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agentotterSo I want to preface this by saying that this is merely a verbalization (typalization?) of my thought processes and that I will probably, inevitably, say something that is stupid. Possibly I will make you think I'm a tool or something. That happens sometimes. I hope that you'll bear with me. I don't really have the mental and linguistic tools that are really necessary to talk about some of the places that my mental wanderings take me (like when everybody else is discussing feminism complete with technical terms and the best I can do is, "Yeah, I don't actually know why but that sort of made me feel dirty. And also angry."), and after spending the majority of my life trying very hard not to examine anything about myself, my society, or anything that might cause me stress, I still feel very much like a child in a lot of ways. So if I sound childish, or idiotic, or make you shake your head in that very pitying way and go, "Oh, honey, don't be such an asshat," I sincerely hope that you'll tell me how I'm being an asshat. It isn't your job to educate me. I know that. But I also consider you my friends, and I kind of hope that you'll find it in yourselves to gently take me aside and smack a little sense into me if you feel it's warranted. I have learned from the Race!Fail, but let's face it: I haven't learned enough. I'm not sure it's possible to ever learn enough. Anyway.
Quite awhile back, I participated in a study. Unfortunately, it was not a study of like... telekinetic powers or whether I could shoot laser beams out of my eyes or anything super-cool like that. It was, if I'm understanding the idea correctly, a comparison of gay women with their straight sisters, to examine how community has an impact on different people with similar upbringings. Or... something like that. I don't know. The questions were very broad and general and I'll admit that I didn't find them terribly interesting, but I did find myself absolutely floundering as I tried to answer them. (Also, every time I use the word "floundering" I have to look it up, because I always feel it should be "foundering" instead.) She asked me about what communities I considered myself to be a part of. You wouldn't think that would be a tough question, but it was.
(Incidentally, if you've never participated in this sort of study, I kind of recommend it. I was trying so hard to be completely open and honest for the sake of SCIENCE that it totally felt like talking to a shrink. Actually, I'm pretty sure she was a shrink, but that wasn't why she called me. Poor woman.)
I couldn't really think of any "communities" to which I could claim myself a member. I'm wholeheartedly supportive of the LGBT community, but I am none of those things. (Okay, maybe a tiny bit B. We can't all have sharply defined lines.) The closest I could come was my flist, which -- I can admit it -- sort of made me feel like a mega-geek. At the time I did the interview, I'd recently moved from Montana back to California and the generosity of the Internetz was fresh in my mind -- you wonderful, sweet, beautiful people had very recently sent me surprise money with which I purchased food and socks and other necessary things. I was living in a trailer in literally the middle of a desert wasteland, and all of you were essentially, in a world of utterly rampant insanity, my only link to the rational world outside. I clung to you desperately. But it's hard to call even that a community; I "knew" you, in a fashion, but most of you probably don't know each other. (This is increasingly brought home to me since I've been rooming withmalnpudl, because we constantly assume, for reasons I can't figure out, that we both have the same people on our flists and are involved in the same communities and will, generally speaking, know what the other person is talking about. This is of course deeply untrue.)
