Tag Archives: tradition

Cultural appropriation, cultural heritage, cultural patrimony, heritage protection, Native American rights

Cultural appropriation and its Mayan discontents

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Huipíl detail
Huipíl detail, Jilotepeque, Guatemala. Source: Wikimedia commons, Textile Museum of Canada.

I recently gave a talk on current thinking about cultural theft to an audience at Southwest Seminars, a Santa Fe-based organization that sponsors a public lecture nearly every week of the year as well as frequent field trips in the region.  As one might expect in Santa Fe, a town long known for its artists (Indigenous and otherwise), after the lecture a number of people expressed concern about whether their own art works represented cultural appropriation.  As one woman put it—and here I paraphrase—”My work is inspired both by the spectacular New Mexican landscape and the work of the Native Americans who portray it in their ancient artistic traditions.  Is that wrong?”

I have no way of knowing whether her paintings represent a commercial activity or only  a hobby.  In the latter case, it’s hard to see how imitations of, say, Pueblo pottery designs harm anyone.  Still, it reminded me of how complex and confusing the issue of cultural appropriation is for many people, especially at the non-commercial end of the arts spectrum.  And then there’s the question of how, or even whether, Indigenous artistic productions can be protected when appropriators imitate the style of a given tradition rather than actual works.

Some of these issues are addressed, and others dodged, in a recent news story about efforts to protect the intellectual/cultural property of Maya weavers in Guatemala.  According to the story, the IP laws of Guatemala explicitly excludes Indigenous art from protection.  A group of weavers has filed a lawsuit seeking government protection for their work:

Aspuac says that royalties received as a result of the patent would be divided among the community. The community will designate representatives to negotiate on their behalf with companies seeking to use their designs, and manage the distribution of funds back into the community. Aspuac and other leading members of the movement want to see the money invested in social projects like weaving schools and education for women and children.

The hope is that with the patenting of their textiles and designs, the Maya community would have more autonomy and control over their heritage and culture, thus alleviating two of the major hardships the community faces: cultural appropriation and dispossession. Royalties received from the patent would also give the communities the chance to end a long-standing cycle of poverty. [Source]

This sounds like a promising approach, and I hope it enjoys success.  Nevertheless, it begs the question of whether such a law would effectively prevent the sale of “Maya-inspired” designs that don’t consist of exact copies of existing works.  Where does Mayan creativity end and some other society’s creativity begin?  How far into the past would such protection extend? And would it protect the work of Maya weavers experimenting with radically new artistic forms?  The latter question might sound hypothetical, but after three years of hosting Native American artist fellows at SAR, I’ve come to appreciate how many of them are joyously breaking with tradition to pioneer powerful hybridized art.  An example is found in the paintings of Ehren Kee Natay, as well as his work in other media.  Ehren was SAR’s Rollin and Mary Ella King Native Artist Fellow in 2014. I expect that Indigenous Guatemalan artists aren’t far behind.

One possible solution for the Guatemalan case would be to complement conventional copyright protection of finished works with a licensing program that would allow manufacturers to certify their work as “Mayan” or “Maya-inspired” for a fee.  The licensing fee would have to be modest enough to be absorbed as part of the cost of doing business.  It would be similar to Fair Trade certification, which assures customers that they are doing the right thing by purchasing a certified product.  This strikes me as administratively more plausible than trying to enforce a “cultural copyright” on Maya weaving in all its forms and variations.

On a related front, be sure to check out the website of the Creative Sensitivity Project, the goal of which is to “get as many creatives as possible to understand the effects and ramifications of cultural misappropriation to understand how their job as creative practitioners will effect marginalised groups in society.”

Indigenous Amazonian peoples: Social issues

Pondering the Law of Unintended Consequences

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Awajun_bible
Sample page from 1973 SIL translation of bible (mostly the New Testament) ,Yamajam Chicham Apu Jisukristu Pachisa Etsegbau,.

“Growing old ain’t for sissies” is an adage one hears a lot from the AARP set, a group to which everyone over 50 automatically belongs,   One unsettling aspect of working in a discipline for decades is that some truths once regarded as self-evident reveal themselves to have been misguided or false.  Depending on the situation, this reversal of fortune may be discouraging or uplifting.  But for anyone committed to reality-based understanding, unexpected outcomes can be of great interest.  They are also humbling.

