Teaching Evolution: Alfred Russel Wallace: Geographical distribution

May 2, 2018 • 12:30 pm

by Greg Mayer

Our sixth installment is a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace. Written while he was still collecting in the Malay Archipelago, it is a foundational work in zoogeography, in which Wallace invokes a long history of evolutionary changes of organisms, and geographical changes of the land and water, to account for organisms’ current distributions and affinities. Readers may recall that 2013 was the centenary of Wallace’s death, and that we posted a series of commemorative posts on Wallace here at WEIT to celebrate his accomplishments during that year.  (Follow this link for many WEIT postings on Wallace.)

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of natural selection. A gentleman but from a family of lesser means than Darwin, he was largely self-taught. He first made a name for himself by conducting an expedition to the Amazon (1848-1852) with Henry Bates; unfortunately, most of his specimens were lost when his ship sank on the return to England. Setting out again on a natural history collecting expedition, he traveled in the Malay Archipelago from 1854-1862. It was at Ternate in 1858, that, during a bout of malaria, the concept of natural selection came to him. Wallace is widely acknowledged as the greatest figure in the history of zoogeography. A lifelong friend of Darwin, in later life he became a staunch public advocate of socialism and, much to the chagrin of his scientific colleagues, spiritualism. His books include The Malay Archipelago (1869), Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870, a collection of his papers, including the important ‘Sarawak’ and ‘Ternate’ papers), his monumental The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876), Island Life (1880), and Darwinism (1889). Andrew Berry has edited a wide ranging anthology of Wallace’s writings, Infinite Tropics (2002).  All of Wallace’s published works are available at John van Wyhe’s superb Wallace Online.  A modern, scientific biography is Peter Raby’s Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (2002).

Reading:
Wallace, A.R. 1860. On the zoological geography of the Malay Archipelago. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, Zoology 4:172-184.

Study Questions:
1. The comparison of which particular islands’ faunas helped Wallace epitomize the nature of the boundary between the Indian (= Oriental) and Australian regions? What are the geographic, climatic, and geological circumstances of these islands? What are their faunal differences and similarities?

2. What importance does Wallace place on the depth of the sea? Show how he uses it in accounting for the geographical distribution of animals.

3. What explanatory principles does Wallace invoke to explain the phenomena he discusses? What do these principles reveal about Wallace’s thinking at the time he wrote this paper?

 

More on “cultural appropriation” of the Chinese dress

May 2, 2018 • 11:18 am

Yesterday I reported on the fracas about a Caucasian woman from Utah, Keziah Daum, who wore a qipao (also called a “cheongsam”), a form-fitting Chinese-style dress, to her senior prom. She found the dress in a vintage clothing store and admired it. For this gross breach of propriety, she was called out by many people for “cultural appropriation.” First, here’s the dress on Ms. Daum:

The qipao is a special dress, one invented in Shanghai in the 1920s and worn by socialites of the upper class. Further, I didn’t think of the possibility that its form-fitting nature may actually have been influenced by Western styles, which becomes more plausible if you read about its origins and alterations (from Wikipedia):

The original qipao was wide and loose. It covered most of the woman’s body, revealing only the head, hands, and the tips of the toes. The baggy nature of the clothing also served to conceal the figure of the wearer regardless of age. With time, though, the qipao were tailored to become more form fitting and revealing.

The modern version, which is now recognized popularly in China as the “standard” qipao, was first developed in Shanghai in the 1920s, partly under the influence of Beijing styles. The streamlined and body-hugging cut of the modern cheongsam was popularized by the socialite and one-time First Lady of China Madame Wellington Koo. Voted several times by Vogue into its lists of the world’s best-dressed women, Madame Wellington Koo was much admired for her adaptations of the traditional Manchu fashion, which she wore with lace trousers and jade necklaces. Cheongsam dresses at the time had been decorously slit a few inches up the sides, but Madame Koo slashed hers to the knee, ‘with lace pantelettes just visible to the ankle’. Unlike other Asian socialites, Madame Koo also insisted on local Chinese silks, which she thought were of superior quality.

