“How many layers of soulless, commodified and forced cultural and religious amalgamation are you on?”
“idk, like maybe 3 or 4?”
“You are like a little baby. Watch this”
Why can not these people just start a religion, so i can hate it and i dont need to describe them every time i hatepost about them?
shit man a dream catcher and a yin yang, we’re RUINING THE AMERINDIANS AND ASIANS
When what you’re fighting for is so ridiculous you talk shit about a cheap novelty gift most likely made in China.
Inb4 she blocks you.
So this post has been tagged as “#sjw” by the usual suspects, showing once more that this site continues to be tone deaf across the entire political spectrum.
Perhaps the strangest, but not uncharacteristic response to this post was the unwarranted speculation that I’m somehow fighting for anything. My post contained no calls to action or even the suggestion of politics. I’m not part of the cultural appropriation hysterics crowd, and consistent with that I’m not calling for anything to be forbidden or sanctioned or to be racially or culturally policed. Perhaps we can focus on the things I wrote in the fairly short post, which shouldn’t be a challenge to read and digest, or so one would assume.
I pointed out what I called “soulless, commodified and forced cultural and religious amalgamation“. Each of those words is important, more so than buzzwords that I didn’t use. The example should serve to illustrate all of those.
First of all, that it’s a cheap novelty gift item is part of the issue. Both the tajitu symbol (often known as “a yin yang” among people who have a surface level of engagement and interest in Chinese culture) and the dreamcatcher are meaningful items that derive their meaning from associated spiritual beliefs. The tajitu illustrates the (primarily) Daoist concept of metaphysics, the idea that all apparent dualities emerge from one monadic principle. Dreamcatchers are tied to Ojibwe religion and are a concrete manifestation of a protective deity (the Spider Woman).
You might notice that we’re not talking about the proverbial sausage added to mapo dofu, the strawman employed to imply that the opponent thinks culture will be destroyed if it’s combined with something foreign. Not a profane item like food or casua clothes or technology, each of these items has a specific, self-contained meaning, and each of them is tied to the spiritual beliefs of a specific group. Fact aside that these hence sacred and meaningful objects have been turned into “cheap novelty gifts” (hence, commodified), by combining them for aesthetics they lose their meaning. How is this object still a Daoist religious item? How is it still an Ojibwe cultural item? The only meaning and message this item conveys now is that of a commodified aesthetical item that is mainly meant to signal its owners attachment to non-western (and this is why whether the item carries Chinese or Ojibwe cultural connotation is moot) New Age liberal conceptions of harmonic and enlightened Others. Hence, it’s soulless - the two original items have lost their meaning, their potential for people to meaningfully relate to them, and have become a product that has a limited, commodified, self-masturbatory message.
Finally, this item is a forced amalgamate because it is not the result of genuine, authentic cultural innovation and interplay and bricolage. You have been spending too much time arguing with fourteen year olds socialized in a hysterical, authoritarian environment, who might have made you believe that the only opposition to cultural syncreticism and innovation are leftist kids who want ethnocultural safe spaces. This is likely why you did not address the points in my post and went straight for the “SJW” arguments you brought with you.
Consequently, you are uncritical about the fact that his is indeed a wholesale enterprise that is marketing these products because they know that in the US and elsewhere, enough green tea-drinking “spiritual but not religious” sufferers of colonial cringe desperate for an identity or two will buy the idea of a mystical, enlightened Other that is vaguely defined (Chinese? Indian? Native American? all the same, right?) but if at all then from western ideas of progressivism.
In closing I would like to stress that if I did not suggest this should be banned or forbidden or at all acted against, I do very explicitly say that this kind of uncritical and callous display of neutered, meaning-bereft symbols applies to the lowest common denominator and is helpful in marking individuals who you might otherwise have wasted time on socializing with. It is in this spirit that I would like to share the link to the item in question as well as the store (in Delhi, India) so that you can buy those, and maybe epically spite some top kek SJWs along the way.
Parting words: I’m a dude, but you do you when it comes to your likely logicd/mrcappadocian line of thought that someone who raises a point agsint the commodification of culture, be it from the left or the right, can only possibly a woman.
The only meaning and message this item conveys now is that of a commodified aesthetical item that is mainly meant to signal its owners attachment to non-western (and this is why whether the item carries Chinese or Ojibwe cultural connotation is moot) New Age liberal conceptions of harmonic and enlightened Others.
Sums it up well
