let people know that this is wrong and it was really, that’s the bottom line is that it’s about learning and educating ourselves.

AP: And asking yourself questions. Sorry, go on.

HB: No, I was just going to say, I think here in the United States that some American, Native American peoples do object to the sweat lodges even when they’re small, just a small group of “filling the blank” Pagans doing it in Maine or in Vermont that they do object to it and they do feel that it is inappropriate and it may be that it’s on their stolen land.

SO: But I think if it’s done at a camp, you know, like where it’s a big gathering it is public. I meant more that if it was, you know, a group of six people that meet regularly in, you know, in the Cotswolds.

HB: It may also be that it’s in the Cotswolds. It’s so far away and it’s not on the stolen land.

SO: I was just aware that there was a group when I was teaching at a school there. I never went along but I was curious about it and they would have been doing this for a couple of years.

HB: But there is also the concern whether they know what they’re doing. And indeed you mentioned the case that I was, you know, exactly the case I was going to bring up and you said, and then there was Sedona. And I thought yes that was the case that came immediately to mind.

SO: I was appalled about it. Yeah, the lack of preparation in many of these cases.

HB: And you know, that people don’t know what they’re doing. And this person was inadvertently killed. The intent was not to murder people but he did kill people.

SM: People died, audience members, who aren’t familiar with this case this was a spiritual leader who created this sweat lodge ceremony but did not know how to properly and safely construct a sweat lodge. He used plastic for the canopy of the sweat lodge and as a result, the steam could not escape, the heat builds up inside the sweat lodge and a couple of participants actually died of heat exhaustion as a result. So this is someone who appropriated a practice, charged people boku bucks to participate and didn’t really know what they were doing, didn’t follow safety practices and ended up inadvertently killing people.

HB: And some people got hurt as well because it was a rush to get out and there’s only one small entrance and it was…

AP: Sounds awful.

HB: Yeah, it was totally awful and it was shocking and I think the plastic also, when it started to burn, the two of you can correct me but my vague memory is the plastic also gave off chemicals when it was burning that were harmful to people’s lungs. And I can’t remember the specifics of this but I remember I’m trying to bring it up out of my brain.

SO: But the other issue is he did not want people to leave and if you go to a sweat lodge in a native community you can leave anytime – it’s fully accepted. Whereas this leader did not want people to leave when they were complaining.

HB: Yeah and it was affecting people’s eyes and their lungs. I remember now, it was the eyes as well and it was because of a chemical given off when plastic is burnt, and if you ask me what the chemical is we’re now past my ability to remember off the top of my head.

SM: It doesn’t matter Helen, what matters is that he messed up.

HB: Yes that’s a good way of phrasing it.

SM: So many levels of messing up there, right. There are lots and lots of different levels many different levels of messing up. So even if his intent was good intention is not the only thing that matters, results matter and many of these people who participated in this ceremony have long-term ill effects from breathing this, you know, this burning plastic and so on and so forth. So yeah, he messed up on many different levels.

HB: And he didn’t prepare. It’s not just messing up, we can all mess up but one should expect a certain level of preparation. If somebody, you know, if you’re cooking a meal I think you should check that you’re not including any poison mushrooms.

SM: You have to know what you are doing, right?

HB: You’re checking that the mushrooms you’re about to serve the rest of us…

SO: And checking allergies as well.

HB: You know at least if you’re not putting poison mushrooms in the stew.

AP: Yeah, that would be a good idea.

Now I collected a few questions from my Patreon community. I kind of summarised all the comments that were left under my question of whether they had questions for you guys and probably we have covered some of these topics throughout our conversation. So the difference between cultural appropriation, cultural exchange and syncretism, I think we covered that and explained that it’s quite nuanced and that’s the matter of power imbalance and also the direct contact -Sabina also explained. On the direct contact, there is something that has been going through my mind the idea that you mentioned YouTube a few times and I was thinking that nowadays, for many people, a contact via the internet or via technology is considered a direct contact. I mean, for instance, either the younger generations or people that have a strong affinity with the use of technology. So I would be also interested in knowing what you think about that. Would that constitute a direct contact or…

SO: I mean right now, we are face to face, we are in contact I think it’s that, you know.