Part of my problem in forming community ties is that I've moved around so much, but another part I think is just that people in general don't really do much community-forming anymore, at least not locally, and for so many of us there aren't people with similar backgrounds to connect with locally, or even necessarily people who share our ethnicity. Where early immigrants to the US had entire communities like Little Italy to give them support, today I feel like most of us are just on our own, often without even so much as extended family to fall back on, and little in the way of cultural ties to ground us. (For some reason Americans as a society cling to this idea that when you turn 18 you're supposed to strike out on your own and make your fortune or join the Marines or whatever so that you can return to your hometown only later in life when you're ripped and deadly and need to put down the local crime boss. Or possibly that was a movie I saw with The Rock.) I've made the occasional attempt to connect to my heritage, but even I will admit that I pick and choose when and how I do so. On my father's side -- which is the side of my family that I actually know a little bit, though I may wish I didn't -- the blood is mostly German, and a bit English, and lord only knows what else, but I'm not particularly interested in Germany. At all. The Scottish side intrigues me more -- my great-great-grandfather's middle name was "McClanahan," which may be the best middle name ever -- and the two times I've changed my name (I know, I know) I used names from my Scottish roots, which does help me feel closer to some sort of culture. I'm often torn about it, though, because though I may have Scottish ancestry, I'm not Scottish. I might know more about Scotland than your average American, but I haven't the slightest clue what it means to be Scottish, or how people in Scotland experience their world and connect to their own culture, which traditions they take seriously and which they don't, what their holidays are and where they come from, how their history impacts them and where they're going. I come from them, in a sense, but I'm not one of them, and attempts to come closer to that culture leave me feeling, frankly, like a poser. I enjoy my new Now 100% More Scottish name because it's a connection to where I came from, but there's a big difference between that and trying to assume other parts of Scottish culture... like acquiring a fake accent or running around in ghillies or something. I suppose it would be one thing if I were involved in a pipe band or was well-versed in traditional dance or... something. I don't mean with this ramble to in any way put down the many fine people who participate in highland games or create Scottish-inspired music or anything else; I think those people are kind of awesome, it's just that I'm not them, and I'm perhaps hyper-aware of the tendency that people have, when they're looking for the same things I'm looking for, to cross over a line from history to fantasy and basically just become a sad wannabe. (I knew a kid in school who spoke with actually a pretty good high-brow British accent and insisted that we call him "Ethan [Something], Esquire." None of us knew what "esquire" meant. Unfortunately his twin brother spoke very much like the Americans they were, so the illusion wasn't exactly easily maintained.)
My sister's getting married in a few weeks -- omg road trip! wedding! sister! why isn't it NOW?! -- and as some of you may remember, for my "formalwear" I purchased a kilt. (I look hot in it. Even though it makes my butt look huge. I think possibly it makes my butt look huge because my butt actually is huge. Let's hear it for the ladies with a little junk in the trunk. In case you were wondering, I also have "wonderful birthing hips." My grandmother said that to me once like it was a compliment. I wasn't sure for a moment if she was talking about me or her favorite dairy heifer, but then I remembered that she didn't have any heifers of any kind.) Before I made the purchase, I surfed the internet for some time looking for kilt reviews, and I ended up ordering a rather nice kilt for a rather nice price. But in the process, I came across a message board thread where kilt enthusiasts were discussing whether a woman should be "allowed" to wear a traditional kilt, or if she should have to buy a long tartan skirt. For people who wear a garment for which they are regularly mocked -- and most of them, from what I could tell, Americans and not Scots -- I guess I kind of expected kilt enthusiasts to embrace having anybody wear the kilt. In many ways it's a dying tradition, even among the Scottish. But no: most of the responses to that question were negative: women should not be allowed to wear the kilt, because it goes against tradition. (Right about when I was going to bust a gasket and register just so I could rip these people a new one, I found a response in which someone had done just that. Bless them.) The particular woman in question, by the way, was a military veteran and if I recall correctly, wanted to wear the US Navy tartan. I can't exactly blame her for not wanting to wear the "traditional" tartan skirt, because those things are, IMO, kind of fugly. (I tried a few on once in the vain hope that I'd look hot in one, but that is never going to happen.) The nice thing about the kilt, you must understand, is how all those pleats make it wonderfully swishy. (Just ask John Barrowman. I bet when he puts on his kilt he spends hours in front of the mirror, just endlessly swishing. It's seriously fun, you guys.)
Finding that thread was a little horrifying to me, but it did get me to thinking about how traditions and culture evolve with new generations and an increasingly mobile world. Where exactly do we draw the line between cultural appropriation and cultural growth? When should tradition give way to transformation? How we do define what's culturally offensive when two people from the same segment of the same culture would have opposing views on the matter? (When exactly did American men get the power to determine what is and isn't acceptable for women to do? *froths with rage*) Is it offensive for me to wear a kilt when I'm neither Scottish nor a man? And how does the history of the tradition play into it? For instance, when I tried to look up the history of women's traditional clothing in Scotland -- because you really cannot tell me that hard-working highland women of the pre-Victorian era wore the kind of "kilted skirt" that's socially acceptable today -- I found a number of references about how women wearing essentially a female version of the belted plaid were legislated against and called whores. Should a tradition that's steeped in oppression of women matter to anybody? Or can women take back the kilt -- assuming it was ever theirs to begin with -- and redefine the culture?
