The case for cultural appropriation

In her book, Who Owns Culture?, the American lawyer Susan Scafidi argues that wearing a dress belonging to another culture without permission from a member of that group constitutes ‘appropriation’, but doing the same with permission – for instance, when an Indian family invites one to the Diwali festival and asks one to dress in a sari – is appreciation.

In contrast, in The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, the cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that the idea of cultural essentialism is ripe for the waste bin. Not least because ‘all cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixture’. To speak of cultural ownership, therefore, is to invoke the tired language of intellectual property employed by large corporations; it stymies cultural interaction among peoples.

In my view, the Boasian view gets it right: the charge of cultural appropriation is an empty one since every culture is the product of other cultures. Consider language, one of the main components of culture. Every language has borrowed from other languages. What would Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, French and Italian languages be without Vulgar Latin, from which they evolved? As West Germanic languages, English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish and Luxembourgish share, to varying degrees, common terms, syntax and semantics.

By the same token, the pidgins, creoles and patois that exist in many former European colonies are derivatives of their European counterparts. These languages are the cumulative result of diffusion and modification; they all spring from processes of cultural borrowing.

The demarcation between ‘cultural insiders’ and ‘cultural outsiders’ is problematic, too. Determining ‘cultural membership’ risks creating racial divisions. People would be excluded from participating in a particular cultural practice simply because they do not satisfy a rigid cultural understanding of group membership.

To claim cultural authenticity, and thus make culture an intellectual property, is to bar humanity from borrowing the best practices and ideas from around the world. Yoga is of Indian origin but it has spread far and wide. It would make no sense for people to abandon Yoga just because of its ancient Indian origin.

To be blunt, we need more rather than less cultural appropriation in order to promote global understanding and make the world a better place. We must refuse to subscribe to a view of culture that depicts borrowing as antithetical to human progress. The Persian poet Rumi advised that we should ‘come to the root of the root of ourselves’. Surely, our cultural borrowings are our roots? Adele’s donning of Bantu knots should be celebrated as a sign of our interconnectedness, not demonised as sinful ‘appropriation’.

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