• DayOfDoom [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      Appropriation is a value-neutral concept. And also not rooted in exploitation per se. There’s an erroneous conflation here between colonialist appropriation which does material harm to the people being colonized as well as possibly being a component to the ideology of colonialism (like Israel taking Palestinian culture into itself to use as a justification of their superiority to them) which marxism will sometimes talk about, versus neutral appropriation like white people using synthetic peyote or American teenagers making vaporwave from '80s J-Pop.

      It’s not inherently disrespectful to use things without chaining ourselves to the original contexts they were used in. It can sometimes be harmful and/or disrespectful but idpol liberals literally only care about turning anti-imperialism and morality into arbitrary dinner etiquette. So they just call it all cultural appropriation and tell people not to do arbitrary things.

      • Kynuck97 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        I appreciate the response - I understand what you are saying. I do want to clarify that I’m not trying to argue from an arbitrary moral/idpol perspective. In the article in the linked thread, they interviewed a person who is a part of the Navajo nation, who argues explicitly against the consumption of Mescaline for outsiders, synthetic or not.

        “How would Christians feel if Jesus Christ was cloned?” asked Justin Jones, a Diné peyote practitioner and legal counsel for the Native American church of North America, a non-profit organization that advocates for more than 300,000 members. “And while the real Jesus is protected, people could do whatever they wanted to the clone.”

        Creating synthetic mescaline in a lab or growing peyote in a greenhouse is a violation of natural law, and interrupts the unique symbiotic relationship with the plant. “What western scientists call mescaline is for us the essence of the medicine,” said Jones. “It is the soul of it and what makes it holy.”

        If I am understanding you correctly - that would shift this from being a purely value-neutral form of appropriation, to being actively harmful and disrespectful.

        • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          11 months ago

          Does it? I kinda feel like you’re approaching the idea of listening to native voices uncritically. Protecting their practices and ability to practice their culture is important, but the idea that their religious beliefs about nonpractitioners should be enforced isn’t acceptable, just like it isn’t from any other religion.
          Certainly we should be protecting peyote, returning the lands it grows on to the tribes/NAC, and stopping others from harvesting it, but there isn’t a justification for stopping people from using mescaline that was created sythetically or grown from other cultivated species. The theft and oppression that stops them from practicing their religion is harmful, but just using mescaline derived from other sources doesn’t affect them or their ability to practice.