(If you'd like a true wtf moment, visit kiltmen and read all about "trouser tyranny" and how white men are totally being oppressed, omg. I agree you should be able to wear kilts on any occasion, you guys, but don't try to make it a human rights issue on the level of genital mutilation or something, okay?)
Anyway, the reason I've been thinking most about this lately is that I'm a tattoo fan. I'm also an artist, so I design my own tattoos, and recently through my work I've landed a $370 credit for tattooing at a parlor in Fort Bragg, so I've been pondering what exactly I want to get. And what I really want is a Haida-style design.
Obviously, I am not an American native. I don't belong to the Haida tribe, or the Tlingit, or any of the other pacific northwestern tribes with whom this style of art is associated. I am a fan of all sorts of tattooing, though, so I'm at least aware enough to realize that for some tribes, the particular style and content of their traditional tattoos is very meaningful. The traditional Maori tattoos, for instance, Ta Moko, are as far as I understand a sort of geneological record: for an outsider to replicate a Maori tattoo on themselves is very offensive, and for good reason. (About.com has a short page about it here; it's not a terribly in-depth analysis, but I really liked the quote they had from a Maori woman about exactly how stupid it is for white people to copy Maori tattoos.) Luckily for people who just really want Maori-style tattoos, Maori artists are reviving a practice of kirituhi, which are basically tattoos (or painted non-permanent body art) that are in the same artistic style but don't carry the same symbolism. (I wouldn't be surprised, however, if kirituhi on white people is still a huge joke to Maori people, and I wouldn't really blame them for laughing.)
To me, tattoos are a very personal thing. Some people like to get them and show them off, and that's great; I don't go to any particular effort to hide mine, but I don't generally place tattoos to make them easier to flaunt or anything. The only art I'm willing to literally carve into my body is art that's deeply and personally meaningful. What I'd really like to design is a Haida-style horse, and while I feel perfectly within my rights to decorate my body in any way I like, I'm also very aware that doing what I like could result in epic douchebaggery. (Witness probably millions of American youth sporting tattoos of Asian-language symbols which not only do they not know how to read, but the symbols probably don't mean what they think they mean, either. It is widely acknowledged that they're total douchebags. There's even spoken word poetry about it.) I'd be designing my own art rather than copying something by a native artist -- horses aren't really as much a part of the history of coastal tribes like they became for people on the Plains; coastal people for obvious reasons generally used symbols like whales, salmon, bears, wolves and other critters indigenous to these areas, and if there's Haida-style horse artwork in existence I haven't found it -- so it would be a truly unique piece. It would also be a marriage of many of the things that are most important in my life: this style of art is strongly identified as symbolic of the pacific northwest and western Canada, which to me is always going to be home (er, the northwest I mean, not Canada, though I'd love it if that were home), and obviously horses are a major influence in my life, and the clean artistic style present in this art pretty much just turns my crank. A lot. Part of the purpose of Haida artwork, which was tattooed on but also was used in totem poles, was a sort of family crest and family history all rolled into one, and so I feel it would be kind of an appropriate way to mark down my own history, and I like that it's a style of Indian art since mustangs are sort of the Indian breed of horse and my horse in particular came from a reservation, though not a northwestern one. (There's a pretty good summary of the symbolism of northwest coastal art here, though I can't really speak to how reliable it is. My feeling is that you'd kind of need somebody inside the culture to explain it to you to truly begin to understand a thing's significance, but it's not like we're owed explanations, either.)
