I spoke to Professor Hedstrom about the issue of cultural appropriation at UVA

Walking around Grounds, I have noticed just how bombarded I am with posters of free yoga classes, “Mindfulness Monday” events, and speeches about meditation. It made me wonder if perhaps UVA was succumbing to the trend of cultural appropriation, of taking aspects of another culture’s traditions without giving credit to that culture.

I wanted to talk to someone about this, and I thought that Professor Hedstrom of the Religious Studies Department and the American Studies Program could possibly shed some light because, after all, cultural appropriation was a prominent topic in his class, ‘Spiritual but not Religious’.

He welcomed me into his office, where he had rows of books and plants lining his walls. I asked him what he thought constituted ‘cultural appropriation’. He looked a little stumped, and said, “Trying to define the term, you start to get into some thorny questions. You want to say it’s cultural theft – to take something from the other cultures. And I guess when people use it in that term, they mean that there is some kind of power behind it, in maybe the most extreme cases, violence.

“But the complexity comes in [when] that culture is always about borrowing. Creativity really comes from borrowing, from mixing and matching, but not really from inventing out of nothing. We’re always taking and mixing and remixing. That’s when issues of authority rise: when you have situations of unequal power. This is when the language of cultural appropriation, cultural colonialism applies.”

The different perspectives of cultural appropriation seemed to entail exactly how a person who views this as problematic or not. If some see it as theft, there is a problem. If some see it as borrowing, and simply recreating, there is no problem. And this conflict itself is the problem. When people have different views on what offends people, people get hurt without being apologized to.

Is this problem big here at UVA? Is it relevant? Are we contributing to something morally wrong? Professor Hedstrom seems to think that it’s not just UVA, that it’s “an issue that everyone in the United States, everyone in the West, needs to think about.” He claims that “people who have certain kind of economic and political power…should be thoughtful about it.”

And UVA hosts many with economic and political power. We are senators, government officials, celebrities, important people with important opinions. It’s important that we do something about problems in our society, about conflicts in our society.

These Buddhist-inspired mindfulness classes are interesting to look at because these are part of the Contemplative Sciences Center here at UVA. This is a center that not only educates people on mindfulness, but also helps people who have been through traumatic events cope with them by techniques of mindfulness. And that’s awesome. People helping other people is a powerful movement of compassion and genuine sympathy. Yet, it makes me wonder if it’s wrong not to give proper, explicit credit to Buddhism.

Professor Hedstrom states that “we’ve removed something from its religious context…there’s no doubt about that.” He wonders if this is doing any harm to those who continue to use these for religious practices? Some say that these practices are sacred to these individuals, yet others are doing these practices in a non-sacred context. This makes them worried about what is happening to these traditional practices. This makes Professor Hedstrom worried, too.

“I mean I’m a professor…we just need to know what we’re getting into. We need to have thoughtful, informed conversations. We need to understand the history, understand the dynamics, and make people make really good decisions about this.”

We’re smart here at UVA. It’s important to think about the context of certain practices that you do every day, from mindful breathing to yoga. By no way are these practices bad or wrong. It’s just time to be mindful about being mindful.