Remembering Offence: Robert Bringhurst and the Ethical Challenge of Cultural Appropriation

2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 890-912 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Bradley
Author(s):  
Ian Finseth

This chapter focuses on how witneᶊes to Civil War death made sense of their traumatic experience. The ethical challenge was one of recognition: to see and know the often-anonymous dead for who and what they were. Yet the dead were invariably integrated into familiar frameworks of meaning and into the conventions of aesthetics and rhetoric. Drawing on insights from phenomenology, pragmatism, Freudian psychology, and affect theory, the chapter shows that the psychological proceᶊes of abstraction and typification underlay a social logic of necrophilic dependency that both thrived on the dead and yet resisted their complex individuality. This problem is then connected to a long-standing cultural and historical melancholia whereby the Civil War dead have been internalized and eternalized as representational artifacts within a society that remains divided and ambivalent over the meaning of the war.


Author(s):  
Steve Bruce

Understanding why Islam has contributed little to contemporary religious and spiritual innovations allows us to see the principles underlying cultural borrowing. With its creator God, authoritative text, religious dogmas, and defined ways of life, Islam is too much like Christianity for cultural appropriation, and there is a considerable Muslim presence in the West that constrains borrowing. Such appropriation is easiest when ideas are not embedded in a large faith community (feng shui is an example), when they are retrieved from an ancient and undocumented past (as with Celtic Christianity), or when they are entirely fictional (as with the supposed characteristics of Atlantis).


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 107-119
Author(s):  
Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros

AbstractThe digitization and online dissemination of the Popol Vuh, a historical indigenous knowledge work, poses distinct ethical, legal, intellectual, and technological concerns for humanities researchers and information practitioners seeking to study and digitally curate works through a decolonized consciousness. Ongoing debates on data sovereignty, the repatriation of cultural artifacts, and cultural appropriation question the ability of researchers and information practitioners to effectively steward indigenous knowledge works in a digital environment. While consensus on best practices for the postcolonial digital library or archive remain to be established, information inequity continues to persist, effacing indigenous knowledge, languages, and content from the knowledge society. The following case study will discuss the results of a 10-year multi-institutional initiative to curate, repatriate, and steward the reproduction of an indigenous knowledge work online. From the vantage point of the library, the case study will explore the project’s successes, failures, and the work left to be done.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 435-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank A. Chervenak ◽  
Amos Grünebaum ◽  
Eran Bornstein ◽  
Shane Wasden ◽  
Adi Katz ◽  
...  

AbstractThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has placed great demands on many hospitals to maximize their capacity to care for affected patients. The requirement to reassign space has created challenges for obstetric services. We describe the nature of that challenge for an obstetric service in New York City. This experience raised an ethical challenge: whether it would be consistent with professional integrity to respond to a public health emergency with a plan for obstetric services that would create an increased risk of rare maternal mortality. We answered this question using the conceptual tools of professional ethics in obstetrics, especially the professional virtue of integrity. A public health emergency requires frameshifting from an individual-patient perspective to a population-based perspective. We show that an individual-patient-based, beneficence-based deliberative clinical judgment is not an adequate basis for organizational policy in response to a public health emergency. Instead, physicians, especially those in leadership positions, must frameshift to population-based clinical ethical judgment that focuses on reduction of mortality as much as possible in the entire population of patients served by a healthcare organization.


2021 ◽  
pp. 193229682199111
Author(s):  
Jacob M. Appel

The COVID-19 pandemic raised distinct challenges in the field of scarce resource allocation, a long-standing area of inquiry in the field of bioethics. Policymakers and states developed crisis guidelines for ventilator triage that incorporated such factors as immediate prognosis, long-term life expectancy, and current stage of life. Often these depend upon existing risk factors for severe illness, including diabetes. However, these algorithms generally failed to account for the underlying structural biases, including systematic racism and economic disparity, that rendered some patients more vulnerable to these conditions. This paper discusses this unique ethical challenge in resource allocation through the lens of care for patients with severe COVID-19 and diabetes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862110293
Author(s):  
Maha Ikram Cherid

The term blackfishing, which takes a twist on the concept of catfishing, that is, tricking people online into thinking you are someone else, refers to the practice of (mostly) White women pretending to be Black by using makeup, hairstyles, and fashion that originate in Black Culture to gain financial benefits. This article aims to contextualize the concept of blackfishing through a critical literary review that will cover the following elements: cultural appropriation, the commodification of Black culture, the representation of Black women in North America, and the operationalization of blackfishing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Shields

This article considers the ethical implications of a stance toward or relation with the natural environment that could be characterized as dominant across many sectors of not only the economy but consumption patterns generally. Despite popular perception or denial of climate change over the past decades, this is an implicit relation toward the collateral risks and damages to ecosystems by human activity. Not only are livelihoods sustained on the basis of natural resources but the direct costs of hydrocarbon development are borne locally in the environment. For some, this is understood to be without a personal cost despite the fears expressed. The article quotes from interviews with residents. It stages a broader, continuing conversation about the ambivalence of being dependent on hydrocarbons. This article explores the difficulty of developing an ethical engagement with the nonhuman and natural ecosystems when they are relegated to the status of what will be referred to as “bare nature.” Rather than state of exception or standing reserve, nonhuman nature is only present as a form of absence and as nonentities and does not present an ethical challenge or claim.


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