AP: You mean like a connection in that way?

SM: We have a relationship, we’re face-to-face. That the four of us already have a relationship with one another and that we’re part of a… well, at least three of us know each other quite well, Suzanne, this is my first-time face to face with you in a virtual context but I know your work, right. So we’re part of the scholarly community together. So we are having a personal exchange and I think that that’s different from if I, I don’t know, download a video for how to make a particular recipe, right? A YouTube video and again if I make the recipe for my own benefit or you know, just to serve to my wife, me and my wife, okay. But if I then, I don’t know, open Sabina’s authentic taco truck and you know try to sell tacos as authentic tacos then it’s already a different thing. Yeah, it’s like it’s a different thing. I mean it’s a really, really good question because I think as we move forward there are more and more communities of practice that only exist on the internet. And I don’t know how I don’t know, at what point you can say that you’re no longer just learning personally from a YouTube video and that you’re part of a community of practice. I mean again I think that that is contextual and that I would have to do a little bit of ethnographic research to figure out what is the relationship between these people. But there is sometimes a relationship there.

HB: The concept of community is definitively changing and I think we have to start thinking of it differently just as I think we have to have a new more plastic notion but I’ve thought that for a long time. I think that the notion, that the only thing that stands as a community is face-to-face regular interactions in a small town is rather limited. I’m certainly willing to include that in the definition of community but it’s not the only one. And I certainly see that with academic communities, with there are people who are regularly part of my life who I only see at meetings sometimes two, three years apart and now on Zoom. The thing that was given to me by Covid. There are some good things by the pandemic, not many but mostly negative, but among the good things is Zoom. Although I did some of this before I think we all have gotten it.

SO: There’s one of the questions that was on your list Angela about consent, number four. And I think this is one where I’ve seen a lot of people maybe make a misjudgment here because just because an individual from a group gives you consent to do something does not mean it’s automatically okay. It may still upset other people of that group and I think that that’s one that I think is quite tricky.

HB: Right. And how many people in that group are upset? Is it just one person? Somebody raised that in the questions, I forget whom but it certainly is legitimate. Does one person being upset enough to negate everybody else not caring or thinking it’s good? Who gets to make that choice in any culture? None of this is, I think, I think what we’re in is mud but nonetheless, it’s mud that we have to walk through to live in the world and I think it is not easy to sort of pass these and as I said, I think there are some that are very easy on one end – clearly cultural appropriation, clearly not. I wrote about it, I thought there was no question. The people who originated it, whose culture it’s part of… can’t get hold of and are not able to get enough of it and it’s leading to over-harvesting, what’s there to question? But you wouldn’t believe how many people were questioning it. So I was actually quite surprised about that. But there’s other, that I would say, well, I don’t know that that’s cultural appropriation, that sort of cultural drift I mean. And the whole thing with pizza, you know, it’s now become ubiquitous in America and some people have claimed that it actually comes from Brooklyn, not from Italy.

AP: That makes me angry, for instance.

SM: But Pizza is not just Italian. It is cognate with a variety of foodways in the circum-Mediterranean and Near East that involve once-leavened bread, that is leavened once and which is formed into a round shape and stuff put on it. So pizza, pita, pide, all of these things are linguistically and also folkloristically cognate with one another.

AP: Yeah but in a way we know pizza now is Italian. It is something that has been developed in Italy.

SO: You’re talking to someone from the Napoli area here.

AP: The Pizza Margarita was created for Queen Margarita, so yeah. Yeah, the way we know, I’ve heard, you know, about the history of pizza as well and yeah it is true there are some cognates but the way we understand pizza now is how it was developed in Italy.

SO: And food always changes when it travels, you know, like California sushi, you know, it’s very different from what you would find in Japan.

HB: And pasta – which comes from China. I mean the Italians did a great job of taking something that Marco Polo brought back and changing it completely. I like, I love noodles both Italians…

SM: Like the couscous and the, you know, conjones and those very small little kinds of pasta that we find in Sardinia in parts of Sicily and parts of the South those are actually cognate with couscous and were there before. But the spaghetti, linguine, tagliatelle, filled pasta, tortellini, agnolotti, and ravioli, all came from China through the Silk Road.