People eagerly sought a more modernized style of dress and transformed the old qipao to suit their tastes. Slender and form fitting with a high cut, it had great differences from the traditional qipao. It was high-class courtesans and celebrities in the city that would make these redesigned tight fitting qipao popular at that time. In Shanghai it was first known as zansae or “long dress” (長衫—Mandarin Chinese: chángshān; Shanghainese: zansae; Cantonese: chèuhngsāam), and it is this name that survives in English as the “cheongsam”.

If you click the link on Madame Wellington Koo above, you’ll learn that she served as China’s nominal first lady for a year, but was also an international socialite, living in Paris and New York.  (Her Chinese name was Oei Hui-lan, 黃蕙蘭.) She also frequently wore Western clothes (see photo below), but I suppose nobody accused her of cultural appropriation. Well, that wasn’t in vogue back then (though Ms. Koo was in Vogue as a “style icon”), but my point is that it’s certainly plausible that Koo changed the baggier dress to a form-fitting style because she was influenced by Western dresses. In that case the qipao is itself a form of cultural appropriation that’s been “reverse appropriated.”

US ambassador Averell Harriman (C) greeting people with Mrs. Wellington Koo (L) during a party at the US Embassy in London. January 01, 1946

As for Chinese people wearing jeans, having Western names, and wearing Western suits, a new piece in the Independent explains why that’s okay (click on screenshot):

The author is Eliza Anyangwe, described on YouTube a “Cameroon-born, London-based freelance journalist and founder of The Nzinga Effect.com, a platform to celebrate African women’s stories. She naturalised in Britain but her parents are South African residents, living and working here. She is an example of a phenomena that is called the third culture children, who can’t lay claim to one culture because they are constantly on the move. Eliza joins us in the studio to tell us more about the Third culture Movement.” (my emphasis).  In the video she says that the “third culture” people float between several different cultures, which means they can appropriate elements of any culture. Isn’t that convenient? If I have genes from Ireland, as I might, is it okay if I wear green on St. Patrick’s Day?

As you can tell from Anyangwe’s title, she takes an extreme position—so extreme that she sees wearing a qipao as an element of systemic oppression practiced by whites. But Chinese people wearing suits aren’t oppressing Westerners.  Why? Anywangwe tells us (my emphasis):

Daum does not deserve online abuse, no one does, but the debate her prom pictures have prompted is justified. Cultural appropriation is about power, and to many she’s the embodiment of a system that empowers white people to take whatever they want, go wherever they want and be able to fall back on: “Well, I didn’t mean any harm.”

Yes, the qipao can probably be acquired fairly cheaply anywhere in the world where there’s a Chinese store, and in the same way that jeans are part of US cultural imperialism, there are certainly some in China who would see Daum’s sartorial choice as an extension of Chinese soft power – but whichever way you look at it, it wasn’t “just a dress”.

. . . Of course, it’s not just white people who are capable of appropriation (black people wearing bindis to music festivals has always irked me) – but it is unfair, enraging and a reflection of more deeply rooted inequalities when young people from various ethnic minorities are ridiculed for wearing their traditional dress; when they fight their afro hair into submission or dream of surgery on their eyelids, all so that they fit a white ideal.

Well, there you have it. The adoption of Western clothes by Chinese is the U.S.’s fault—cultural imperialism! But how does that work? Did Levi Strauss force the Chinese to wear their gear? I doubt it. Rather, the Chinese like jeans, either for their comfort or as an appropriation of Western style. Whatever the reason, it’s cultural appropriation—but not to Anyangwe. As the saying goes, “When WE do it, it’s okay!”  Either that or “We were forced to do it by those Western imperialists.”  Her last sentence is simply window-dressing, for the kinds of “black cultural appropriation” she mentions can be imputed to white imperialism.

