Notes on Cultural Appropriation & Traditional Skills
All our ancestors, no matter where they originated, created intimate relationships with their home places, including place-based skill traditions. In the modern world, those skills and relationships are in decline.
Groundwork’s folk school is a space to share and learn traditional non-industrial skills as a way to…
- Preserve and expand ancestral and traditional skills, helping humanity prepare for a less industrial future.
- Build relationships with place and foster the emergence of more localized culture.
- Explore values and ways of life the oppose capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism.
- Open dialogue between communities.
- Explore the role of traditional skills in modernity, and to confront together how attitudes towards different lifestyles are used as tools for violence and displacement.
We recognize that learning ancestral and traditional skills can appropriate indigenous cultures. People with privilege can freely learn skills that were violently suppressed during genocide and assimilation processes. We believe that it’s possible to explore, study, and practice ancestral and traditional skills in respectful ways. We strive to…
- Limit exoticism by placing all skills on an equal standing. Knitting and spinning are traditional skills just as tanning buckskin is a traditional skill. We strive to make available skills that people want to teach and learn.
- Approach the sharing of traditional skills not as a way to return to an exoticized past, but as a tool to explore and build relationships with the places where we live and between communities who share similar values.
- Recognize the line between inspiration and appropriation. While cultural cross-pollination and exchange has always happened, it’s important to acknowledge that in a world where some cultures marginalize others, members of dominant cultures taking pieces of marginalized culture comes with complex power dynamics. Professor Minh-Ha T. Pham thinks that “racial plagiarism” is a better phrase to describe this process. While there’s no distinct line between inspiration and appropriation, below are some of our general positions. For a more thorough exploration, we recommend this article by Ligaya Mishan.
| Inspiration (If Done Respectfully) | Appropriation |
|---|---|
| Learning techniques & processes | Using culturally significant symbols |
| Using traditional materials to create never-before-seen designs | Copying traditional designs |
| Acknowledges source material | Does not acknowledge source material or claims to be original |
| Sees craftsmanship as fluid, creatively exploring new forms | Sees craftsmanship as static, seeking purity |
| Can include cultural values with skills like practices of reciprocity and gratitude for materials | Can include copied cultural practices, like replicating ceremonies |
| Uses translated language as a way to engage with underlying meaning e.g. translating and adapting prayer with context and acknowledging its source | Uses untranslated language as a way to gain status by proximity to something exotic e.g. reciting a prayer in a language you have no relation to |
| Lateral exchange between groups of equal status in which both sides emerge better off | One group with power profits from another group’s knowledge and tradition |
| Recognizing and respecting boundaries established by marginalized groups | People with privilege claiming the world should be boundaryless |
| Recognizing that people with privilege may interact freely with art & style while ignoring background, history, or resulting marginalization (e.g. a white person wearing dreadlocks may not face increased police surveillance) | Claims that art and style are separate from history, so anything is fair game |
A Note On Terminology
In the past decades, a traditional skills “scene” has emerged in the United States centered around skill share gatherings. It’s important to acknowledge that while there are many different groups who engage with the preservation, practice, evolution, and teaching of traditional and ancestral skills, we also see the predominately white nature of the spaces where many of these skills are taught. When traditional skills gatherings first gained popularity, they were called “primitive skills gatherings.” One friend described the history of the skills gatherings as “Native American cosplay”. That’s not something honorable. We see that language choice is important when engaging with stories and practices from a complex and violence-filed past. “Primitive skills” is easily used as an exoticizing term that at once devalues the skills and their practitioners, exoticizes the practitioners, and also distances contemporary people from the historic practitioners. These practices of separation are, as Bruno Latour writes, the foundations of the destructive mindsets of modernity.
Currently, Groundwork is experimenting with three separate terms to refer to these skills: non-industrial skills, traditional skills, and ancestral skills. We know that “ancestral skills” can feel a bit appropriative and exoticizing, easily co-opted to refer to an undefined idyllic past that gives rise to the myth of the wise “noble savage”. We use the word to refer to skills that ancestors of all people practiced and depended on, and our white teachers primarily study and teach the traditions of their European ancestors. “Ancestral skills” is a term recognized by people searching for these classes, so we are using it for now.
In general, we are teaching classes for creative skills that are:
- Done primarily by hand with simple, inexpensive tools.
- Not easily scaled up.
- Focused on locally-available materials.
- Use minimal industrial inputs.
Based on these four criteria, “traditional non-industrial skills” seems to be the most accurate name, but it’s a little cumbersome. We’ll continue to be mindful of our language and adapt as the conversation evolves.