HB: And they’re very different. Cause you have the Chinese and you have the Italian they don’t seem the same at all at this point. So then the tomatoes came from here.

SO: When I was teaching in a school, I once asked the kids to go home and to find out where their food originated from you know if they have peanut butter, you know, where did that come from? The Americas and we found that almost everything in their cupboard came from the Americas, you know, it’s astonishing and I went when I was in India I said, what did you spice your food with before chillis? And they thought it was a crazy question but then, yeah pepper, you know, or something but chillies were not originally part of Indian cuisine.

So yeah, food is one thing I just saw the comment about djembers, you know, someone selling djembers drums in African drums and I think those kinds of craft items and musical instrument items, it always depends and I think djembers, if they are made by craftspeople and they’re African or something and it may be revenue for them, or even if it’s made by non-Africans I think this is where you know it gets into a different kind of conversation perhaps. But I know that some Native Americans sell craft items like, you know.

SM: High art, that’s something that is not cultural appropriation. When you buy an art item or a craft item from a person in that culture who has made it as a work of art or as a work of craftsmanship and they are selling it to the public that’s not cultural appropriation. When you go to a restaurant, an ethnic restaurant that is run by people of that ethnicity and they’re selling food to you in the neighbourhood or from their food trucks, that’s not cultural appropriation. They’re making that choice to market their cultural product to the general public so that’s never cultural appropriation.

AP: And one thing that I saw in the chat is something that I think is quite popular within the wider spirituality, Pagan or Pagan-adjacent kind of communities and that is the idea that… how can I put it? It’s not really an eraser of culture but it is the idea that we are all humans and cultures are just constructs. And in a way they tend to see the whole matter of cultural appropriation as something that focuses on human constructs as opposed to looking at what is the essence, which is something, for instance, there were people talking about the spirit that doesn’t have colour and the spirit doesn’t have the boundaries of countries and there are some people within these communities that tend to adopt that kind of perspective. So what would you say to that?

SM: Well I would say that this kind of perennialism and universalism is one of the features that developed within the context of colonialism and that sometimes justifies the appropriation and the unauthorised use of items from other cultures. At the same time, I think that the discourse of appropriation doesn’t take into account an emic perspective in which we can talk about religious conversion. So while on the one hand, nobody would blink if a person talked about a person of any cultural origin talked about, for example, receiving a message from God, feeling a call from God to join a particular religious movement, a mainstream religious movement. There is more resistance, right, to the idea of a person, say of… I’m going to pick on myself, right, a person of Italian origins hearing the call to become a Shaman, right? There’s a lot more resistance to that because of the unequal power relationship between European cultures and indigenous cultures. The historical relationship, the recent historical relationship of great power inequality. So how do we deal with that? Well again, as Helen said, we are in muddy waters. There isn’t one answer that applies to every context. But in a sense perennialism, universalism can be used to justify cultural appropriation. On the other hand, they don’t take into account the fact that people often feel a very real spiritual call, a spiritual attraction towards a particular practice, towards a particular deity. How do we account for that?

AP: Yeah, there were people in the chat saying what happens is, for instance, I have a set of dreams or I have a calling from a deity that doesn’t belong to my culture. Should I ignore that and, you know, not develop it further because of cultural appropriation?

SM: How can you, how can you ignore that, right? If you feel a call, a spiritual call you shouldn’t ignore that. What I would say is you need to learn more, right? You need to learn more, don’t take it for granted, learn more, and learn as much as you can about the culture. Get in contact with people of that culture, learn something about their current struggles, yeah.

SO: And if there’s a way to give back, you know if it’s a living culture that’s experiencing difficulties.

AP: And as a last question, what would you say about the other side of cultural appropriation? I mean people that tend to say that people should be more culturally pure and only do things that belong to their own culture. What are your thoughts about that, that kind of attitude?

HB: There are no pure cultures, there are no pure races there are no pure cultures. And that’s what I would say. I feel very strongly about that, they don’t exist. And I know that a lot of people and you know when they do genetic tests what we find is there aren’t that people are not pure race and race itself is a social construction.

