Spiritual acquisitiveness, cultural misappropriation (and Tarot decks)

Thinking about what has been written on this topic:
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=133391&page=1

I think it's a discussion that could be extremely important.
It's also a dangerous discussion as there will be strong and opposite opinions.
However let's think how many themed decks are out there: hundread maybe.
What are we doing, then?
And why?

I feel like these questions, exploring our mutual cultural connections, are very important to the Tarot world.
To make a long story short... if we use Tarot to mirror or channel the life experience of a sentient being, we must expect Tarot to create a connection with the cultures that being belong to.
Yet, I am Italian, I own a dreamcatcher near a celtic engraving (not the Pagan one, the other!) and I talk about zen while listeing to some Brasilian music. Oh my... I'm a mess.

To answer Lilly... I think there may be one difference between the British and the Native American. Your identity as a British is not in danger when people pillage the Stonehenge imaginary. Maybe your identity is more in danger by immigration (and that causes uproars, probably. In Italy it does).
For a Native American, the connection betweeen his cultural heritage and his cultural identity is so much stronger as he has little else.
So... "acquisitiveness" or "misappropriation" may be felt as a direct attack to one own identity.
Still... the world is smaller any day. Is it really wrong to try to accomodate an echo of Native Americaneness into our future selves? Even if it's *stolen* (violently so, and quite literally, if we look at history).
It may also be said that wearing a dreamcatcher, and trying to understand what it is... is a way to say "if I were to a new choice, I will not make war to that culture, but I would try to listen and learn. I would. I have changed".
And it may be too late for it to be respectful. Still it's something positive.

(I have very confused opinions, and I have yet to bring then back to Tarot)

ric

This is a valuable discussion, Ric. Thanks for starting the thread.

I think that themed decks demonstrate a desire to demonstrate a commonality between what is understood as the archetypal message or provenance of a given card and the chosen culture or spiritual tradition (I shall point to, as examples, Julia Cuccia-Watts' Ancestral Path and Louise Poole's MerryDay Tarots). I think that this is more often the case than a cynical "let's make a buck" desire to corner (or create!) a niche market (though I think they do exist and an example could be the USG Medicine Woman Tarot - IMO); after all, it takes a great deal of work to design and illustrate a deck, particularly a themed one (which tend to be fully scenic throughout).

HOWEVER

(and here, I think you put yourself in the firing line, mate, sorry)

There are many people involved in the team that "brings you this Tarot of Lost Tribe Faerie Bushmen". Within the team are the illustrators (in the case of LS's scripted decks), the person or people who first conceived of the theme (who may or may not be the illustrator/artist), the investors, the marketers . . . the decks that get approved, that get the big tick, might be the ones that bring up the "ka-ching" moment in the investors/marketers/advertisers' minds. Herein lies my cyncism.

I'm not having a go at you, Ric. I respect Lo Scarabeo as a business as well as a driving force in Tarot's evolution; moreover, I respect you as a member of this community with the gumption to get involved in the life of LS's decks after they leave the door, when it could be said that they're on their own. You rock. But the structure of LS's process for bringing out new decks (at least as far as I understand it) is open to the charge of cynical spiritual acquisitiveness, if only because there are a number of steps or roles involved in the process which leaves it open to "corruption" (if you will).

I'm going to quit while I'm still making sense.

\m/ Kat

Ciao, ric!

I thought immediately of an interesting thread about the LS Native American tarot deck. It seems that much is right about it, but much is not. Here's the thread: http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=75592

For me the problem comes from grabbing at the "cool" parts of people's lives without caring about the deeper meanings that the images or practices have for them.

I don't mean you have to study Japanese culture if you want to eat sushi.

But sometimes people build a whole imaginary world out of a few appealing elements from other cultures, and convince themselves that they understand.

Everything becomes a commodity. It is equalizing in that way.

My two cents to this wonderful subject. (Thanks Riccardo )

If you want to find the real essence of a disappeared culture or a threatened one, read ethnology books and visit museums. And then again... how unbiased can be a human's point of view on its own culture or somebody else's culture?? What do we choose to outline, what do we choose to discard as we tell about one culture? (off topic, i know...)