Art is always evolving, and I think artists are deeply influenced by styles from around the world. I've been captivated by everything from traditional Japanese brushwork to anime and caricature to corporate identity design. And many artists, by virtue of their professions and their own growth, really have to be versatile, especially if you're doing something like logo illustration, where you're designing work that may need to be representative of an area or people or culture that isn't anything to do with you. But where do we draw the line between "influenced" and "stolen"? Between assimilation and colonialism? This is a great piece of Haida-style art created by a video game fan, for instance, and I think it's really beautiful, but is it offensive? If this had been created for a film -- like faux Egyptian art created to give the appearance of Stargate aliens in ancient Egypt, for instance -- would it be more acceptable? Nobody seems to mind much when artists imitate the style of ancient heiroglyphs and petroglyphs, for instance, even when they're imitated very poorly... are we just far enough removed from those ancestors, and their societies are dead enough, that we don't mind the imitation?
So, no matter how much I ponder it, I just can't come up with an answer that satisfies me. (Or maybe I should say that this is one of the many occasions in which I know the answer, but don't trust myself to have come up with the right one. Because when you're me, second-guessing is an Olympic sport.) Much as I'd like to create that piece of art, I don't want to be that person who appropriates some cultural symbol I don't understand. The trouble is, I can't think of any other style of art that would be acceptable to me, either. With most of my ancestors coming from various areas of the British Isles, it would seem a safe bet to use a celtic knotwork horse, or a medieval heraldic horse, but those I don't really feel are terribly reflective of who I actually am or where I come from or where I call home. And in much the same way, the use of those symbols -- which are traditionally European or specifically English or Irish or whatever they may be -- also feels like a form of appropriation. I'm not Scottish. I'm not English. I'm American. (And okay, admittedly, I'd rather be Canadian.) While I respect those artistic traditions, I also feel like using, for instance, a celtic knot horse would say something about me that isn't true. (I'll admit it: I'm prejudiced against knotwork tattoos. It's an awesome style of art, but I have bad associations with poser spiritualists of the wiccan/pagan/made-up-mysticism variety. Sorry. I'm not talking about anybody here with a knotwork fetish, they're very pretty,but most of the people I've known who've had them were more devoted to Worlds of Warcraft than they were to ) So what does that leave me with? What is art that is uniquely North American, but not stolen from native tribes? Cheesy advertising art from the 1950s? Norman Rockwell? Photorealism? The sort of early American woodcut that you'll find all over free clipart sites but which is particularly creative in its portrayal of equine anatomy? I DON'T KNOW.
(Incidentally, my other tattoo idea is this Juno I made. It's based on the little horse figurine from The Black Stallion movie, and I like it, but I'm afraid that maybe it's awful and looks like a My Little Pony and the people I've shown it to so far have just been too polite to say so. Also, that I will one day decide it is too cutesy, and you can't really have something permanently engraved in your flesh that you aren't sure about.)
I guess my point is, I don't feel like I personally have a culture or community to draw artistic inspiration from, to find comfort or identity in, and as a result I feel sort of... bereft, I guess. Isolated. Sort of an identity disorder for... people who make up identity disorders. I DON'T KNOW, like I said. Jesus, my head hurts now.
Part of what I love about our new global culture is that those of us who don't necessarily fit in with the culture or community into which we were born or raised or assimilated can acquire traits which make us feel more ourselves, or which simply reflect our life experience: in much the same way that an expatriate might begin to take on the local accent in his new home, we bring pieces of our travels and our friends and our experiences into ourselves. This is very true of fandom, where it seems to me that not just each fandom but each particular segment or clique in a particular fandom has its own vocabulary of acronyms and references and whatnot, to an extent where I don't know what the fuck my flist is even talking about half the time. (I love you all, but seriously. I really, really don't know what you're talking about. You'd laugh if I told you how long it took for it to occur to me what "YMMV" means, much less the endless combinations of acronyms for actors' names, episode titles, pairings, kinks... I can't even remember my own phone number half the time, much less what all those things mean. It's a little sad how I'm prematurely turning into a crochety old -- HEY! YOU KIDS! GET OFF MY LAWN!) The downside to that I suppose is a dilution of culture, but sometimes I think all cultures could use a little dilution, a few new ideas, some new blood, some others who will go out into the rest of the world and take that culture with them. It doesn't mean we get to cherry-pick the best of what everyone else has to offer and keep it for ourselves, but that maybe we can all learn to appreciate without appropriating. Or maybe it just means that I won't be the only one caught in limbo, as we all gradually lose all the little pieces of what we used to be.