SM: But even then what I would say is that race is not culture, culture is learned, culture is learned through face-to-face or I guess now we can say also digital exchange but it’s learned through immersion. And so what gives you access to a culture, what gives you the right to practice a culture is not your DNA. I mean I can have my DNA tested and find out that I am 0.1% South Sea Islander, allegedly. according to ancestry.com. Does that give me the right the practice Polynesian culture? Absolutely not. I don’t know anything about Polynesian culture I have never lived in Polynesia I have not… I have only been there as a tourist. I know nothing about this culture, it is not part of my heritage except maybe through DNA and even I questioned whether that’s even correct.

SO: This is a huge, huge issue that’s emerged in the last 20 years or so in Newfoundland. With people claiming descent from the extinct indigenous group, they’re culturally extinct for sure. Obviously, there is some DNA in the population from this group but I agree with Sabina, it’s not the same. You can’t claim that culture, you can claim descent that yes, I have maybe 1/32, whatever, of this particular culture but that’s different from claiming identity as that culture.

SM: And I would say the same things to people who say, for example, oh you must have a Germanic DNA in order to do this cultural practice such as using the runes or using or participating in a particular ritual or being part of a particular group. Culture is not DNA, culture is not race. These things don’t line up and if you’re interested in this and if you get, I don’t know how many of our European viewers are able to see Skip Gates’ show Finding Your Roots but I think many of our North American viewers can see it on PBS. This is Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor of Africana studies, African-American studies and history who invites celebrities on its show and traces their ancestry really through historical records and then sometimes also does DNA analyses. I would invite anybody to watch that show and find out how surprising it is, how surprising people’s DNA ancestry can be and how we all have both oppressors and oppressed, both winners and losers and people from all over the globe literally in our DNA. Most of us are a real mix.

AP: That reminds me of the fact that I made a video on Hoodoo, African-American Hoodoo and I got so many hate comments under that video saying that I was white and you know, I shouldn’t be talking about Hoodoo. Which I thought was interesting because I was presenting scholarship made by African-American women. So I was actually disseminating African-American scholarship they said that since I… there were people saying that since I am white I cannot even talk about it. I was not saying that I was a representative or that people could you know… I was simply explaining what African-American Hoodoo was based on scholarship made by African-American women.

SO: Yeah, it wasn’t your personal experience of it. Yeah, it was based on scholarship. There are obviously sensitivities…

SM: This is cultural appropriation gone wild, right? I mean there is a feeling in some parts of the academy and some parts of popular culture that the only people who have a right to speak about something, to disseminate it, to study it are members of that particular group. And this is a stance with which I disagree. The study of what scholars, let’s say African-American scholars in this case, have written about Hoodoo – that is not cultural appropriation. That they have studied this and published their scholarships so that other people can understand this tradition in its cultural context. And so reading that scholarship, informing ourselves, highlighting their voices, the voices of these black scholars is not cultural appropriation. Sorry, that’s where I draw the line.

HB: And I would draw it also as saying that people, outsiders also need to be able to study it. Otherwise, the only voices heard are insiders and anybody who is sceptical said, well they’re all members so, of course, they say that. And so, if you have no one from the outside, it’s a different perspective. It’s not necessarily a better one but it’s a different one and both things could be respected. And I think there are sometimes people who say no if you’re not of that group you can’t study the group. And that would be a very limited voice.

SO: Yeah, I know there are some things that I’ve participated in and seen that I won’t write about because of sensitivities. But I can write about other things, and so it’s about being aware of, you know, where it’s appropriate and where it isn’t. But sometimes, you know, people as in your case, Angela, that was inappropriate criticism.

AP: Yeah, but I mean I think that’s why that’s why people get so polarised about matters such as cultural appropriation because, on the one hand, you have people that want to defend at all costs, you know, the fact that you should only work with things from your own culture and on the other hand you have people that tend to also accuse anybody who talks about anything outside of their culture. And so it becomes really a polarised debate between people that are in favour of eclecticism and syncretism and they want to implement things from other cultures and maybe they struggle to understand when it is appropriation and when it is not. With other people that just accuse you randomly and wildly and you know, quite intensely of cultural appropriation, you know, any time that you talk about the culture that is not your own.

SO: So were these African-Americans because I can understand that they may feel aggrieved. I think what bothers me sometimes is when people speak on behalf of a group they are offended on behalf of a group that’s something a bit more uncomfortable.