In our "communication/information- easy come - easy go" society, what is marketed as "genuine", "native", "primitive" has to meet the tastes/needs of the XXIth century audience, the worldwide audience, mostly brought up on TV and fast food meals.

I often see these slightly genuine native primitive items more as the first tree, the first step to the deep forest laying behind, the doorstep to the real thing..
If a Native American deck, despite all its defects, can inspire ONE person to do some serious research on Native Americans afterwards, i think it is great. I might be extremely naive on that (and I usually am the cynical one) but i do believe in inspiration coming from the most unexpected and/or insignificant details in our well-planned little existences.

Ideas do not belong to anyone. "Culture" etymologically means "tilled land" or "the tilling of the land". The seeds grow, the men harvest the fields, the plants grow again differently, depending on their environment, other men harvest, the fields change shapes, sometimes disappear completely or extend and grow over the next part of land. With and without human hand.
It is what happens to human cultures as well.

Nothing grows from emptiness, nothing remains unchanged and yet everything is sacred.

What debra said, and what I sort of said in the other thread. It is about respect for others, and taking the trouble to look properly at what you are doing rather than saying "I think I'd like to make a deck with Indians on cos those feathers look good."

If you want to look at Native American peoples - at least find out what is true before pretending that yours is a deck portraying them. But as she also says - if it encourages people to study other cultures - that is all good.

What would be very offensive to ME would be artwork that showed them as actually being the "savages" we colonists said they were when we invaded their country. If we had looked at who they WERE when we met them for the first time, history could have been so different. We need to avoid making the same mistakes again by colonialising their (as in other people's) cultures because they have "pretty bits" that look good in our own lives....

I have to say even the very attractive/idealistic/and "not at all a bay idea" Native American Culture is offensive.

My reason is that I see the Culture as a current collective of those surviving in a tradition coming together through their similarities to rally under a message. However, the Con of this is that its often forgotten that there are many indigenous cultures in the Americas (North/South/Central). There are the ones we are lucky enough to know as much about as we do, and all the others that are lost forever. Unfortunately, it seems that we tend to pick-and-choose characteristics or qualities, lump them together, and use that to serve as an adequate definition of an entire continent(s) of a people.

I agree wholeheartedly that all cultures should be treated with respect. Hell, everyone should be treated with respect regardless of who we are or where we're from. I just kind of wish when it came to cultures, its like making a new friend. You learn about their good side and their bad. And eventually you see they're just like you with a few quirks.

Fascinating thread. I still don't know quite what I think. I'm tempted to say it's all a part of the commodification of life's little leisure moments. You can buy "shamanism" in a box now, you can "own" buddhism and lay claim to all kinds of illustrious ancestors (of course I've got Hindu or Galapogan blood in me somehere - you have too - it's just a case of looking hard enough).

However, I also think that when I lose myself in something totally "other", then I find myself.

It's easy to be sniffy but some tarot decks on a culturally/ spiritually exotic theme have taken me out of myself and made me think without the boundaries/ restrictions of the familiar. I would never have thought 5 years ago that I would love a deck like the Greenwood but I do and I have just let it find me on its own terms. Heck I'll never be an authentic pre-Celtic shaman but it lifts me out of myself.

And aren't Celtic Faeries and the Florence of the Minchiate all part of the same leap of imagination? Historical decks require the same acquisitiveness, but nobody pulls us up for it. I remember when I was studying Art History and thinking "actually the art of the Yoruba tribe in Africa and Renaissance Florence are both just as alien to me", but being European I can delude myself and think that somehow the Renaissance of Europe is more immediate to me. I don't really think it is.

But back to Tarot. Isn't all tarot reading appropriating and misappropriating meanings? "It dosn't mean this. For me it means that." So there.

Wow ^^

Creating a themed deck of every kind is open to all kind of criticism.
If I do a deck about love... but please how could I know enough about love, in order to really *know* love?
But even if I were a 100% navajo and decided to do a navajo Tarot deck, wouldn't I just be selling out my heritage for some quick buck? Or should I ask that only my kin could buy the deck?
I did (I actually did) a deck about the Etruscan. There are no Etruscan alive today, so I'm safe... but still I *used* the surface of their culture, in order to translate *my* beliefs.

