Tag Archives: cultural appropriation

Alternatives to Oriental-ism

[Although this post was written for practitioners of acupuncture and East Asian medicines working in the United States, I am posting it here in the hopes of inviting historians, anthropologists, and others working on related topics into this active conversation.]

Orientations:

Beginning in the wake of the protests memorializing George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others in summer 2020, two movements began to address a related issue of racism within our own scholarly and professional field. At the grassroots level, Influential Point launched a petition and campaign requesting that the U.S. acupuncture and oriental medicine (AOM) community remove this racist word from our professional discourse. At the administrative level, Dr. David Lee, the Academic Vice President of Alhambra Medical University in California, initiated a campaign among his peers to “repeal and replace” the word “oriental,” school by school, in school names and degree titles, with the goal of carrying this momentum forward into pressuring ACAOM and NCCAOM to do the same. Collectively, it would seem, the moment has come for making long-overdue, necessary change.

But after determining to not use this word, what other word should we use? And more importantly, how do we make that choice? How might we, the professionals impacted by the name and public face of our craft get a say in making it? If practitioners wish to have a voice in the decision about how we redefine the AOM profession to patients and our broader communities, step one is educating ourselves about the pros and cons of commonly proposed alternative names.

This list of terms, and breakdown of some of their more salient associated issues, is by no means exhaustive. This paper presents a starting point for opening an informed discussion based on something other than personal opinions. It is further my hope that it will help readers cultivate an appreciation for the many different filters through which different people can see the world, let alone a single word. For this reason, each term needs to be looked at from many possible perspectives. One person’s opinion is not going to decide this for us. Nor should it.

I am a clinician, philologically trained translator of classical Chinese, and historian-in-training. This is to say that I have spent countless hours researching and thinking closely about exactly what a word means, or what is the best way to translate X concept into Y language, or for Z type of audience. At the most fundamental level, any alternative would be better than the deeply embarrassing, racist word that we currently use. That said, how we choose our marginally better word matters, too. It is an opportunity not only for learning and self-reflection about the word “oriental” that we seek to replace. It is also an opportunity to recognize some of the many ways in which our field is Orientalist – perpetuating a reified notion of an exotic, but ultimately undifferentiated or falsely uniform, “alternative” or “other-than” medical culture.

Credit: World map in the form of an FFA of the retina. Credit: Jon Brett.

How much do we wish to engage in the work of examining Orientalism within our field – self and public perceptions – along with changing its presently Orientalist name?

To change the broader dynamics (removing Orientalism), rather than only the most visible external manifestation of those dynamics (removing only the word oriental), are two separate things. In my opinion, we should not neglect the former opportunity in our rush to correct the latter problem. The work of examining the Orientalism that permeates our field is important work because it can help us to clearly define and create a professional community. At present, the AOM field in the United States, with its crazy-quilt patchwork of organizations, state practice scopes, regulatory agendas, and heterogeneity of training, entirely lacks professional cohesion. Such fragmentation prevents us from standing united against threats to our scope of practice, such as dry-needling, let alone advocating more strongly for our potential role as first point of contact providers of healthcare in a country desperately in need of primary care providers.

How might we use the process of reflecting on replacement terms as a kind of professional praxis, forcing us to confront the ways in which words matter because words connote as well as denote, delimit, and define?

The idea that the name or definition of something matters – that a name should accord well with the thing it names – is not a new or radical one. Rather, we know that Confucius himself advocated for the “Rectification of Names,” warning against the confusion and social unmooring created by the drift between signs (names) and the things they signify. As we come together as a collective in exploring the full context of each possible term, we are also forced to open a conversation about what values undergird our selection strategy. Naming ourselves presents an opportunity to better define the dynamics of our profession as a whole, our individual positioning within these dynamics, and a collective re-envisioning of how we wish to define ourselves and our practice.

Click here to continue onto a term-by-term discussion of replacement words (document linked to preserve footnotes and formatting of the reference list included as a bibliography):

On Thai Massage and Cultural Appropriation

Photo above: Is this cultural appropriation in action?

Recently, there has been much discussion online about yoga and cultural appropriation, and this has spilled over into the Thai massage world as many have begun to wonder about how this critique may or may not apply to our own practice.

What we shouldn’t do is simply write off the critique that Westerners practicing Thai massage is cultural appropriation. Clearly it is. Non-Thais traveling to Thailand, learning a traditional medicine technique, and returning to the West to use that technique to make a living is probably the very definition of cultural appropriation. The question is not whether or not this is cultural appropriation, but, rather, how we deal with the ethics of our crosscultural encounter.

