You’re at a house party and a woman you don’t know won’t stop blabbering to the group about her three-month trip to India and Nepal.
“I just got back! Like six months ago,” she says, raising her voice to compete with the music.
It’s the third time she’s recounted this anecdote tonight in your earshot, but her tone is no less dramatically wise. The people around her are all ears, listening to her recount the weeks she spent in a village “helping” widows sew products for import for a “social enterprise”. As she speaks, you can’t help but wonder how much money is actually going back into the community in the country you were born in.
“The women there are so oppressed,” she explains between sips of beer. “I taught them so much about finding their voices as feminists. It felt so good to give something back.”
Do you remember when the internet burst into flames around 2016, when the number of white women at music festivals donning Indian bindis and Native American headdresses increased dramatically? The term ‘cultural appropriation’ then entered the mainstream vernacular.
Cultural appropriation is when a person exploits aspects of someone else’s culture as an aesthetic without understanding any of its significance, nor being invited to participate in it. It is usually done by those with greater privilege (i.e. white people), and it infuriates people of colour like myself because they receive praise for the exact thing that we are judged for. When the white woman wears a bindi, she looks exotic and cool; but when we wear it, we are immigrants who refuse to assimilate.
Most of the discourse about cultural appropriation focuses on the use of clothing, accessories and hairstyles by those who do not belong to that culture, but what is more difficult to explain is when people barge into the sociological and psychological nuances of a culture without being invited in. This kind of behaviour is much more detrimental, as it is harder to pinpoint and often gets overlooked, yet leaves the biggest impact.
When people take a singular experience of travel or dialogue with someone from another culture, and then document or share it with their audience back home – making sweeping generalisations – they actively create and perpetuate stereotypes, like that woman at the party.
Let’s look at another example. You come to Nepal because you are tired of your hedonistic lifestyle. You are in search of a spiritual awakening, and one day, an old priest looks you dead in the eye, into your soul, and rubs a streak of tika on your forehead. Now you have renamed yourself Guru Rameshworand and charge other white people to come to your pseudo-spiritual classes. This is not only misleading and a wildly inaccurate portrayal of Hinduism, but you are actively profiting from a culture that you are not a part of without giving a single dollar back to the community.
White people need to understand that they were born with an inbuilt Bose speaker.
When you speak, the world listens intently, trusts you, and glorifies your words. For everyone else, microphones cost a large sum, the batteries are often broken and, when we speak, we would be lucky for our words to reach the people down the street.
As a Nepali woman, what I have noticed are white tourists who come to Nepal to discover the “fascinating culture that is beyond anything they know” and ask very inappropriate, uncomfortable questions to local people in that pursuit. Are crossing boundaries more acceptable when done by ignorant members from another culture? Does it become more okay because you are white?
Every Nepali person is assumed to be an enthusiastic teacher and nominated representative of the culture, on call to answer any random question, and when we don’t know the exact reason why the sari is 5.5 metres long, white tourists are shocked and low-key judgemental Please leave us alone. You don’t approach a stranger in Australia on the street and ask about Indigenous genocide or why everyone loves binge drinking, because you would very quickly be told to fuck off.
It is not my job nor responsibility to educate you or share intimate details about my family, the values and attitudes that oppress me and the people I know. It is not our job, and yet so many white people expect every single Nepali person to chirp easy anecdotes about the culture, sugary things that make them feel good:
“In our culture, guest is next to God. Please, please wear the sari, it looks so nice on you. We love to share, to give. Come stay in my house, eat, drink and sleep for free. Guest is God.”
People of colour are always the sidekick to the white protagonist’s story, even in our own country, even in telling our own narratives.
We are out here living our multifaceted lives, just as you are. We are grappling with paradoxes such as getting Master’s Degrees while being expected to have an arranged marriage with someone of the same caste. How can I explain why that happens? You cannot ask about sensitive topics like why my parents had an arranged marriage if they are so progressive, or why my family has a domestic helper. You cannot expect locals to be completely vulnerable with you for your very selfish and ignorant pursuit of knowledge.
There is an enormous difference between me sharing how my grandmother’s life has been shaped by the patriarchy compared to you demanding to know about it. It is about self-agency, about whose voice the story is told in, and whether that story is shared from a place of resilience or whether it is snatched as an example of “the Other’s oppression”.
If you are not invited in – to clothing, hairstyles, or more importantly, deeper sociological and psychological aspects of a culture – do not barge in like you understand more about our lives than we do and that you are the white saviour here to knock sense into us.
“Why don’t you give money to the beggars? Don’t you feel bad for them?”
“Why don’t you wear that skirt outside? You can wear whatever you want!”
“Why don’t you just go into the temple on your period? It’s totally okay!”
“Why don’t you just tell your parents you are moving out? You are an adult!”
I KNOW SALLY. Thank you for enlightening me to the fact that I deserve full rights of freedom of movement and choice as a woman. I had no idea! I will do exactly those things right now. Thank you for empowering me; you can go home now.
According to writer and author Julie Zeilinger, white feminism is “prioritising the experiences and voices of cisgender, straight, white women over women of colour, queer women and those who fall outside this narrow identity,” and links closely with a white saviour complex in travel narratives.
White feminism is obnoxious and harmful both at home and when we travel. When a white feminist travels overseas and is confronted with women whose realities are very different from hers, her privilege smacks her across the face. Brimming with white guilt, she will proceed to do one of two things:
- Aim to educate and uplift women of colour through her own personal lens and western worldview which is completely irrelevant and offensive, and/or
- Aim to raise awareness by speaking to five out of five million women in the country and painting a very limited picture of “the plight of Nepali women”.
Please stop. Sit in your white discomfort. And just listen.
When we travel, we must remember that an outsider’s perspective is just 10 percent of the reality. You see what you what to see, you feel what you want to feel. It is a cycle – you project your fantasies of the country and culture, the locals allow the fantasy, and then you get “proof” that your fantasy is real, so you tell everyone you know about it. But what you don’t realise is that it is all just a wild yet smoothly oiled game where the locals indulge you in your fantasises – simultaneously sucking up to you and laughing at you. The white person must be catered to – the illusion of respect unbroken, but our mockery of your naivety will always prevail.
The inequality created by borders and passports can only begin to lessen when those in privilege drastically change the way they learn about cultural practices and people who are very different from them when they travel. Please understand that your white skin does not immediately make you an expert on any subject, nor does it give you unlimited access to other peoples’ experiences and knowledge. Behave towards strangers how you would behave at home. Respect personal boundaries. You are entitled to absolutely fucking nothing. Observe, listen and participate only when you are invited to do so.
Travel is always personally exciting and enriching, but being an aware and empathetic traveller requires much more introspection and humility.
Cover by Abhay Singh; inset by Shaouraav Shreshtha