AP: Yeah, so some people were African Americans and others weren’t. So there was a mix. But for instance and that actually gives me the chance to talk about this, I also got comments saying oh there are white four white women talking about cultural appropriation – there is an indigenous person… yeah and there were quite a few, even before the live stream and to that. I have to say that I have invited, I have tried up until two days ago to invite over an indigenous scholar and my invitations were declined. So…

SO: It is an interesting thing because I wrote a short piece about the sweat lodge and I was invited by an indigenous scholar to do that. But I said, oh isn’t there an indigenous scholar who would write about it and they said they don’t want to touch it and I don’t know if that’s the issue here but it’s just availability, you know, maybe it’s just other reasons.

AP: I think that the answer that I got was mostly that they don’t feel they have the expertise to talk about it. And I understand that kind of, that argument is one that I fully respect because you don’t want to be a token that just because you’re an indigenous person – that would be wrong as well. And it seems like, at least to my knowledge, the scholars that have published on cultural appropriation are all white. So maybe that’s because of a problem that, I don’t know.

HB: It’s the problem white people have – we appropriate. I think that may be why it’s our problem, we’re writing about it.

SO: I researched it because I was participating in groups in the UK who were clearly appropriating from Native Americans and I was part of it and I wanted to know if this was right or what people felt about it. And I went to Canada, I also went to Pine Ridge in South Dakota because I wanted to you know meet it head-on and say like right let’s… and it was really good. I did, it was quite, I think it was quite brave for me to do that at that time because I wanted to see. And then I did offend somebody by sharing details about ceremonies, that was an issue, and I did learn from that to be a bit more careful. But it is interesting because I was on Pine Ridge at the exact same time that they had met the Lakota War Against Exploitation of Lakota Spirituality was being drafted while I was there. And yeah, I was participating in all of these ceremonies and so there’s obviously clearly lots of things going on there. And it made me, that’s why I wanted to write about it because I was participating but I wasn’t then taking those ceremonies and selling them or leading them, you know, as a Shaman in Scotland or wherever or the Cotswolds. But yeah it’s… I can’t remember what my point was but this… oh yes, indigenous scholarship on cultural appropriation. It is our problem, you’re right. Yeah.

SM: The only thing that we have to remember is that the indigenous and black scholars in our midst are overburdened with requests to participate and to lead all kinds of initiatives and committees and things like that. And so they are not there at our beck and call to be you know on things that we run whenever we ask. And so this is another thing that we have to be mindful of, their time is their time and they’re already overburdened with requests from majority culture – colleagues.

SO: They have a lot of things that they’re initiating.

SM: That’s right and their initiatives should be respected, right, should have priority over, oh come and do this thing that I want you to do.

AP: Yeah, sure. I mean I wouldn’t want anybody I think…

SM: I’m not criticising you, I’m just, I want to speak to the audience who’s like well you know why didn’t you get person A and person B who is indigenous, who is Black who is Asian? These are some of the very real challenges that we have in the academic community, in wanting diversity and representation but also in having to respect the boundaries that our colleagues set that’s all I’m saying.

AP: Yeah, I totally agree.

SO: Yeah yes I’ve seen like in the American Academy of Religion when I was co-chair of the Indigenous Religious Traditions group we were always looking to try to up the representation but it was a challenge because the scholars didn’t want to come, you know, the indigenous scholars sometimes and that’s their choice. And the initiation had come from us, so they could decline us.

AP: Yeah, I mean everybody can decide whether to accept or decline freely, that’s definitely their right. So do you guys have any final thoughts before we wrap up?

HB: Just thank you for inviting me and all of us this was a very interesting conversation for me, I had a good time.

AP: Yeah thank you, thank you Helen Sabina and Suzanne for accepting to come over and have this discussion.

SO: I enjoyed speaking with all of you as well, Helen, Sabina,

SM: It was very stimulating. It’s a pleasure to finally see you face to face, Suzanne.

SO: And of course, all of us are contributing to the volume Pagan Religions in Five Minutes we’re all going to be contributing to that that Angela and I are editing together.

