Aloha,
D E wrote:
> although I should add that when I was in California last year I went
> on a wine tour, part of which was a quiz about the links between wine
> and US history (not remotely academic, then) and the outnumbered Brits
> beat the Americans hands down (and that was n=1)
Since I grew up in the little city that sometimes likes to consider itself
"the gateway to the wine country"--Vallejo, CA, located at the confluence
of the Napa River with San Pablo Bay--let me say a little about the
Native American peoples and tribelets there. About how I got to know
them and their cultures. Or did not.
Thanks to European immigration, missionization, small scale warfare,
the introduction of diseases like smallpox, and a reservation system, more
or less no local Native Americans were to be found in their ancestral
homelands
when I was growing up. Their major representation was a large bronze
statue of Chief Solano, for whom the California county was named.
My youthful outlook on Native Americans was shaped mostly by
popular culture--TV, movies, fiction--and by organizations like the
Boy Scouts. I mostly imagined Native Americans as Plains or Apache
types.
>
> dragging this back towards academic areas, I am very interested in the
> way that various things have been appropriated, especially by UK
> pagans, the dream catcher being a prime example; and there is a notion
> of the exotic being *automatically* magical (Edward Said's
> Orientalism, being expanded to include anything that is not European,
> perhaps?) I'd be interested in people's thoughts on that
>
Borrowing, poaching, expropriating Native American cultures is a
big concern among American pagans. Probably among Pagans in general.
And certainly among some Native American folks.
Cultures rarely present themselves to us with unambiguous boundaries,
so that we can tell what elements come from where or whose claim of
proprietorship is legitimate. We all encounter a mix in process.
Our popular occulture does suggest that other, exotic cultures offer
a treasure trove of hidden lore and secret powers. Our popular consumer
culture commercializes and markets salable items based on this suggestion.
So I end up sometimes wondering how a dream catcher made in Taiwan
or China, based on an Ojibwa pattern, sold in a gift store in California or
the U.K., has much at all to do with any culture but the global mercantile
culture.
I'd like to say that the dream catcher is Native American. Certainly it
was once. But when the plan, the pattern, moved from immediate local use
to broader markets and additional uses, the blurry boundaries got even
blurrier.
Coming into popular occulture these days, artifacts like dream catchers
are pre-existents without specific cultural origins, at least on the
store shelves.
Folks probably use them or not based on outlooks and values already
established, and on what their peer group is doing.
Just some thoughts.
Musing I Can't Decide About Those Cultural Boundaries Yet!?! Rose,
Pitch
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