An anthropological assumption that now looks less tenable than it did in the 1970s and -80s concerns the impact of evangelical missionary work on the indigenous peoples of Latin America.  Arguably the largest and most successful Protestant missionary organization of this period was the Wycliffe Bible Translators, whose sister organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), sent trained linguist-missionaries to scores of remote indigenous communities for the express purpose of creating an alphabet for previously unwritten languages, providing literacy training, and using this understanding of the local language to translate, print, and distribute bibles. WBT and SIL were once two faces of the same organization.  As far as one can tell from their websites, they now appear to have taken divergent paths, with SIL International focusing on language  documentation and preservation (although it continues to describe itself as “faith-based”), whereas Wycliffe retains its explicitly evangelical mission.

In the 1980s SIL was controversial for several reasons.  Critics felt that the imposition of Western, Christian ideologies on vulnerable indigenous peoples represented a form of cultural imperialism, which it surely was.  The U.S. origin of the SIL and the organization’s sophisticated infrastructure of radio communications and air transport in remote parts of the Amazon inevitably raised suspicions that it was a covert arm of US intelligence.  More broadly, aggressive proselytizing by a minority religion in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Latin America was considered a threat to the region’s national cultures.  In these contexts SIL downplayed its link to WBT in ways that critics found deceptive. These factors led several Latin American nations to expel the SIL, although it continued its work in Peru by muting its religious commitments and providing invaluable services to a Ministry of Education grappling with the challenge of providing bilingual teaching materials to children in Peru’s jungle villages.

Two books helped to frame anthropologists’ overwhelmingly negative view of American missionary work in the Amazon: Søren Hvalkof and Peter Aaby’s Is God an American? (1982) and David Stoll’s Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? (1983).  Both have a polemical tone in places, but they also provide detailed historical and ethnographic information on the impact of American evangelical missionaries on a diverse set of indigenous communities.  Neither book may have influenced popular opinion about American missionaries as much as the late Peter Matthiessen’s novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), which was brought to the screen in 1991 by director Hector Babenco.

I shared some of those negative views when working with the Awajún in the 1970s and -80s despite my minimal contact with American missionaries in the field.  In the years since then, however, circumstances have made my prejudices look simplistic and in some cases misplaced.

For one thing, the work of the SIL brought literacy and bilingualism to the Awajún much earlier and faster than would have been the case had SIL not been there.  The Awajún have embraced literacy with great enthusiasm and today have one of the highest literacy rates of any Amazonian community in Peru.  Literacy in the Awajún language, which might not have been promoted by the Peruvian government if it had been in control of Awajún education in the early years, is now a significant factor in Awajún cultural survival and political mobilization.

A more subtle effect of Awajún contact with American missionaries is the sense of cultural separateness—the idea that the Awajún are technically Peruvians but have their own distinct identity and destiny.  I can’t prove that this was explicitly promoted by the SIL, but it seems like a probable result of long involvement with powerful outsiders who thought of themselves as distant from Peruvian national culture and values.

It’s true that evangelical missionary work had negative consequences as well.  For a time it promoted factionalism between traditionalists as well as converts to Roman Catholicism.  It caused many Awajún to abandon traditional rituals and related cultural expressions, including the search for visions by young people.  As I report in Upriver, this reflected a genuine desire of some Awajún to break out of the cycle of revenge killings with which the vision quest was strongly associated.  But in the years since those early missionary contacts, more sophisticated Awajún are starting to return to the visionary language and practices of their ancestors while focusing more on the constructive, life-affirming possibilities of ayahuasca visions. A few are even converting to the Baha’i faith on the grounds that it is more ecumenical than Christianity and therefore more open to the Awajún’s own cultural traditions.

Thoughtful Awajún intellectuals recognize the positive as well as the negative impact of the missionary work of Protestants and Roman Catholics in Awajún country.  They value the literacy and bilingualism promoted by both groups, as well as the global contacts that involvement with missionaries promoted. At the same time, they are critical of the paternalism of missionary organizations and their past reluctance to fight for Awajún civil rights and political self-determination.

