When Blue Needs a New Name, Part I: Cultural Appropriation and the Epistemology of Perception

Cultural appropriation is not a moral failure, but an epistemological one. Let's get into it.

-- hi, I'm Thyia River North. If you're new here, I write about where western consciousness goes wrong even in its most well-meaning attempts at repair—pulling at the threads to find what's actually fraying underneath. Check out "Why I Don't Believe in Animism" to get a primer on my work.

First, let's talk epistemology and what I mean by that.

When I wrote the Animism article, I was, in the simplest way, talking about how harm can be done in taking a concept we don't fully understand and filling in the gaps of knowledge through assumption and our own contextual and cultural reality. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. How do we know things? What counts as knowing? What are the conditions under which knowing is possible or reliable?

So when I say cultural appropriation is primarily an epistemological failure rather than a moral one, I'm saying this: the root problem isn't that people are bad or selfish or disrespectful—it's that understanding is going to come through colored by inherited ways of knowing and lived experience, which may not be the same as the culture from which they are learning.

They don't recognize that the framework for understanding the fullness of this concept, whatever it might be, is inseparable from the cosmological reality, practice lineage, and relational web that produced it. We think we can lift the naming and leave behind the knowing that earned it, because we don't understand what that knowing is and where it came from.

What might start as innocent recognition of something that feels so deeply resonant, then gets shaped and molded through contextual framing being applied to it that has never been applied before and it comes out the other side misshapen and barely recognizable, a strange amalgamation of something claiming to be the original thing.

But knowledge of this kind is not transferable content, extractable from context, and ownable as mere information. Within spiritual concepts, especially, true knowledge comes from an experiential place, not a rational one; and when we pick and choose concepts that light something up within us and define them instead of let them work upon us, change us, awaken us to something that shifts deeper, we're damaging the source.

This can be quite innocent on first pass. We think we're receiving understanding; but we're actually receiving a hollowed out form detached from the experiential knowing that gives it meaning. And with a hollow form comes a need to fill in. Quite easily and without thought, we repackage the knowledge from our own perceptual understanding, often with authority, and attempt to pass it off as the original thing, fooling ourselves, but perhaps not everyone else.

Where it goes from there, then, may actually end up being a moral failure: there can be commercialization and monetization that feels icky; there can be "teaching" when nothing has been learned; there can be a general space-taking that wasn't earned in the sense of the knowledge itself. But the moral critique fails to be heard. We say, "be more respectful, ask permission, give credit," but we're not addressing the core epistemological issue or providing viable understanding to a people desperate for a sense of participatory belonging that their frameworks have not provided them.

WHAT'S YOURS ISN'T MINE

There's a larger foundational error that I think needs to be addressed before I get into the limitations of knowledge that we have in the west. I want to detail a bit of structural framework upon which all my further concepts will sit, and it is here that I must acknowledge a great debt to Ibn Arabi and the multiplicity of isti'dad that exists, not just person to person, but culture to culture.

You see, each of us as people have a unique expression or disposition—our isti'dad—of the Divine that is our form. If the Divine is a clear liquid, then we are the vessel into which it is poured, of unique shape and color. So, too, are the cultural landscapes in which we exist. There is a sense here, then, that my experience and expression of the Divine will not be the same as yours; and, furthermore, your cultural experience/expression of the Divine will also not be the same as mine. This is not an error of separatist thinking, but a theurgical function of reality wherein nothing repeats, but is always wholly unique unto itself, and a deepening of the disclosure of the Divine to greater and greater nuance.

“Reflection” by Odilon Redon

When I experience God in a work of art, a painting for instance, I don't go and then copy that exact painting, hoping to express God through it. God has already been expressed through that painting and exists in that way. I cannot be the clear channel through which that art was created in the same way that artist was; instead, I would be making a hollow copy. But if I were to be inspired by that experience of God and then go create my own art, not from that piece of art, but from the experiencing of God that it elicited in me, then I am doing something new and profound. This is the imaginal faculty at work: the capacity to receive without possessing, and to express without copying.

When a tradition or a way of knowing and understanding God is presented to us from another culture and it inspires us, enlivens our heart, deepens our felt sense of who and what we are in this earth, we have experienced the clear reflection of God in that person, culture, concept. That inspiration and resonance is a gift and a sense of the unity of existence as reflections of God. And when we are each doing our unique part to reflect God in our unique way, this is what we share.

So how do we begin to know in our own way and not in another's way? And what does imagination have to do with this?

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Before we get into knowing in our own way, let's look at how we're set up to know.

In the 1930s, Benjamin Lee Whorf, a chemical engineer in Massachusetts, uncovered something curious in the cross-currents of his double life. By day he worked as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Massachusetts, inspecting factories across New England. By night, he was deep in the study of linguistics: from Biblical Hebrew to Mesoamerican and North American indigenous languages. He had begun to pull at a thread that what we take to be universal categories of experience are actually results, more directly, of the language we think in.