Yes, culture is something to thread very carefully.
But it's not just about creating a themed deck, but also about using one.
We are all a melting pot... our own cultural identity is a bastard child of thousand cultures, spread upon the times.

I don't know about others, but I'm not sure who I am, culturally.
I'm Italian. I am. I'm being reading manga and watching anime since I was 6. All the TV I see is from US. Videogames takes most of my time (US again, with an hint of Korea and Japan). my nephews are Brazilian, and when I saw Avatar, I couldn't help looking at Native American doing african dances.
I did Chinese martial arts, and over by bed I have a huge Klimt print. And when I hung up the telephone to my friend, my last world is not "ciao", but "namaste". I was raised catholic, and I don't have the faintest idea of what I belive in.

When I use a Native American deck... I imagine a world where spirits walk the land, where the relationship between man and nature is two-way, where the adult see himself as a warrior.
There is nothing more afar from my life (actually maybe a Vampire deck^^).
Still sometimes I need to *attune* to that theme and idealization.
Are the Native American really the way I stereothiped them? Probably not.
And I can see why a Native American may feel degraded or simplified, or used or sold, from such a deck.
Still I gain a lot from being able to imagine them (like a girlfriend of the past, forever far, totally unrealistic). I can bring forth a part of myself I need.
And through that Tarot deck, I can experience my own subjective reality with a different subjective flavour.
And this is true for the Etruscan and the Vampire as well.
Are the Vampire really *Vampire*? I would say they do not exist. Still, they are a cultural translation of a part of our self. And we can resonate with it.

I think sometimes the line between good and bad is like the line between "seduction" and "rape". I should not help destroy what's important to someone else.
Native American cultures (plural) are something fundamental to many.
I should not hurt them.
Still, I need to reach to them, even if it was me (metaphorically) that destroyed and conquered their culture.

Ric

This is a brilliant post.

I agree with every word of it.

*raised as the daughter of an Anglican vicar and now beyond hope and not even sure of nationality* (well, I am, actually - and that is significant I guess - I feel far more for my adopted Canadian nationality than for the one was accidentally born into. What on EARTH does that say about me ? or about misappropriation ?)

RiccardoLS said:

When I use a Native American deck... I imagine a world where spirits walk the land, where the relationship between man and nature is two-way, where the adult see himself as a warrior.
There is nothing more afar from my life (actually maybe a Vampire deck^^).
Still sometimes I need to *attune* to that theme and idealization.
Are the Native American really the way I stereothiped them? Probably not.
And I can see why a Native American may feel degraded or simplified, or used or sold, from such a deck.
Still I gain a lot from being able to imagine them (like a girlfriend of the past, forever far, totally unrealistic). I can bring forth a part of myself I need.

Click to expand...

Hi Ric,

Great thread! There is an awesome Indian writer named Sherman Alexie who would have thoughts about this. You should pick up his book, Reservation Blues. Or just look up some of his poetry on the net. He writes a lot about the appropriation of Indian culture (and he calls himself an Indian because he always has and every other Indian he knows calls themselves Indian).

For my part, I totally understand this dilemma. On the one hand, if I'm searching for something *different* to fill the empty corners of my place (where-ever I happen to be at the time), a different world sounds good. Sometimes I find that world in Medieval Europe -- though I'm not so naieve as to think that the scenes depicted on any Medieval themed tarot are authentic to the experience of actually being there...

Sometimes I find that world is Victorian-era England. Any closer to reality? Maybe, probably not. How about Prague? That one seems more authentic. How about drippy-eyed kawaii little furry animals in an ethereal dreamscape forest?

I guess I draw the line when we're discussing worlds which have been traditionally marginalized and systematically destroyed. So yes, I do find "Native American" tarots a bit off-putting. Especially because the ones I have seen don't really portray the horrific suffering that has also been written into their history. I mean, would anyone think it's a good idea to make a tarot based on Jewish culture and just skirt around the whole issue of the Holocaust?

And if you can freely admit, "And I can see why a Native American may feel degraded or simplified, or used or sold, from such a deck," how can go and turn that into a tool for spiritual elevation?

Great discussion! Lots to think about!
Melissa