Thomas Hobbes wrote that “science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.”  In my case, growing recognition that things often turn out differently than expected, both in good ways and bad, has made me more wary of the sanctimony and moral certainty that pervades the discourse of cultural anthropology today.  My personal convictions remain firm.  What has changed with age is my certainty that “doing the right thing” (as understood at a particular moment of history) inevitably leads to the results for which one hoped.  What anthropology and other social sciences need today (Are you listening, economists?) is a large dose of humility tossed back with a chaser of ironic sensibility.  And we all need the willingness to revise our views in response to the lessons of history.

For additional information on the impact of evangelical missions on the Awajún written from the perspective of committed Christians, readers may want to track down a copy of Mildred Larson and Lois Dodds, Treasure in Clay Pots: An Amazon People on the Wheel of Change (1985) as well as scholarly papers by Robert J. Priest, including this one.  Sections of the Bible translated into Awajún can be found online in various locations, including here.

It’s worth noting that David Stoll followed up his book on SIL with Is Latin America Turning Protestant?, a work that revolutionized anthropological thinking about the direction and significance of Protestant conversion in Latin America.

Reviews of "Upriver"

“Upriver” in the Utne Reader . . . and Hau

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The Utne Reader  has published a long excerpt from Upriver in its website.  Utne carried a review by Will Hermes of The Channeling Zone back in 1997, and it’s great to back in their pages again.

The excerpt is headlined “The Aguaruna struggle to retain tradition,” which is okay, I guess, and probably right for Utne’s readership, which seems to be drawn to topics dealing with sustainability, right living, spiritual development, and progressive politics.  But what interests me about the Awajún/Aguaruna is the extent to which they aren’t chained to tradition in the way Anglo-Americans often think about such things  Yes, they are committed to their language (but to bilingualism, too), to the retention of many traditional understandings and values, and to maintenance (and recovery) of the political autonomy and right of self-determination that they once enjoyed.  At the same time, however, they are hungry for formal education and flexible in their religious commitments, which now include Baha’i, evangelical Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism.  Some actively aspire to professional careers and, as I recount in Upriver, a handful have achieved them.

Despite their Amazonian location, the Awajún remind me of a new generation of American Indian thinkers and artists who are deeply committed to decolonizing their societies and yet aren’t afraid to pour at least some elements of tradition into the cultural blender with hip-hop and other global influences.  Last week at SAR we heard a talk by  Ehren Kee Natay (Kewa/Diné), who has been working hard in the SAR artist studio as a Rollin and Mary Ella King Fellow.  Ehren’s work encompasses rock music, painting, sculpture, and video, including the unforgettable “Rock Your Mocs,” filmed in front of several of Santa Fe’s public symbols of Western conquest.

The Awajún aren’t far behind, although the style of music and videography may be jarring to an American audience.  Compare this short ethnographic video of an Awajún woman recording magical love songs to (1) a social dance and song in traditional dress, but with electronic backup, and (2) an Awajún cumbia video, one of scores that can be found uploaded on YouTube.  At this point, it’s probably fair to say that Latin cumbias are “traditional” to the Awajún.

On a radically different front, the open-access anthropology journal Hau has just published an article by the distinguished ethnologist Anne-Christine Taylor (Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparatives (LESC); CNRS, Paris). “Healing Translations: Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism.”  Upriver snags a spot in Taylor’s citation list.

ANPE FOTO/ Patricio Realpe/www.conaie.org
Achuar shaman, ANPE FOTO/ Patricio Realpe/www.conaie.org

The Achuar—like the Shuar, a group closely related to the Awajún in language and culture—practice shamanism.  Taylor’s sophisticated but accessible paper assesses “how illness is transmuted through shamanic practice into a condition that is readable in terms of the history of interethnic relations, a process involving an ordered sequence and combination of “trans-lations” (i.e., shifts from one plane to another and the “harmonic” effects thus created)  . . . as it occurs among and between the northern Jivaroan Achuar and the Quichua-speaking forest groups that have developed in post-conquest times in their neighborhood.”  One way of looking at the paper is that it considers how a traditional practice of great antiquity and symbolic significance, shamanism, is negotiated and renegotiated in light of the ever-changing ethnic relations in which the Achuar are embedded.  An article not to be missed by anyone interested in Amazonian shamanism and Jivaroan and Quichua-speaking peoples in general.