How ludicrous this is! Are Asians oppressed in the U.S.? And is the qipao an item of clothing ever worn by oppressed Chinese? The answer to both questions is “no.” Anyangwe’s rationale is the same as the rationale for saying that blacks and Hispanics can’t be racist, because racism supposedly equals oppression plus power. To Anyangwe, cultural appropriation equals borrowing plus power. In both cases the “power” part has been added to excuse one group from what they impute to other groups as bigoted behavior. But wearing a qipao is not bigotry—it’s an expression of admiration for a dress style. As Seth Andrews has said, Anyangwe and the other critics of Daum’s dress are practicing “recreational outrage” (something I’ve called “leisure fascism”, but I like Seth’s term better). While some forms of cultural appropriation are worthy of being called out, this isn’t one of them.

For a palliative to the rant of Ms. Anyangwe, read the article below, also in The Independent, by Kassie Draven (click screenshot), who identifies herself as “Samoan, and part German, Dutch and British.”

An excerpt:

The qipao itself was culturally appropriated from Western figure-hugging dress designs as early as the 1920s, and was intended to be a luxurious evening gown. Did Keziah not wear it for its intended purpose? If so, how was she being in any way, shape or form disrespectful?

Personally, I think it’s deeply conservative to tell people what to wear, let alone what they can and can’t enjoy, based on their race or outward appearance. As someone who wants equality for all and for racism to end, I find it worrying to hear people discouraging the mixing and appreciation of other cultures. That mixing is actually the driving force towards acceptance and positive anti-racist change.

No culture is ‘pure’, as in completely removed from influences of other cultures around it. Humans have culturally appropriated ideas from each other since time immemorial. We in the West scoff our Pop Tarts (surely descended from the Cornish pasty? Don’t quote me on that!), use maths (which Arabs developed from the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Indians) and enjoy the comfort of electricity (which many different people from all backgrounds contributed towards harnessing) as we tap away on Twitter, quick to forget that what makes us great isn’t necessarily what makes us different; it’s the things we learn and share among each other despite being different.

In other words, what makes us great is cultural appropriation. To oppose it would be madness.

Indeed! Although, as I’ve said, some acts of “cultural borrowing” are unsavory, in general it’s not only harmless but salubrious. Opposing things like eating ethnic food or wearing ethnic garb is madness, and Anyangwe is truly mad—in both senses of the term. Those senses, of course, tend to go together.

 

 

Pushback from Israeli museums who don’t like my stand on censoring evolution exhibits

May 2, 2018 • 9:15 am

As I noted the other day, I had strong objections to a practice at Jerusalem’s Natural History Museum described in the Times of Israel (click on screenshot below). When the Haredi schoolchildren (ultra-Orthodox Jews) visit, the Museum, which is funded by Israeli taxpayers, covers up its evolution exhibit, as evolution is contrary to their religious beliefs and would offend (and maybe enlighten!) them. Further, other people are in the Museum at that time, and they, too, don’t get to see the evolution exhibit.

This disturbs me on the grounds that Israel is a secular country (though not as secular as the U.S.); that no religious group can dictate, on the grounds of its beliefs, what is shown in a science museum; and that blocking the exhibit for non-Haredis is an unwarranted incursion on their rights.

I wrote to the head of the Museum (the letter is at the top link), and although I didn’t hear back from him, several Israeli newspapers and websites covered this fracas, mentioning my letter. And I did hear from the head of another museum, the non-publicly-funded and religious Biblical Museum of Natural History in Beit Shemesh. 

At any rate, the ultra-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz covered the kerfuffle after the fact:

They mention my letter to the Museum director:

Biology Professor Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago, who specializes in evolution, read about the affair and sent the museum a letter in which he criticized their decision to cover the exhibit. “As an evolutionary biologist of Jewish ancestry, I am deeply offended at your practice of covering up the human evolution exhibit lest it offend the Haredi Jews who go to your museum. Why would a museum hide the truth, even if it’s offensive to some religious believers? Is this proper in a largely secular state like Israel?”

