Sandworms of 'Dune' and ownership of culture

By Jason Lim

"Dune" is one of the defining books of my teenage years. At the end of the 8th grade, as the early summer heat settled oppressively upon the emptying campus on the last day of school, I came across a used book sale in the cafeteria.

I saw a paperback with a giant white worm arising out of an orange and yellow desert and thought that it was cool artwork. So I bought the whole three-book set. As I was walking out, a classmate yelled out, "Great book!" after me when he saw what I was carrying.

For some reason, I felt particularly proud for having been recognized for my literary choice, which actually compelled me to read the book during that summer. Without that compliment, "Dune" could have become just another paperback gathering dust on my shelf.

To be truthful, I barely understood the book. Having grown up on fantasy novels that used action sequences to drive the narrative, I often found the social and political underpinnings of "Dune" to be slow and elusive. But I kept reading because there was an unspoken promise of something deeper and enlightening that I could grasp only if I kept digging into the narrative. Also, what gave "Dune" an almost intoxicatingly exotic and mystical flavor was the liberal borrowing of traditions and terms from the Middle East and Ancient Greece.

This borrowing wasn't just Frank Herbert peppering in foreign terms to seem exotic. The beliefs, words, and traditions were integral parts of how the history of the "Dune" universe came to be. It wasn't far-fetched to believe that the multitude of traditions that originated from Earth would mix and mash in creative ways to create a brand-new world that, while echoing faintly in tantalizing ways, definitely was not of the ancient worlds that it came from.

Consequently, it was also the first book that made me feel as if I could claim my personal cultural inheritance from the totality of the human experience, and not just be pigeonholed into the narrow cultural space of my (accidental) ethnicity.

"Dune" took a story set 20,000 years from now and in a planet many light years away from Earth to give the mental freedom to proudly claim my rightful birthright as a living legacy of all the human civilizations that have gone before me. My ancestors weren't just Koreans living in the Korean Peninsula, defined by surviving narratives that demarcated what it means to be a Korean.

They were the Bedouins of the Sahara, the Sufi mystics, scions of Agamemnon, dancing letters of the Kabbalah, and other countless cultural narratives that Herbert wove into his story. Through a simple book, I could access and appreciate the various cultural traditions of my human ancestors, not as a scholar but as a casual consumer.

That's perhaps why it (wryly) pains me to see the inevitable accusations of cultural appropriation against "Dune" currently coming out of the woodwork. As always, these accusations take cultural appreciation and label it cultural appropriation. In short, the argument is that "Dune" is appropriating Arab or Islamic culture unfairly because it didn't cast Middle Eastern actors in key roles.

It doesn't matter that the concept of ethnicity wasn't mentioned in the original "Dune" book. Sure, you can surmise that people looked differently based on the environments that they lived in, but physical looks weren't put forth as an organizing principle for different, competing groups of humans. Also, the narrative was happening more than 20 millennia from today, where nations that we know today, in fact the actual planet Earth, wouldn't exist even as a footnote to human history.

For the argument of cultural appropriation against "Dune" to make sense, today's Arabs should be able to claim exclusive ownership over a specific segment of human culture as some type of a patentable intellectual property that today's Arabs had nothing to do with creating in the first place.

The accusations lack in logic what they have in manufactured outrage. This is the same for today's cultural appropriation outrage surrounding certain food, music and clothes as well. Culture is at best a snapshot of a set of behaviors and associated artifacts that are products of the dynamic mixing of people and traditions over many years. It's a complex system. Cultural appropriation is akin to assuming that there is a direct cause-effect relationship in a complex system that undulates and morphs over time, because the constraints that bound the system also change.

My argument isn't to downplay the lack of Arab actors in mainstream Hollywood movies. I think representation does matter. I agree with the criticism when patently Asian roles in original material were cast with white actors in a way that took away from the richness of the story.

But there is danger in using accusations of cultural appropriation to expand representation. Not only is the logic faulty, it goes against our human instinct to engage with one another intimately, deeply and inclusively, as we have always done. We would be leaving our children culturally poorer, more isolated, and worst of all, fated to the accidental tribalism of their births.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.