Cultural Expropriation
The term cultural appropriation has been trending for the last few years as our societies start to address past wrongdoings. But when does the fact of denouncing cultural appropriation leads to cultural expropriation instead?
The term “cultural appropriation” needs to exist but should be used with a lot more caution than it is today. It particularly bothers me when it is applied to art.
Cultural appropriation means that someone who doesn’t belong to the culture of a subgroup in society ( usually an oppressed minority either through colonization (i.e: Native Americans, Australian aborigines, etc.. ) or immigration, forced or not (i.e: slavery)) uses an aspect of this culture because they think it’s cool, or want to make fun of it, or want to make money. Those are very different motives and should be viewed very differently. Is it an homage, a parody, a mockery, a business opportunity? Intentions DO matter.
Halloween and Day of the Dead. Different cultural origins, different dates, doesn’t matter…
Day of the Dead imagery with the title of a famous French song about love… Because what screams love more than a pink skull?
Native American snow boarders….
Plastic tikis, 50% off!
“Let’s go camping” decor, and just for fun let’s add some tippis, arrowheads and canoes to the whole thing ….
I have personally been guilty of cultural appropriation. I used to own a miniature Zen Garden that was gifted to me. It was a small container with grey sand, a couple of rocks, a plastic rake and a plastic Buddha statue to decorate the garden. It’s not until a Korean woman came to my house and seemed a little surprised that I had a statue of Buddha as a decorative item that I realized it was not a good idea. It had no religious meaning to me and I was completely oblivious to how this could be considered offensive by someone to whom it meant something. Needless to say, the Zen Garden ended up in the trash. Nobody is perfect, and as long as we learn as we get on in life, we can hope to create a more welcoming place for everyone.
Nevertheless, some denunciations of cultural appropriation leave me dubitative. Dreadlocks, for example. In a few articles I read dreadlocks were mentioned as examples of cultural appropriation. Apparently black people are the only people allowed to wear dreadlocks because it is historically a black hairstyle and white people do not face the same discrimination when they wear it. I want to remind everyone that we’re talking about a haircut. Do we really want to start deciding which haircut people should or shouldn’t wear depending on their origin? Should non-Muslim men be banned from wearing a beard because it doesn’t have the same meaning for them? Or should non-Buddhist monks be banned from shaving their heads?
The hairstyle is not the problem. The problem is that minorities are being treated unfairly, not because of their haircut but because society is racist and will treat people who don’t look like the majority badly. I know that black hair is a battleground, and that black people have often been forced to wear a hairstyle that mimicked the majority just to be able to go to school or have a job. But if everyone starts wearing dreadlocks instead, then dreadlock discrimination should diminish in the same way that wearing tattoos doesn’t raise an eyebrow these days. Unless -as only black people should wear dreadlocks- only Pacific Islanders should be allowed to wear tattoos?
Another example of cultural appropriation I read about was Madonna using voguing in one of her music video. According to the criticism I read, she made a lot of money with the song “Vogue” in 1989 and that’s not fair because she was not part of the gay and black culture that created voguing. Still, she apparently was interested enough to discover new dance styles, and thanks to her, voguing became better known, which surely is a good thing for people who identify with it.
One last example: I know someone who doesn’t use the word “totem” because it has a sacred and very specific meaning to native Americans. Instead, they use the term “stacking sculpture”. If that makes them feel better about the way Native Americans have been treated, why not? But words have several different meanings, and if we purge languages from all the words that we are not using properly based on their original meaning, few words will be left. “Entrée”, the word Americans are using to mean “main course” actually means starter. As a Native French speaker, it bothers me every time I see it on a menu (actually, menu also has a different meaning, but whatever…). Am I going to ask everyone to stop using “entrée” and use “main course” instead? No, because it’s not worth it. Languages are free to evolve, words travel and the fact that Americans use “entrée” incorrectly doesn’t prevent me from using it the way I want.
Our societies feel guilty about the way they have treated their minorities -as they should, one hundred percent – but in my mind the cultural appropriation police is trying to make amends in the wrong way. Minorities need some kind of reparation, either cash, properties they were not allowed to keep or buy in the past, access to better jobs so all minorities are reflected at every level of society or even access to free education for their kids. There are lots of options. Barring people from using a certain haircut, word or dance style seems quite mundane in comparison. But it’s free and that’s an easy way to feel like you are doing something about the problem.