He also published the letter on his blog “Evolution is True.” Coyne called on his readers to send their own letters to the museum. “I hope you realize that by literally hiding the evidence for human evolution, you are misleading people: in effect, lying by omission. The truth is the truth, regardless of whether some people are offended because it goes against their upbringing; and by catering to the false beliefs of creationists, you are, in effect, censoring whatever science that some people find unpleasant. This kind of behavior makes me ashamed of my Jewish background.”

but also gives the Museum’s defense of its practice (my emphasis):

. . . Since the beginning of the school year, 12 groups from Haredi schools have visited the Natural History Museum as part of the city’s “Jerusalem Advantage” educational program. This is the first year such visits to the museum have been subsidized by the city.

The museum’s educational director, Dr. Evgeny Roznitsky, says schools made their visits conditional on the exhibit being covered up, and he decided to agree to their request. “The agreement is that when such a group arrives we close the curtain and the guide does not explain about those parts. When they leave we open the curtain,” he told Haaretz.

“It has happened 12 times and we would be happy for more – before this year there were no Haredi groups at all, only in a few private frameworks. This year groups come from [Haredi] schools in an organized manner, so I still think this is an achievement,” said Roznitsky.

. . . It is preferable to expose the students to the rest of the worlds the museum has to offer than to refuse their request and have them cancel completely, he says. “My dilemma was either not to close [the curtain] and not agree to the request, and then not to receive this public and not to expose them to the beauty of the other exhibits, or to temporarily close something that is 0.3 percent of all the museum’s space and expose them to the rest: The environment, nature, environmental quality. We have animals in the garden zoo, a beautiful garden. These are children who have never seen an animal in their lives. So I expose them to an entire world. So on behalf of pluralism and education I close this curtain,” said Roznitsky. He completely denies that a visitor who criticized the curtain was told she could leave. [JAC: note that the exhibit is closed to all visitors when the Haredi visit; they don’t have exclusive access to the whole museum.]

. . .The Jerusalem municipality said: “The city’s Educational Administration initiated the ‘Jerusalem Advantage’ program in which all the city’s students from all communities are entitled to visit a wide variety of museums in the city within the framework of their studies. Within this program, thousands of students visited the Natural History Museum in the city and enjoyed the exhibitions and exhibits there. As opposed to what has been claimed, the aforementioned exhibit is open regularly to all groups visiting the museum.”

The city said that out of a desire to attract groups from the Haredi community, too, it was decided to agree to the request from Haredi schools and cover a specific exhibit during the visits. “So far, 12 groups from Haredi schools have visited the museum. The Educational Administration will continue to make cultural institutions and enrichment activities accessible to all the city’s students from a viewpoint of tolerance and equal opportunity for everyone.”

The same defense—that it’s better to give the Haredi kids some exposure to the outside world even if it means censoring evolution—was offered by Rabbi Nathan Slifkin, head of the Biblical Museum of Natural History on his website, in a post called “The skeleton in my closet.” Slifkin also wrote me personally along the same lines and posted a comment on my own site (here), to which you are welcome to respond (be civil!).

Finally, the Times of Israel published a second piece also mentioning my letter (click on screenshot):

This article reaffirms that the exhibit is covered when Haredis visit, even if other people are there at the same time, and the evolution exhibit was also covered twice by mistake when no Haredis are visiting, ostensibly due to “lack of manpower” (seriously; how hard is it to take down a curtain?). So everyone gets denied the science when Haredis are visiting; religious rights trump the right of non-Haredis to learn about human evolution.

The article also says that the Museum is sticking by its guns:

The Natural History Museum in Jerusalem has vowed to continue its policy of hiding an evolution exhibit from view, along with other displays on dinosaurs and the human body, during visits by ultra-Orthodox groups in order to avoid offending their religious beliefs. The announcement came despite an outrage caused in Israel and abroad by its decision to self-censor displays on evolution, dinosaurs and the human body.

“Of course,” the museum’s educational director, Dr. Evgeny Reznitsky, told The Times of Israel on Tuesday when asked whether he will carry on with the practice, citing the institution’s dire financial situation and saying it was better to have ultra-Orthodox schoolkids visit on their terms than have them not come at all.

As people protested outside the building with a megaphone and demanded that the museum reject the demands set by Haredi schools, Reznitsky said he would only reconsider his position if ordered to stop by municipal authorities.

Yes, there were protests!