Quite awhile back, I participated in a study. Unfortunately, it was not a study of like... telekinetic powers or whether I could shoot laser beams out of my eyes or anything super-cool like that. It was, if I'm understanding the idea correctly, a comparison of gay women with their straight sisters, to examine how community has an impact on different people with similar upbringings. Or... something like that. I don't know. The questions were very broad and general and I'll admit that I didn't find them terribly interesting, but I did find myself absolutely floundering as I tried to answer them. (Also, every time I use the word "floundering" I have to look it up, because I always feel it should be "foundering" instead.) She asked me about what communities I considered myself to be a part of. You wouldn't think that would be a tough question, but it was.
(Incidentally, if you've never participated in this sort of study, I kind of recommend it. I was trying so hard to be completely open and honest for the sake of SCIENCE that it totally felt like talking to a shrink. Actually, I'm pretty sure she was a shrink, but that wasn't why she called me. Poor woman.)
I couldn't really think of any "communities" to which I could claim myself a member. I'm wholeheartedly supportive of the LGBT community, but I am none of those things. (Okay, maybe a tiny bit B. We can't all have sharply defined lines.) The closest I could come was my flist, which -- I can admit it -- sort of made me feel like a mega-geek. At the time I did the interview, I'd recently moved from Montana back to California and the generosity of the Internetz was fresh in my mind -- you wonderful, sweet, beautiful people had very recently sent me surprise money with which I purchased food and socks and other necessary things. I was living in a trailer in literally the middle of a desert wasteland, and all of you were essentially, in a world of utterly rampant insanity, my only link to the rational world outside. I clung to you desperately. But it's hard to call even that a community; I "knew" you, in a fashion, but most of you probably don't know each other. (This is increasingly brought home to me since I've been rooming with
malnpudl, because we constantly assume, for reasons I can't figure out, that we both have the same people on our flists and are involved in the same communities and will, generally speaking, know what the other person is talking about. This is of course deeply untrue.)Part of my problem in forming community ties is that I've moved around so much, but another part I think is just that people in general don't really do much community-forming anymore, at least not locally, and for so many of us there aren't people with similar backgrounds to connect with locally, or even necessarily people who share our ethnicity. Where early immigrants to the US had entire communities like Little Italy to give them support, today I feel like most of us are just on our own, often without even so much as extended family to fall back on, and little in the way of cultural ties to ground us. (For some reason Americans as a society cling to this idea that when you turn 18 you're supposed to strike out on your own and make your fortune or join the Marines or whatever so that you can return to your hometown only later in life when you're ripped and deadly and need to put down the local crime boss. Or possibly that was a movie I saw with The Rock.) I've made the occasional attempt to connect to my heritage, but even I will admit that I pick and choose when and how I do so. On my father's side -- which is the side of my family that I actually know a little bit, though I may wish I didn't -- the blood is mostly German, and a bit English, and lord only knows what else, but I'm not particularly interested in Germany. At all. The Scottish side intrigues me more -- my great-great-grandfather's middle name was "McClanahan," which may be the best middle name ever -- and the two times I've changed my name (I know, I know) I used names from my Scottish roots, which does help me feel closer to some sort of culture. I'm often torn about it, though, because though I may have Scottish ancestry, I'm not Scottish. I might know more about Scotland than your average American, but I haven't the slightest clue what it means to be Scottish, or how people in Scotland experience their world and connect to their own culture, which traditions they take seriously and which they don't, what their holidays are and where they come from, how their history impacts them and where they're going. I come from them, in a sense, but I'm not one of them, and attempts to come closer to that culture leave me feeling, frankly, like a poser. I enjoy my new Now 100% More Scottish name because it's a connection to where I came from, but there's a big difference between that and trying to assume other parts of Scottish culture... like acquiring a fake accent or running around in ghillies or something. I suppose it would be one thing if I were involved in a pipe band or was well-versed in traditional dance or... something. I don't mean with this ramble to in any way put down the many fine people who participate in highland games or create Scottish-inspired music or anything else; I think those people are kind of awesome, it's just that I'm not them, and I'm perhaps hyper-aware of the tendency that people have, when they're looking for the same things I'm looking for, to cross over a line from history to fantasy and basically just become a sad wannabe. (I knew a kid in school who spoke with actually a pretty good high-brow British accent and insisted that we call him "Ethan [Something], Esquire." None of us knew what "esquire" meant. Unfortunately his twin brother spoke very much like the Americans they were, so the illusion wasn't exactly easily maintained.)