In the Hopi language he was studying, he was observing a radically different relationship to time than that of English speakers—one that didn't divide experience into past, present, and future the way English does. He had no way of knowing, without direct confirmation from the Hopi peoples, that this influenced their way of relating with reality, but it did set up a curiosity in his mind, a question of whether or not language was influencing their orientation.

But it was while in the factory that Whorf noticed something that seemed to confirm his question. Workers behaved differently around "empty" gasoline drums than full ones—and in an opposite way to what you might think. Even though the drums were called "empty" of gasoline, they were actually full of explosive vapor, making them even more volatile than the "full" drums of gasoline. However, workers acted more relaxed around them, lighting cigarettes, tossing stubs. The word "empty" was shaping their perception of reality and their behavior within it, to the point where they acted more recklessly around the potentially more dangerous drums than the full ones.

Whorf later wrote that language isn't just a tool for expressing thoughts you already have, but is constitutive of how thought forms in the first place. He said, "We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is of course an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees."

Whorf has since come under criticism, especially as much of what he hypothesized he could not rigorously prove, but that's where Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive psychologist and professor at UC San Diego, and her team come in.

Boroditsky led research around linguistic impact on the perception of color—published as 'Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination' in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007. The study was simple in design. They showed participants three color squares at once: one on top, two on the bottom. One of the bottom squares was the exact same color as the top one. The other was a slightly different shade of blue. The task was just: which bottom square matches the top?

In the study, she looked at English and Russian speakers. English has one word for blue while Russian has two: goluboy for light blue, siniy for dark blue. In Russian these aren't shades of the same blue the way they are in English. They're categorically distinct, the way English treats red and orange as separate. English has no such line anywhere in the blue spectrum—blue is blue, no matter the gradation of light to dark. Her team asked a similar question to Whorf: does linguistic difference actually change what speakers are capable of perceiving?

What they found was that Russian speakers were faster and more accurate at picking the correct match when the wrong square carried a different Russian word than the target. When the wrong square fell within the same Russian word as the target—just a slightly different shade of the same category—they were slower. English speakers showed no such pattern. For them, the performance was consistent regardless of which blues were involved.

Now, you might be wondering, much like I did, if this is just a matter of noticing because a distinction has already been drawn. You might think, much like I did, "was it a linguistic distinction or just the fact that it is recognizable and has been pointed out as recognizable through cultural familiarity, learned from a lifetime of being told these were two different colors?" That's where the verbal interference part of the test comes in.

While doing the color discrimination, both English and Russian speakers silently rehearsed a string of numbers, occupying their language faculty. During this task, the Russian speakers lost their advantage both in speed and accuracy, while English speakers were unaffected with no perceptible difference between the results with and without the language interference task. They also tested with a spatial memory task of equal difficulty, which had no effect at all on either group.

From this, they were able to deduce that it wasn't familiarity or cultural training that was sharpening Russian speakers' perception of these blues, but the language doing active perceptual work in real time, in the moment of looking. Remove the language faculty temporarily and the distinction softens and the advantage is erased.

Perhaps you've noticed the limitations of the English language before, as well as its great complexity, and found yourself in a divide while trying to explain the nuance of an experience you had spiritually. English functions through identity, separate self, and experience as a distanced thing. English grammatically encodes the observer-observed split, the subject acting upon an object, and leaves us a bit bereft of the warmth of relational experience. And as Boroditsky's research shows us, this isn't just a philosophical observation—language is, in fact, doing this work below conscious awareness, in real time, shaping what we're perceiving before we've had a single conscious thought about it.

But English isn't only an apparatus of separation and definition. It also contains within it, just below the surface of habitual use, a wilder register: poetic, enchanted, alive to multiple meanings simultaneously. The problem isn't English itself but the domesticated relationship to English that the Enlightenment inheritance produced through its emphasis on rationality, which I'll address in a moment. We've been hanging out in one dusty old attic of this rationality, thinking it was the extent of our linguistic domain, not realizing we live in a pastoral manor of expressional possibility.

Because of the superficiality of the taught structure of English as a native language, we are pre-programmed with understandings and ways of knowing that come through in this structure. We often feel separate from things we are observing, separate from experience itself. But when we are given new ways of relating, needing to understand through our native tongue, we have a creative responsibility to begin to play in the space of language and create anew instead of overlaying the dead and dusty. When a concept arrives from a tradition whose grammar is built around participation rather than separation, our language may receive it and immediately begin pressing it into the only shape it knows. Unless, that is, we are willing to sit with it, and create from it something uniquely our own.

PAUSING BEFORE KNOWING

Something that remains challenging through the spiritual journey is the willingness to sit with an experience without jumping into definition. Whether it is when we learn something new that hits on a resonance we hadn't felt before or we experience God in a new way, we're quick to want to put words to it and are fully into taxidermizing the thing before it's even been birthed, much less died. When we turn experience into something to observe, define, and categorize, we step outside the experience before we've had a chance to be changed by it.