Meanwhile, outside the museum, several protesters gathered Tuesday morning for a demonstration, carrying signs and shouting slogans such as “The curtain won’t hide the truth on the wall,” “Evolution is for all,” and “Don’t leave the skeletons in the closet.”

They argued heatedly with a museum employee who vehemently defended the practice as respecting the museum’s visitors and as a needed step in light of its financial woes.

“We don’t accept this,” said protester Yaki Hertz. “Science is not custom made. Whoever wants to learn science will do so using all the findings we have today.”

These pieces, plus a new one in Newsweek, also mention that the need for money keep the Natural History Museum catering to the Haredis:

Jerry Coyne, who is an evolution professor at the University of Chicago complained in an open letter that the museum was guilty of “lying by omission.”

“Your blatant censorship offends me…but of course you’d prefer to offend scientists and truth-seekers than those who harbor religious superstitions,” he wrote on his website.

But museum employee Uzi Danon told the Times of Israel that the lack of funds meant that it needed the revenue from Haredim visitors.

“We want the public to be here. Had the museum received funds we would immediately tell the Haredi groups ‘Bye-bye, go home, we don’t need you.’”

“We want to continue operating, they want to close the place down,” he added.

Finally, I received two private emails from Israelis, approving of the Museum’s practice and saying that I simply don’t understand the Haredi culture in Israel. But I think I know enough to weigh in. I know that this group doesn’t accept evolution and that they largely insulate themselves and their kids from secular society.  And I know that this issue isn’t a no-brainer. On one side we have the hope that some exposure to science will enlighten the Haredi kids, and perhaps even get them to think for themselves and maybe, just maybe, accept evolution, even if it’s censored at the Museum. They might even abandon their smothering faith, instilled in them via indoctrination.

Against that we have to weigh the fact that Israeli taxpayers are funding an exhibit that gets covered up when it offends a particular religious group; that it may not help Haredi kids much to see a lion or plant if they don’t also learn how they got here; that Israel is a nominally secular state that still favors particular religions on occasions like this, and that the evolution exhibit gets censored when other people who are not Haredi, and who could learn from the evolution exhibit, can’t see it during Haredi visits. To my mind, this outweighs the small number of Haredi children who have been exposed to the non-evolution parts of the exhibit (12 groups in total). It would be lovely if readers would weigh in below with their own take on whether the evolution exhibit should be censored during Haredi visits, and why. 

Museum of Natural History, take down that curtain!

_______

A contribution from reader Pliny the in Between:

 

Reader’s wildlife (museum) photos

May 2, 2018 • 8:15 am

Today we have a change of pace: reader Robert Seidel sent some photos from London’s Natural History Museum, a wonderful Victorian museum that I’ve visited twice. Robert’s descriptions are indented:

I thought you might enjoy these photos I recently took at London’s Museum of Natural History. It’s a fantastic place, build on request of chief curator Richard Owen to house the natural history collection of the British Museum. Owen is perhaps best known today for his fervent opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution (the only one of his enemies who annoyed him, as old Charles stated, and he was not an easy man to annoy) and his comically wrong reconstructions of dinosaurs. But this magnificent building shows a much different side of him: A man deeply in awe of nature, who wanted to share that awe with everybody. Though he would probably have framed it in a religious way, it is a monument to the spiritual aspects of science, and for wanting to share that feeling with the public he must have been quite a visionary.

Anyway, I’m blathering. The photos:

Skeleton of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) suspended from the ceiling of the entrance hall. That hall is huge, and intentionally made to look like a cathedral.

A lovely bit of interior decoration. The whole place is covered in these, also an idea of Owen. I think he even provided the templates.

The London Archaeopteryx. One of the most significant fossils ever discovered, and perhaps the one most fraught with history. The first transitional form to be recognized, it was purchased by Owen so that he could properly describe it and put an end to the “missing link” nonsense. Unfortunately for him, Thomas Huxley also got in on the game. . .

Thomas Huxley. The sculptor really went with the “Darwin’s Bulldog” theme here. His statue and that of Owen are facing each other, and it seems like he’s about to lurch at poor Owen.

