"You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour"
About this Quote
Guthrie lands the jab where it hurts: on the people who wrap themselves in cultural anxiety like a flag while quietly cashing in on the very community they claim to defend. The line moves with the rhythm of a folk protest song - plainspoken, almost conversational - then turns accusatory. "Art, and dances..". reads like he can barely be bothered to list the pageantry, because the real story is economic. Culture becomes a convenient spectacle, something to mourn performatively, while labor exploitation stays politely offstage.
The intent is less to dismiss cultural loss than to expose who gets to define it. When "their culture" is treated like property, the guardians often end up looking like owners. Guthrie's subtext is that cultural preservation, in the mouths of the powerful, can function as a smokescreen: a moral panic that distracts from wages, working conditions, land, and agency. If you're truly worried about a culture being "wiped out", you don't start by underpaying the people who make it.
Contextually, Guthrie comes out of an American folk lineage that treats music as a witness statement - Woody Guthrie's labor politics filtered through Arlo's wry, anti-authoritarian tone. It's also a critique that travels well beyond the 1960s: today, you can hear it in tourism economies, in "heritage" branding, in corporate diversity campaigns that celebrate aesthetics while outsourcing suffering. The punch of the quote is its refusal to let culture stay symbolic; it drags it back into the ledger, where hypocrisy is easiest to measure.
The intent is less to dismiss cultural loss than to expose who gets to define it. When "their culture" is treated like property, the guardians often end up looking like owners. Guthrie's subtext is that cultural preservation, in the mouths of the powerful, can function as a smokescreen: a moral panic that distracts from wages, working conditions, land, and agency. If you're truly worried about a culture being "wiped out", you don't start by underpaying the people who make it.
Contextually, Guthrie comes out of an American folk lineage that treats music as a witness statement - Woody Guthrie's labor politics filtered through Arlo's wry, anti-authoritarian tone. It's also a critique that travels well beyond the 1960s: today, you can hear it in tourism economies, in "heritage" branding, in corporate diversity campaigns that celebrate aesthetics while outsourcing suffering. The punch of the quote is its refusal to let culture stay symbolic; it drags it back into the ledger, where hypocrisy is easiest to measure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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