I mean depending on their ethnic background naming the kid Moana would have been an issue for reasons besides being teased for being named after a disney princess.
If you can only name kids after your own ethnic background there’s a lot of Richards/ Riciardos/Jeans/Jans/Johns/Stephen/Joris/Mubaraks/Etiennes out there that are mislabelings.
All of those examples are linguistic drift though.
Naming a white girl moana isn’t the same as some guy named Peter and his russian buddy Pyotr realizing that their names derive from the same origin in Greek (or Aramaic depending on how much you wanna argue Kefa should count as the origin since Petros was a direct translation of it as a name)
It’s not only linguistic drift, it’s about awareness. Three used to be a beer narrow set of names (in western Europe) that got used, with a mostly Catholic base, so your John, Paul, Marie type names which would hear the variation of your country. Usually the ancestors would be reflected in the naming convention.
However awareness spreads through media like newspaper and film. Celebrity means that different spellings of names get noticed and get used, regardless of culture. There’s Estonian men named James, because of James Dean (or Bond). There’s kids named after fashion brands nowadays.
The boundary between appropriation and homage is thin. Is Willem Dafoes embracing his school nickname insensitive towards the Dutch? It can be cringey, like Shia Labeoufs mother making two spelling mistakes in her new french inspired last name. It’s a bit time deaf maybe but I wouldn’t personally classify it as inappropriate.
Ultimately culture works by drawing inspiration from others. Like Picasso being inspired by Cycladic sculpture and Renaissance artist by roman art.
Are you saying that if one ethnicity uses a name another can’t? If so, someone should inform all the Japanese people named after various white Disney characters (not that it’s a huge group, but particularly around Frozen there were some Elsas and such).
No, just that it’ll pretty offensive for the white folks that have made polynesian life hell since just after they found the Pacific to suddenly begin jacking their names and cultural aesthetics because of a fun movie.
This is the same shit as the dreadlocks debate, people are still getting discriminated against for this stuff, it ain’t kosher to wear it like a costume while the people it originates from can’t wear it without catching shit when it was theirs from the start.
Issues around “black hair” (I think is the most common word for it, but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here) are certainly real and depressing.
I still don’t think naming a child after a name you happen to like is so problematic (well, unless the name you like is something like ‘Hitler’ or will otherwise cause trauma and issues for the child). If using another culture’s name is a bad kind of cultural appropriation, then either nearly everyone or almost no one is guilty of this (the former because people move and cultures merge and split, the latter being a reductionist take that all human genetics come from basically the same place and/or a “pre-world” language family).
I think cultural appropriation itself is a bit of a weird one. You have people like most Japanese who encourage people to wear kimono and other Japanese styles. I assume that’s true in a lot of the world (I just happen to be more familiar with the Japanese side having lived here for about a decade). But is wearing clothing cultural appropriation? Is cosplay? My Japanese friends and wife encourage me to wear yukata and such, but I generally am just my jeans-and-tshirt self.
Speaking of, were all those Japanese around the Meiji restoration wearing suits appropriating Western culture. Is “Western culture” even a unified culture? Cultures have always borrowed, stolen, and shared. I think if something is intentionally done in mockery or some other way, it’s not OK. Other than that, I think a lot of people are angry, often on behalf of others who may or may not actually be angry themselves.
This, and cultural diffusion is a normal part of human society. It has been for countless thousands of years.
I understand why cultural appropriation can be problematic but the fact remains that the usual mode of cultural diffusion has been, “that’s really cool. I wanna have that too”
It’s not a zero sum game because there isn’t some finite limit. By wearing a kimono or whatever you aren’t taking someone else’s right to wear one away from them.
the way i see it it’s at worst cringey and in bad taste, but on the flip side it’s at best a huge compliment because someone liked your culture enough to name their child according to it.
And a cringey name is nothing new, there are people who name their kids “hope” or “gaius maximus”
I mean depending on their ethnic background naming the kid Moana would have been an issue for reasons besides being teased for being named after a disney princess.