The clenched fist of Thomas Huxley:

Owen himself, managing to look both genial and a bit shifty, in a Cardinal Richelieu way:

Old Charles, being his unassuming self. One can only speculate what Owen would have thought about the presence of this statue in his museum.

Watercolour drawing of the  kakapo [Strigops habroptila] by John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912).

As lagniappe, we have an astronomy photo from reader Tim Anderson in Australia:
This is a narrowband image of the Running Chicken Nebula (IC2944) comprising fifteen 300-second exposures in each of the Ha, O3 and S2 wavelength bands using 7nm filters. The image was processed by applying the “Hubble colour palette” (Ha green, O3 blue, S2 red)

Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

May 2, 2018 • 7:15 am

It’s Wednesday, May 2, 2018, and National Chocolate Truffle Day. Alas, I have none of these things. And in Bhutan, where I’d like to go if they’d rescind their huge per-diem tourist fee it’s the birth anniversary of Jigme Dorji Wangchuck the 3rd Druk Gyalpo, who began Bhutan’s first steps toward modernization.

On May 2, 1611, London printer Robert Barker published the very first King James Version of the Bible. I still claim it is not a great work of literature, even in that version. On this day in 1920, the first game of Negro League baseball was played in Indianapolis. Blacks weren’t allowed in “major league baseball” until Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.  On this day in 1945, after the suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, the Soviet Union announced that Berlin had fallen.  And on May 2, 1952, the world’s first ever commercial jet airliner, the De Havilland Comet 1, made its first flight: from London to Johannesburg. On May 2, 1986, the city of Chernobyl was evacuated six days after the uncontrolled nuclear reaction and explosion. Finally, it was on this day 18 years ago that President Bill Clinton announced that GPS technology would no longer be restricted to the U.S. Military. “Let there be Siri navigation!”

Here is drone footage of the abandoned city of Chernobyl, filmed between 2013 and 2016, 27-30 years after the accident:

Notables born on this day include Alessandro Scarlatti (1660), Catherine the Great (1729), Hedda Hopper (1885), Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron (1892; shot down at age 25), Satyajit Ray (1921), Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan (1929, see above), Lesley Gore, born Lesley Sue Goldstein (1946), and Brian Lara (1969). Those who died on May 2 include Martin Bormann (1945, probably a suicide), Joseph McCarthy (1957), J. Edgar Hoover (1972), Oliver Reed (1999), Lynn Redgrave (2010) and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (2014).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is practicing her ornithological skills:

A: What are you looking at?
Hili: I’m trying to see what kind of bird that is.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Patrzę, co to za ptaszek.

And Leon is still staking out his future home, suggesting a new plant for the garden:

Leon: Catnip aromatherapy? We could try.
In Polish: Aromaterapia kocimiętką? Można spróbować.

Some tweets from Grania; this one shows a concealed-carry kitten:

A sneaky sheep. Look at that coat!

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/991469182981058560

This belongs in the National Enquirer, but it’s true:

And what did you expect given that the letter said that Trump was “the healthiest President ever elected”? What? With all that junk food he eats?

A lovely full moon over the high mountains of Pakistan:

From Matthew; a spry grandma:

And a painting with a GOOD picture of a cat:

The Einsteins test out a movie gimmick. Watch out, Albert!

 

Angry Cat Man gets long hair

May 1, 2018 • 2:30 pm

Angry Cat Man™ is my alter ego, the superhero I become when faced with crime and injustice. He was created by reader Pliny the in Between, and you can see his diverse adventures here.  (The name originated when a teacher at Chicago’s Lab School sent students posts from my website, and one of them remarked, “Oh no, not another thing from the Angry Cat Man!”

After this morning’s ludicrous claim that superhero women have long hair, which is sexist because superhero men don’t (a claim handily refuted by Grania), Pliny produced this stereotype-shattering image of Angry Cat Man:

“Cultural appropriation” of a Chinese dress causes big kerfuffle

May 1, 2018 • 1:00 pm

Some people are permanently poised to be offended; in fact, you’d think they get pleasure out of being offended.