This compulsion toward premature naming has a two-fold origin: one, an unwillingness to sit in unknowing; and two, a two-step shift from the heart immediately into the mind. The first one we will get to here; the second comes in part II.

The tendency toward pattern recognition and meaning-making is universal and well-documented across cognitive science; and though perhaps a bit more mechanistic of an understanding than I'd be willing to reduce consciousness to, it does show that the brain actively minimizes uncertainty as a fundamental operating principle, assuming it more costly and more uncomfortable to sit in not knowing, to learn a new way, than finding ways to make new experience fit what you already know. Which means the brain has a built-in tendency to collapse new experience into existing categories rather than forming new ones.

That means, then, that the compulsion to define, categorize, possess, and transmit as propositional knowledge may not be culturally shaped, but its pre-formed categories of understanding are. This is where the western Enlightenment inheritance comes in for native English speakers, forcing everything toward rational definition as the only legitimate form of resolution. Other traditions developed practices specifically designed to hold unknowing. Contemplative traditions have existed across religious cultures and beliefs, across mystic traditions within Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and indigenous practices, all because they recognized that the mind's rush to resolve uncertainty takes divine disclosure out at the knees.

For example, the apophatic tradition says the Divine can only be approached through unknowing, through the systematic dismantling of every definition the mind offers. The Sufi concept of fana, annihilation of the self, requires precisely the willingness to not know, to not possess, to not define. Even from within the house of western Enlightenment thought, John Keats was throwing us a lifeline: the Romantic poet wrote a letter to his brother in 1817—right in the thick of the Enlightenment's dominance—after an evening spent with some friends, where one in particular could hold no question, no ambiguity, with patience and uncertainty, and instead kept needing to resolve it with rationality. He coined the phrase "negative capability," defined as the capacity to remain "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

Keats was watching it happen in his own culture in real time and named it as a failure of artistic and imaginative capacity. He saw it as the thing that prevented genuine creative and perceptual openness—the inability to stay in the uncertainty long enough for something to move through us, and potentially out of us, that would be given new life in our filtering, not arriving dead on delivery.

And let's not overwrite "negative capability" with "mindfulness," because as much as contemplative practice is known, it has still been interpreted as an operation of the control and subjugation of thought. We're watching from a distance, labeling, validating. We're biologists, not even in the field, but watching for natural activity through the bars of a cage.

A CASE FOR BEWILDERMENT

There is a state of divine receptivity to be found in bewilderment, and it's a curious word to use for this state. Be-wilder-ment. If you've ever seen how language contains spells, enchantments, and attunes us to particular poetic understandings that remain just below the surface of initial linguistic understanding, you might see the beauty in this word: be wilder for a moment. Be unfettered, unhinged, feral. Do not be pinned down by thought around this, but remain wild and untamed for a moment, letting it undo the conditioning of the domestication of western thought.

The obstacle here is rarely patience alone, but more often it is a lack of trust—a deep conditioning that tells us our own perception is insufficient and that external validation and verification is the only means to know something real. So we name it, we verify it, and in the process we corral the wild and free into the closed pen of our perceptual reality, only giving it due once we've owned it in this way. But what is possessed is neutered by the possession. Just as animals have trouble breeding in captivity, so too does the living wisdom of other cultures struggle to thrive when transplanted from its native environ. You won't propagate life from a place of death. Instead, we must be willing to let our wild Hearts run alongside them, witness them in their native environment, and be inspired by the life they live in inspiring us to live our own.

The resonance was always pointing toward something real; but true agency comes in sitting with it long enough while it remains wild, unafraid of its feral and incalculable ways. If we could trust our own perception enough to stay in that gap, we might develop our own language anew, something genuinely inspired from the encounter with the other. In this way, we can trust ourselves to perceive a new shade of blue we could never have imagined before, but are all the better for having seen. And suddenly the whole world becomes a more alive, colorful place to be because we didn't name it the same blue we have always known.

In Part II we look at how the Heart, as an organ of direct perception, doesn't need external validation or borrowed frameworks to know what it knows. And how this remembering is a radical subversion to the systems of dominance that are built on the premise that the Heart's knowing is insufficient, that you need rationality, verification, and someone else's map to find your way Home to yourself. See you there!

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Sources and Further Reading

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John B. Carroll. MIT Press, 1956. [Available free at archive.org]

Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M.C., Wu, L., Wade, A.R., & Boroditsky, L. "Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 2007. [Available free at lera.ucsd.edu/papers/pnas-2007.pdf]

Boroditsky, Lera. "How Language Shapes Thought." Scientific American, February 2011.

Boroditsky, Lera. "How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?" Edge, 2009. [edge.org]

Keats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 1817. In The Letters of John Keats, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins. Harvard University Press, 1958.

Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination. SUNY Press, 1989.