If you can only name kids after your own ethnic background there’s a lot of Richards/ Riciardos/Jeans/Jans/Johns/Stephen/Joris/Mubaraks/Etiennes out there that are mislabelings.
All of those examples are linguistic drift though.
Naming a white girl moana isn’t the same as some guy named Peter and his russian buddy Pyotr realizing that their names derive from the same origin in Greek (or Aramaic depending on how much you wanna argue Kefa should count as the origin since Petros was a direct translation of it as a name)
It’s not only linguistic drift, it’s about awareness. Three used to be a beer narrow set of names (in western Europe) that got used, with a mostly Catholic base, so your John, Paul, Marie type names which would hear the variation of your country. Usually the ancestors would be reflected in the naming convention.
However awareness spreads through media like newspaper and film. Celebrity means that different spellings of names get noticed and get used, regardless of culture. There’s Estonian men named James, because of James Dean (or Bond). There’s kids named after fashion brands nowadays.
The boundary between appropriation and homage is thin. Is Willem Dafoes embracing his school nickname insensitive towards the Dutch? It can be cringey, like Shia Labeoufs mother making two spelling mistakes in her new french inspired last name. It’s a bit time deaf maybe but I wouldn’t personally classify it as inappropriate.
Ultimately culture works by drawing inspiration from others. Like Picasso being inspired by Cycladic sculpture and Renaissance artist by roman art.
All comes from PIE
Are you saying that if one ethnicity uses a name another can’t? If so, someone should inform all the Japanese people named after various white Disney characters (not that it’s a huge group, but particularly around Frozen there were some Elsas and such).
No, just that it’ll pretty offensive for the white folks that have made polynesian life hell since just after they found the Pacific to suddenly begin jacking their names and cultural aesthetics because of a fun movie.
This is the same shit as the dreadlocks debate, people are still getting discriminated against for this stuff, it ain’t kosher to wear it like a costume while the people it originates from can’t wear it without catching shit when it was theirs from the start.
Issues around “black hair” (I think is the most common word for it, but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here) are certainly real and depressing.
I still don’t think naming a child after a name you happen to like is so problematic (well, unless the name you like is something like ‘Hitler’ or will otherwise cause trauma and issues for the child). If using another culture’s name is a bad kind of cultural appropriation, then either nearly everyone or almost no one is guilty of this (the former because people move and cultures merge and split, the latter being a reductionist take that all human genetics come from basically the same place and/or a “pre-world” language family).
I think cultural appropriation itself is a bit of a weird one. You have people like most Japanese who encourage people to wear kimono and other Japanese styles. I assume that’s true in a lot of the world (I just happen to be more familiar with the Japanese side having lived here for about a decade). But is wearing clothing cultural appropriation? Is cosplay? My Japanese friends and wife encourage me to wear yukata and such, but I generally am just my jeans-and-tshirt self.
Speaking of, were all those Japanese around the Meiji restoration wearing suits appropriating Western culture. Is “Western culture” even a unified culture? Cultures have always borrowed, stolen, and shared. I think if something is intentionally done in mockery or some other way, it’s not OK. Other than that, I think a lot of people are angry, often on behalf of others who may or may not actually be angry themselves.
This, and cultural diffusion is a normal part of human society. It has been for countless thousands of years.
I understand why cultural appropriation can be problematic but the fact remains that the usual mode of cultural diffusion has been, “that’s really cool. I wanna have that too”
It’s not a zero sum game because there isn’t some finite limit. By wearing a kimono or whatever you aren’t taking someone else’s right to wear one away from them.
the way i see it it’s at worst cringey and in bad taste, but on the flip side it’s at best a huge compliment because someone liked your culture enough to name their child according to it.
And a cringey name is nothing new, there are people who name their kids “hope” or “gaius maximus”
Would some Polynesian person naming their kid Richard or some other white bread name be problematic?