My sister's getting married in a few weeks -- omg road trip! wedding! sister! why isn't it NOW?! -- and as some of you may remember, for my "formalwear" I purchased a kilt. (I look hot in it. Even though it makes my butt look huge. I think possibly it makes my butt look huge because my butt actually is huge. Let's hear it for the ladies with a little junk in the trunk. In case you were wondering, I also have "wonderful birthing hips." My grandmother said that to me once like it was a compliment. I wasn't sure for a moment if she was talking about me or her favorite dairy heifer, but then I remembered that she didn't have any heifers of any kind.) Before I made the purchase, I surfed the internet for some time looking for kilt reviews, and I ended up ordering a rather nice kilt for a rather nice price. But in the process, I came across a message board thread where kilt enthusiasts were discussing whether a woman should be "allowed" to wear a traditional kilt, or if she should have to buy a long tartan skirt. For people who wear a garment for which they are regularly mocked -- and most of them, from what I could tell, Americans and not Scots -- I guess I kind of expected kilt enthusiasts to embrace having anybody wear the kilt. In many ways it's a dying tradition, even among the Scottish. But no: most of the responses to that question were negative: women should not be allowed to wear the kilt, because it goes against tradition. (Right about when I was going to bust a gasket and register just so I could rip these people a new one, I found a response in which someone had done just that. Bless them.) The particular woman in question, by the way, was a military veteran and if I recall correctly, wanted to wear the US Navy tartan. I can't exactly blame her for not wanting to wear the "traditional" tartan skirt, because those things are, IMO, kind of fugly. (I tried a few on once in the vain hope that I'd look hot in one, but that is never going to happen.) The nice thing about the kilt, you must understand, is how all those pleats make it wonderfully swishy. (Just ask John Barrowman. I bet when he puts on his kilt he spends hours in front of the mirror, just endlessly swishing. It's seriously fun, you guys.)
Finding that thread was a little horrifying to me, but it did get me to thinking about how traditions and culture evolve with new generations and an increasingly mobile world. Where exactly do we draw the line between cultural appropriation and cultural growth? When should tradition give way to transformation? How we do define what's culturally offensive when two people from the same segment of the same culture would have opposing views on the matter? (When exactly did American men get the power to determine what is and isn't acceptable for women to do? *froths with rage*) Is it offensive for me to wear a kilt when I'm neither Scottish nor a man? And how does the history of the tradition play into it? For instance, when I tried to look up the history of women's traditional clothing in Scotland -- because you really cannot tell me that hard-working highland women of the pre-Victorian era wore the kind of "kilted skirt" that's socially acceptable today -- I found a number of references about how women wearing essentially a female version of the belted plaid were legislated against and called whores. Should a tradition that's steeped in oppression of women matter to anybody? Or can women take back the kilt -- assuming it was ever theirs to begin with -- and redefine the culture?
(If you'd like a true wtf moment, visit kiltmen and read all about "trouser tyranny" and how white men are totally being oppressed, omg. I agree you should be able to wear kilts on any occasion, you guys, but don't try to make it a human rights issue on the level of genital mutilation or something, okay?)
