Culture is not static, and within a country or community there are innumerable variations and innovations in tradition (which can be controlled internally even more vigorously than experimentation by outsiders) . In 2016, Bon Appétit published a recipe for halo-halo, a Filipino frozen dessert, and was widely maligned for adorning it with gummy bears and popcorn. Some called it a “desecration.” These are certainly non-traditional ingredients, but the tradition in this case is only a hundred years old: the Philippines began receiving shipments of ice cream in the mid-19th century, and, as told According to Filipino historian Ambeth R. Ocampo, halo-halo evolved in the 1920s and 1930s from a Japanese dessert of red beans in syrup over ice cream (itself part of a much longest in Japan, dating back at least to the 10th century). The very name “halo-halo” means “mix-mix” and this treat is characterized by exuberant abundance. It’s entirely plausible that someone somewhere is trying to add popcorn instead of corn or cornflakes, two known variants, and gummy bears to approximate, albeit poorly, the chewy texture of jellies. Like the chef of Filipino origin Yana Gilbuena wrote, halo-halo is “infinitely customizable”. So the problem was a lack of history and context; the magazine took liberties without first explaining what it was taking liberties with. (It didn’t help that apparently no Filipinos were consulted.) Above all, it turned halo-halo into just another product – a trendy food that didn’t need to be understood to be enjoyed, then discarded for the next big thing. As Malaysian American artist Shing Yin Khor writes in his 2014 comic strip: “Eat it”, “Eat, but recognize that we ate too and that our sustenance is not your adventure story.
The evil in appropriation occurs when a culture is reduced to its possibilities, reduced to a set of disembodied gestures – a style without substance, which can border on blasphemy, as when a non-native person talks about having a spirit animal . (Indigenous peoples object to New Age rituals, wrote American anthropologist Michael F. Brown, not because they “are false but precisely because they are, in a certain sense, real. … For them, the New Age is a kind of double, an evil imitation close enough to reality to upset the delicate balance of spiritual power maintained by Indian ritual specialists. “) In an increasingly connected world, there is a risk that culture becomes, as the German philosopher of Korean origin Byung-Chul Han writes in “Hyperculture» (2022), “cul-tour”: a tourist circuit. Han proposes an alternative way of meeting the Other, based “on the conviviality of AND”, and a new morality in which shyness or withdrawal are replaced by genuine curiosity, and the difference “is not determined by a ” either/or” but by an “as well as”, not by contradiction or antagonism but by mutual appropriation” – which means that the appropriator and the appropriated are modified, unlike “colonial exploitation, which destroys the Other in favor of himself and the Same.
But how can we overcome the hierarchy of colonial exploitation and arrive at this utopian “and” in which no one is diminished, where everyone’s heart only grows and fills? “An idea of cultural plurality that is inspired by the protection of species and could only succeed by introducing artificial enclosures… would be sterile,” writes Han, before acknowledging: “Having lively cultural exchanges means that things spread but also that certain forms of life disappear. Americans once touted the idea of a melting pot, in which immigrants shed their pasts and assimilate, which some of us learned too late can be a kind of erasure. Then a certain number of white Americans began to fear what Han hoped for, their own transformation in the encounter with the Other, themselves melting, so they retreated. In this, they share a bond with other still dominant groups in the world who see the rise of minorities as a diminution of their own status and are therefore determined to reaffirm their identity by “excluding the threatening Other(s). )”, as the Slovenian says. the philosopher Slavoj Zizek wrote. And yet this fundamentalism, he suggests, has a strange solidarity with its apparent opposite, pluralism, the “ever-increasing flowering of groups and subgroups in their hybrid and fluid and shifting identities, each insisting on the right to affirm one’s specific way of life. and/or culture” – to draw a line; to protect himself.
There is a call to the world without borders, where we can walk at will, eat and dress, make art, write music and tell stories according to our whims, free from the burden of identity. Of course, the absence of borders is a privilege for those who do not have to face real borders. “Go out and play,” they say. “We love what you do.” But what could the rest of us lose?