SO: And of course, all of us are contributing to the volume Pagan Religions in Five Minutes we’re all going to be contributing to that that Angela and I are editing together.

HB: So we’ll all be there together again.

AP: Yes, we are also part of it.

SO: And Angela will have another panel from that, I’m sure.

AP: Oh, yes.

HB: More fun.

AP: Yes, more fun, as I say and you will hear me saying shortly “Academic Fun” which is one of the things that I always say in my videos.

So thank you so much, Helen, Susan and Sabina and for everybody listening you will find their works and contact details in the info box and also the links to the relevant publications and there’s also the link to Helen’s article on white sage in case you’re interested. So you will find all the links and all the information in the info box. Thank you all for being here. So I will do my usual wrap-up now.

So to all of you here, I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Leave me a comment down below, so that I know what you think about it and whether you have further questions. And if you did like this conversation, don’t forget to SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel and activate the notification bell so that you will always know when I going to do a panel, an amazing panel like this or upload a new video and as

always stay tuned for all the Academic Fun.

Bye for now.

HELEN BERGER

Helen A Berger, PhD is an affiliated scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center of Brandeis University. She is a sociologist and one of the earliest scholars to study contemporary Paganism. She has published 4 books as sole or co-author and is the editor of a fifth book. She did one of the earliest large surveys of contemporary Pagans which, the data from which is now online at Harvard University.

PUBLICATIONS

A Community of Witches https://amzn.to/40mwo2p

Voices from the Pagan Census https://amzn.to/3YVC1DC

Witchcraft and Magic in North America https://amzn.to/3TsXJO4

Teenage Witches https://amzn.to/3mUMEZZ

Solitary Pagans https://amzn.to/40dTVmk

Conversation article https://theconversation.com/sage…

SABINA MAGLIOCCO

Sabina Magliocco, Ph.D. is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the interdisciplinary Program in the Study of Religion at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, SSHRC, Fulbright and Hewlett fellowships, and an honorary Fellow of the American Folklore Society, she has published on religion, folklore, foodways, festival and witchcraft in Europe and North America, and is a leading authority on the modern Pagan movement.

She is the author of numerous books and academic articles, including:

The Two Madonnas: the Politics of Festival in a Sardinian Community (1993, 2005) https://www.academia.edu/150895/The_Two_Madonnas_the_Politics_of_Festival_in_a_Sardinian_Community

Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (2004)

https://www.pennpress.org/9780812218794/witching-culture/

Neopagan Sacred Art & Altars: Making Things Whole (2001)

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/N/Neo-Pagan-Sacred-Art-and-Altars

“Reclamation, Appropriation and the Ecstatic Imagination,” in James R. Lewis, ed. Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (2008) https://www.academia.edu/584604/Reclamation_appropriation_and_the_Ecstatic_Imagination_in_Modern_Pagan_Ritual

With film-maker John M. Bishop, she produced the documentary film series “Oss Tales,” on a May Day custom in Cornwall and its reclamation by American Pagans

https://www.media-generation.net/DVD%20PAGES/Oss%20Tales/OSS.htm

Her current research is on nature and animals in the spiritual imagination.

Sabina also trained in the Gardnerian and Reclaiming traditions and is the priestess of an eclectic coven in Vancouver, B.C.

Contact: sabina.magliocco@ubc.ca

Web: https://anth.ubc.ca/profile/sabina-magliocco/

SUZANNE OWEN

Dr Suzanne Owen is an Associate Professor at Leeds Trinity University and researches indigeneity in Newfoundland and British Druidry.

Relevant publications:

Owen, S (2008) The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (London; New York: Continuum [Bloomsbury 2011]).

https://amzn.to/42t14AM

Owen, S. (2020) ‘Is Druidry Indigenous? The Politics of Pagan Indigeneity Discourse.’ In G. Harvey (ed.) Indigenising Movements in Europe (Sheffield: Equinox), pp. 71-83.

https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/indigenising/

Owen, S. (2022) What is a Sweat Lodge? In M. Molly and N. Avalos (eds) Indigenous Religions in Five Minutes. Sheffield: Equinox, pp. 190-192. https://amzn.to/3Ju6HpO

social media handle: @DrSuzanneOwen

Streamed Mar 27, 2023