Anyway, the reason I've been thinking most about this lately is that I'm a tattoo fan. I'm also an artist, so I design my own tattoos, and recently through my work I've landed a $370 credit for tattooing at a parlor in Fort Bragg, so I've been pondering what exactly I want to get. And what I really want is a Haida-style design.
Obviously, I am not an American native. I don't belong to the Haida tribe, or the Tlingit, or any of the other pacific northwestern tribes with whom this style of art is associated. I am a fan of all sorts of tattooing, though, so I'm at least aware enough to realize that for some tribes, the particular style and content of their traditional tattoos is very meaningful. The traditional Maori tattoos, for instance, Ta Moko, are as far as I understand a sort of geneological record: for an outsider to replicate a Maori tattoo on themselves is very offensive, and for good reason. (About.com has a short page about it here; it's not a terribly in-depth analysis, but I really liked the quote they had from a Maori woman about exactly how stupid it is for white people to copy Maori tattoos.) Luckily for people who just really want Maori-style tattoos, Maori artists are reviving a practice of kirituhi, which are basically tattoos (or painted non-permanent body art) that are in the same artistic style but don't carry the same symbolism. (I wouldn't be surprised, however, if kirituhi on white people is still a huge joke to Maori people, and I wouldn't really blame them for laughing.)
To me, tattoos are a very personal thing. Some people like to get them and show them off, and that's great; I don't go to any particular effort to hide mine, but I don't generally place tattoos to make them easier to flaunt or anything. The only art I'm willing to literally carve into my body is art that's deeply and personally meaningful. What I'd really like to design is a Haida-style horse, and while I feel perfectly within my rights to decorate my body in any way I like, I'm also very aware that doing what I like could result in epic douchebaggery. (Witness probably millions of American youth sporting tattoos of Asian-language symbols which not only do they not know how to read, but the symbols probably don't mean what they think they mean, either. It is widely acknowledged that they're total douchebags. There's even spoken word poetry about it.) I'd be designing my own art rather than copying something by a native artist -- horses aren't really as much a part of the history of coastal tribes like they became for people on the Plains; coastal people for obvious reasons generally used symbols like whales, salmon, bears, wolves and other critters indigenous to these areas, and if there's Haida-style horse artwork in existence I haven't found it -- so it would be a truly unique piece. It would also be a marriage of many of the things that are most important in my life: this style of art is strongly identified as symbolic of the pacific northwest and western Canada, which to me is always going to be home (er, the northwest I mean, not Canada, though I'd love it if that were home), and obviously horses are a major influence in my life, and the clean artistic style present in this art pretty much just turns my crank. A lot. Part of the purpose of Haida artwork, which was tattooed on but also was used in totem poles, was a sort of family crest and family history all rolled into one, and so I feel it would be kind of an appropriate way to mark down my own history, and I like that it's a style of Indian art since mustangs are sort of the Indian breed of horse and my horse in particular came from a reservation, though not a northwestern one. (There's a pretty good summary of the symbolism of northwest coastal art here, though I can't really speak to how reliable it is. My feeling is that you'd kind of need somebody inside the culture to explain it to you to truly begin to understand a thing's significance, but it's not like we're owed explanations, either.)
Art is always evolving, and I think artists are deeply influenced by styles from around the world. I've been captivated by everything from traditional Japanese brushwork to anime and caricature to corporate identity design. And many artists, by virtue of their professions and their own growth, really have to be versatile, especially if you're doing something like logo illustration, where you're designing work that may need to be representative of an area or people or culture that isn't anything to do with you. But where do we draw the line between "influenced" and "stolen"? Between assimilation and colonialism? This is a great piece of Haida-style art created by a video game fan, for instance, and I think it's really beautiful, but is it offensive? If this had been created for a film -- like faux Egyptian art created to give the appearance of Stargate aliens in ancient Egypt, for instance -- would it be more acceptable? Nobody seems to mind much when artists imitate the style of ancient heiroglyphs and petroglyphs, for instance, even when they're imitated very poorly... are we just far enough removed from those ancestors, and their societies are dead enough, that we don't mind the imitation?