One of the topics that often triggers unwarranted offense is cultural appropriation—the adoption by one culture or ethnicity of food, clothing, music, or other aspects of a different culture.  In principle this could be offensive, as in the use of blackface, but more often than not it’s simply the appreciation by one culture of another. BuzzFeed (click on screenshot below) and other sites like the Washington Post and the BBC describe a particularly ridiculous example:

What happened is that 18 year old Keziah Daum, a high school student from Utah, decided to wear to her senior prom a quipao, or traditional Chinese dress with a high neckline and slit skirt. While this was worn in China (and still is by societies that try to preserve the dress style), it was really a form of women’s clothing invented in Shanghai in the 1920s and limited to wealthy socialites. Here, for example, is a quipao society I photographed in a mall in Macao on my last visit to Hong Kong:

Well, Ms. Daum made the deadly mistake of liking a quipao she saw in a Salt Lake City vintage clothing store, saying that she was “immediately drawn to the beautiful red grown and was thrilled to find a dress with a modest neckline.” She wore it to the prom and posted the following pictures on Twitter.

You can see the four sub-pictures by clicking on her tweet, but here are three of them. Daum looks lovely, though of course the last picture might be considered offensive by some. I don’t, as it’s not making fun of a culture but imitating (I think) a gesture thought to be Chinese (it’s also Indian, Nepalese, and used in many other countries):

 

Well, you can question the wisdom of the last photo, but believe me, this fracas would have happened had just the other pictures been posted. Sure enough, Jeremy Lam, a student at the University of Utah, took great offense and posted this tweet:

As you see, it got 17,000 comments and was retweeted 42,000 times. As you might expect, though Daum had her defenders, she only got those defenders because of the spate of people who called her out for “appropriating” a “traditional dress with a long history and making it into a fashion statement.” Well, the dress doesn’t have a long history, was limited to the upper classes, and is supposed to be a fashion statement. If the dress represents “Chinese culture”, it is only a very narrow segment of Chinese culture. (If a lower-class Chinese woman wore it, would that be considered “class appropriation”?).

Daum, as might be expected, was sandbagged, not expecting this at all, and was hurt. You can see all the negative and supportive comments at BuzzFeed (it turns out Jeremy Lam had engaged in even more impure forms of cultural appropriation in previous tweets.) But she even tried to be nice about it:

“I never imagined a simple rite of passage such as a prom would cause a discussion reaching many parts of the world,” Daum said. “Perhaps it is an important discussion we need to have.”

She said that she was sorry if she had caused any offense, and that her intent was never to anger anyone.

“I simply found a beautiful, modest gown and chose to wear it,” she said.

No, we don’t need to have a conversation about her wearing a quipao as a prom dress. It’s not insulting and wasn’t intended to be. It was the best kind of cultural appropriation: the adoption of some aspect of culture that you admire. Yes, we can and should talk about blackface, Mexican sombreros, and the like, but if we’re going to talk about cultural appropriation, how about this site, showing Asian workers adopting “dress-for-success” fashion, which happens to be Western? How about if we talk about the limits of “offensive” cultural appropriation?

Isn’t the picture above an example of cultural appropriation? If not, why not? After all, at least in the U.S. Asians enjoy a social and academic advantage over Caucasians; so if “punching down” is worse than “punching up”, Asians wearing Western suits would be the graver sin.

But this is all nonsense. Cultures intertwine and enrich each other; I can’t imagine the U.S. without the musical, culinary, linguistic, and artistic contributions of non-Caucasians (I won’t say “other cultures” because all of us descend from immigrants). We wouldn’t have the great musical form of jazz without the African-Americans who invented it, and yet its adoption by cultures worldwide occurred without the supposedly negative aspects of “cultural appropriation.” That’s another example of cross-fertilization of cultures.

Making a poor high school woman feel awful about her choice of dress is something that these misguided Social Justice Warriors like to do. It accomplishes nothing positive; all it does is make the “appropriators” feel bad and the puritans feel good about themselves. Can you tell me if anything positive came out of this?

 

h/t: Seth Andews