The Trouble with Cultural Appropriation
Examine why the line between cultural exchange and exploitation resists tidy definition, and why the underlying question of power refuses to disappear.
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Few contemporary disputes generate more heat with less illumination than the charge of cultural appropriation. The accusation has become almost reflexive in certain quarters, and the rebuttals — that culture has always been promiscuous, that pastiche is the engine of art, that nothing of significance is invented in isolation — have hardened into matching reflexes. What is lost in this volley is the more interesting question that lies beneath the slogans: not whether borrowing across cultures is permissible in principle, which it manifestly is and always has been, but under what conditions a particular borrowing constitutes exchange and under what conditions it slides into something closer to extraction.
The difficulty, and the reason no clean rule has emerged, is that the wrong being named is not really about the act of borrowing at all but about the asymmetry of power within which the borrowing takes place. When a designer in Paris adapts the embroidery patterns of a community whose artisans cannot afford to attend the fashion week at which their motifs are showcased, the offence is not that adaptation occurred — adaptation is the lifeblood of fashion — but that the chain of value flowed in only one direction. Were the relation reversed, with the originating community profiting visibly from the adaptation and credited as collaborators, what looked like appropriation would, in many cases, look unremarkably like commerce.
This is what makes the standard riposte — that everyone borrows, so no one may complain — so unsatisfying. It is true and beside the point. Borrowing under conditions of equality and borrowing under conditions of conquest are not the same act, even when the surface gesture looks identical. A young Japanese musician studying jazz in New Orleans and a colonial administrator collecting sacred objects for a metropolitan museum both transport cultural material across borders, but to treat these as equivalent transactions is to mistake formal symmetry for moral symmetry. The relevant question, which the rule-seekers tend to dodge, is whether the originating community had any meaningful capacity to refuse, to negotiate, or to share in the proceeds.
Yet the discourse, having identified a real injustice, has not always been responsible in its application. The hair, food, music, and dress of every culture are visited upon, and visit upon, every other; were strict provenance enforced, the cuisines of half the world’s restaurants would dissolve, and the catalogues of every major record label would shrink to embarrassment. To hunt for the pure expression of any tradition is generally to hunt for a fiction; the supposedly authentic dish or rhythm typically discloses, on examination, layers of prior absorption from elsewhere. Critics who treat cultural boundaries as sacred and impermeable risk smuggling in a static conception of identity that is, ironically, more colonial than the practices they oppose.
What survives this thicket of complications is something less satisfying than a rule but more useful than a slogan: a set of questions worth asking before the offending T-shirt is printed or the festival headliner is booked. Who profits? Who is credited? Was anyone asked? Could the originating community have refused, and would that refusal have been honoured? These will not yield decisions automatically, and reasonable people will weigh the answers differently. But they redirect attention from the surface scandal of borrowing — which is a perennial human practice and not the issue — to the structural question of whether a given exchange occurs between something approximating equals or merely repeats, in cultural register, the older choreographies of taking.
Questions
According to the first paragraph, what does the writer suggest is the more interesting question beneath debates about cultural appropriation?