I have just now written a blog post about the question of yoga as cultural appropriation. In that piece I argue that there is no simple way to resolve this issue if we are stuck in the binary of “neo-colonialism” vs. “freedom of choice.” What is needed to understand this issue at a more nuanced level is an awareness of history. If you didn’t get a chance to read that post, please do so before continuing here.

Turning specifically to Thai massage (or Thai Traditional Medicine, or Ruesri Dat Ton, or other Thai modalities, although that applies to far fewer people), I feel that the same sort of historical analysis can assist us greatly in navigating the ethical issues and deciding where we stand.

To begin with, I think it is helpful to remind ourselves that Thai massage is not some ancient practice that “dates from the time of the Buddha,” as its mythology would have us think. As I have explored in many publications, Thai massage is a product of a long history of cultural appropriation by the Thais themselves, which incorporates aspects of Buddhist, Tantric, Ayurvedic, Chinese, and indigenous Thai practices. I have discussed this in detail in this book, which in 2016 will have a second edition released by White Lotus Press. So, yes, we are participating in cultural appropriation, but it is also the case that we are part of a long tradition of the same.

We might also note that the form of Thai massage most often practiced by Westerners represents a very recent synthesis, dating back no further than the 1950s in its current form. This form of Thai massage was “revived” in the 1980s by the Thai government and leading traditional doctors, specifically in order to bolster the tourism and spa industries. So, yes, we are participating in cultural appropriation, but it is also the case that this cultural heritage was  packaged, marketed, and fed to us by Thai government and medical officials and institutions.

Lastly, it is worth pointing our that the Thai teacher most responsible for the popularity of Thai massage in the West (the “root teacher” of ITM, Sunshine, Lotus Palm, Thai Institute, and many other Western schools including my own) was Ajahn Sintorn Chaichakan of the Old Medicine Hospital in Chiang Mai. Ajahn Sintorn, in fact, repeatedly instructed his Western students (including me) to learn Thai massage in order to share it with as many people as possible in our own countries. So, yes, we are participating in cultural appropriation, but it is also the case that we have been actively encouraged by our Thai teachers to share this knowledge outside of Thailand.

So, clearly, it’s complicated. But, don’t misunderstand my argument: these extenuating circumstances don’t absolve us from considering the implications and ethics of our own participation in cultural appropriation. As a long-time practitioner and instructor of Thai healing, I have been thinking about the issue of cultural appropriation for a long time, and discussing it in my Thai massage classes (with all levels of students, including introductory) for almost two decades. Here are some of my thoughts about how to approach our practice of Thai massage and the question of cultural appropriation in an informed and proactive way:

  1. First of all, don’t simply deny the critique. Lean into it. Many aspects of modern Western culture can be critiqued as cultural appropriation.  Educate yourself about the issues, the ethical problems, and the history of each specific case. Adopt a proactive approach. Especially if it is meaningful to you (as a hobby, livelihood, etc.), you need to see the issues clearly and be able to articulate where you stand.
  2. If you are somehow earning a living from a Thai practice, give a portion back to Thailand in the form of charitable giving. In my opinion, setting a percentage and sticking to it is probably the best way to do this. (In my own case, 10% of the sales of my Findhorn books has gone to Thai charities.) The argument that you can’t afford to give charity doesn’t hold water, since even a small sum goes a long way when converted into baht.
  3. Honor the traditions and their Thai origins when you discuss, teach, and practice them. Educate yourself about Thai history and culture, and always remember that we have been able to “borrow” this knowledge because of our privileged position as educated, wealthy Americans/Canadians/Europeans.
  4. Perhaps most critical is to maintain humility. Constantly remind yourself that we are not the “masters” or “ajahns” of this tradition. We are translators, facilitators, and proponents of Thai massage, but we should always direct our students’ and clients’ admiration and gratitude back to Thailand as the source of any wisdom we think we have gained from this practice.

I share my thoughts here as someone who has been thinking about the issue of cultural appropriation for a long time, first as a practitioner, then as an instructor, and now as a scholar of Asian medicine. I have discovered that there is no simple, one-size-fits-all answer for the ethical questions this issue raises. Rather, each person needs to think through the issues on their own.

Where do you stand? Your thoughts on this issue are welcome in the comments. The most important thing is that we keep talking about this.