So, no matter how much I ponder it, I just can't come up with an answer that satisfies me. (Or maybe I should say that this is one of the many occasions in which I know the answer, but don't trust myself to have come up with the right one. Because when you're me, second-guessing is an Olympic sport.) Much as I'd like to create that piece of art, I don't want to be that person who appropriates some cultural symbol I don't understand. The trouble is, I can't think of any other style of art that would be acceptable to me, either. With most of my ancestors coming from various areas of the British Isles, it would seem a safe bet to use a celtic knotwork horse, or a medieval heraldic horse, but those I don't really feel are terribly reflective of who I actually am or where I come from or where I call home. And in much the same way, the use of those symbols -- which are traditionally European or specifically English or Irish or whatever they may be -- also feels like a form of appropriation. I'm not Scottish. I'm not English. I'm American. (And okay, admittedly, I'd rather be Canadian.) While I respect those artistic traditions, I also feel like using, for instance, a celtic knot horse would say something about me that isn't true. (I'll admit it: I'm prejudiced against knotwork tattoos. It's an awesome style of art, but I have bad associations with poser spiritualists of the wiccan/pagan/made-up-mysticism variety. Sorry. I'm not talking about anybody here with a knotwork fetish, they're very pretty,but most of the people I've known who've had them were more devoted to Worlds of Warcraft than they were to ) So what does that leave me with? What is art that is uniquely North American, but not stolen from native tribes? Cheesy advertising art from the 1950s? Norman Rockwell? Photorealism? The sort of early American woodcut that you'll find all over free clipart sites but which is particularly creative in its portrayal of equine anatomy? I DON'T KNOW.
(Incidentally, my other tattoo idea is this Juno I made. It's based on the little horse figurine from The Black Stallion movie, and I like it, but I'm afraid that maybe it's awful and looks like a My Little Pony and the people I've shown it to so far have just been too polite to say so. Also, that I will one day decide it is too cutesy, and you can't really have something permanently engraved in your flesh that you aren't sure about.)
I guess my point is, I don't feel like I personally have a culture or community to draw artistic inspiration from, to find comfort or identity in, and as a result I feel sort of... bereft, I guess. Isolated. Sort of an identity disorder for... people who make up identity disorders. I DON'T KNOW, like I said. Jesus, my head hurts now.
Part of what I love about our new global culture is that those of us who don't necessarily fit in with the culture or community into which we were born or raised or assimilated can acquire traits which make us feel more ourselves, or which simply reflect our life experience: in much the same way that an expatriate might begin to take on the local accent in his new home, we bring pieces of our travels and our friends and our experiences into ourselves. This is very true of fandom, where it seems to me that not just each fandom but each particular segment or clique in a particular fandom has its own vocabulary of acronyms and references and whatnot, to an extent where I don't know what the fuck my flist is even talking about half the time. (I love you all, but seriously. I really, really don't know what you're talking about. You'd laugh if I told you how long it took for it to occur to me what "YMMV" means, much less the endless combinations of acronyms for actors' names, episode titles, pairings, kinks... I can't even remember my own phone number half the time, much less what all those things mean. It's a little sad how I'm prematurely turning into a crochety old -- HEY! YOU KIDS! GET OFF MY LAWN!) The downside to that I suppose is a dilution of culture, but sometimes I think all cultures could use a little dilution, a few new ideas, some new blood, some others who will go out into the rest of the world and take that culture with them. It doesn't mean we get to cherry-pick the best of what everyone else has to offer and keep it for ourselves, but that maybe we can all learn to appreciate without appropriating. Or maybe it just means that I won't be the only one caught in limbo, as we all gradually lose all the little pieces of what we used to be.
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Date: 2009-06-18 12:11 pm (UTC)thank you for commenting about that; i'm glad i got to read it....