At the beginning of March in response to a pop-culture piece, the specific one I can’t recall it may have been J.K. Rowling, I posted the tweet:
And one of my friends, suggested I submit it as a panel for Geek Girl Con. So, at the end of March I did with a slight modification to the idea. I retitled it to be the same as the above post and made it more general about using cultures that are not your own to build fantastical worlds. I posted on Facebook about this and people were supportive, both interested in examining this concept and posting ideas for which Science Fiction and Fantasy works should be part of the discussion. Since that time, I’ve been thinking about this topic (Today’s inspiration being Kung-Fu Panda 3). My primary thoughts being, “Am I qualified to lead a discussion about this?” and the following, “I should really put some of my thoughts about this down.”
I am not a writer of science fiction or fantasy, unless you count archaeological interpretation (zing!). I am primarily a consumer with a little bit more education and a compulsion to write my ideas down. I am also a woman of mixed-race so I have a tendency to complicate issues and investigate them within my more complex experience as a human, adding academic insight where possible and if possible.
So let me unpack my tweet a bit. (Anthropologists love unpacking, maybe because we travel alot) It came in response to the use of another culture by someone who was not of that culture to create a fictional story and world. Not necessarily a bad thing but that person was most likely white and was using another culture for personal gain. This got me thinking about how in science fictional futures there is an assumed blending of cultures where as humans progress through time our distinctions between cultures become more blurred and essentially this only one “human” culture. And following the current world trajectory that future is often heavily influenced by Asian cultures and most often East-Asian cultures. We see this in Blade Runner, Firefly, and the re-make of Total Recall, to name a few examples.
This hypotheses, of a blending of cultures, isn’t too far off. We’ve seen in the last 100 years the loss of much of our language diversity and many issues in anthropology boil down to globalization. There are very few, if any, cultures on our planet that have not heard of or interacted with technology in some way and most “traditional” cultures are still influenced at least indirectly by general improvements in medicine and other sciences. So, it is not far-fetched to assume that in the future, assuming we follow our current path, humans across the globe will be more similar to each other in the future than they are today.
However, how you portray this blending is important. Specifically, all of the above listed examples, and there are many more, do not display the biological blending that is also predicted for our globe. They instead preserve modern racial distinctions and grab the symbols of another culture. And there, my friends, is the rub. There is no example in the history of humanity where you have heavy, and dominating, cultural influence without biological mixing and the problem with not portraying that is it allows modernly powerful ethnicities to take on the cultures of others without giving those people their due.
It is, unfortunately, appropriation rather than adaptation or influence and the relationship between the three is what I will explore in more detail in following posts.