Cultural appropriation invades everything - language, clothes, entertainment, haircuts- except, weirdly enough (and thank God!), food. I’ve never heard yet anyone say they will stop eating tacos because they don’t have Mexican roots. My life would be so much more boring if I was limited to French food (although it could be worse. I could be British 😊!). I love to prepare and eat other cuisines: Asian, Mexican, Indian, Italian, Spanish, Middle-Eastern food. Is it “authentic”? Not completely of course (I haven’t found tamarind paste or preserved lemons yet, so I substitute) but it’s still good and interesting. Cooking seems to be the one place left where we don’t have to feel guilty about embracing (literally gobbling up!) a culture that’s not ours and I am grateful for that. Although I must admit that whenever I see a croissant with ham and cheese in it, I shudder - croissants are not savory!- so I can see how some of my cooking experiments might distress people from other cultures. Still, I love that when we experiment with other cuisines, it’s not called cultural appropriation but fusion instead!
But what about art? Art is a touchy subject because specific types of art belong to specific cultures. Aboriginal paintings from Australia, Native American totems from the Pacific Northwest or petroglyphs from Arizona, Maori jade pendants, all these art styles have very specific, and sometimes sacred, meanings to the cultures who created them. All of these cultures were colonized by western countries which tried to eradicate their people and their cultures, so I completely understand how it would be galling to see the majority who tried to destroy your culture suddenly displaying it with no clue about what it means , just because they think it’s cute. As a glaring example, look at the picture of plastic Hawaiian tikis for sale at the supermarket to create a cheap decoration for summer barbecues at the start of this page. It is not art. It is cultural appropriation from another culture’s art to make a quick buck. There is no respect for either art as a whole or a specific culture in this.
Single artists can protect their art thanks to copyright laws. Maybe we need to create a community copyright that certain tribes and minorities could claim for their own art? In the last example, a cultural Hawaiian association could be denouncing exploitative use of Hawaiian culture and ask for royalties from the corporations making money with their culture? It would be complicated to define who has the authority and which community the art belongs to, but why not try?
However if a true artist is inspired by another culture’s art and wants to incorporate it into their own art, it seems like a crime not to let them. Van Gogh painted Japanese style paintings and Picasso was inspired by African masks in his paintings, leading to the creation of cubism. Are these cultures poorer because these major artists were inspired by their art? It was not a parody or a mockery, it was a genuine interest in different styles of art. In the same way that we have the concept of freedom of speech, we should have “freedom of art”. People abuse freedom of speech and yet it is a crucial concept. Art should belong to everyone, barring actual copyright of course, although with digital art nowadays, defining who created some art is very hazy when artists use “found” images in their work.
African Mask. ( Bartimaeus01, Fang Ngil Berlin IIIC6000, CC BY-SA 4.0 ) Compare with Picasso’s “ head of sleeping woman” to see how the artist was inspired by African art in his own paintings.
Picasso (again) supposedly said “bad artists copy, good artists steal”. Every artist gets inspired by other artists and other styles, but the ones that manage to transform this inspiration and turn it into their own work are the true artists.
I use a Japanese technique (Nerikomi) in my ceramic work. I never took a class because none was offered where I live. Instead, I pieced it together from books and You Tube videos and it’s probably not authentic, which is not a problem to me because I want to create my own designs. Should I stop because I am not Japanese and have never set foot in Japan? And if I decided to move to Japan, at what point would I be worthy of using this technique? One year? Five years? Never?
This conversation has much bigger repercussions. Let’s imagine an Australian artist who has always lived in Australia and wants to incorporate Aboriginal painting techniques in their art. Should they be able to do this if they are not aborigines? Should the fact that they have lived with that culture since birth count? It is a dangerous debate, because if you don’t think they’re entitled to be inspired by a type of art that originated on the land they’re always lived on then it means that every immigrant on the surface of the earth is forever barred from identifying with the culture of the new country they call home. It means that you can never belong to more than one place, stuck forever with cultural roots that you never chose. I obviously disagree with this idea. I have lived for more than a year in four different countries in my life, and I have been inspired by all their cultures, not just the first one I happened to be born in. They all changed me in some ways.
Diversity is a great thing and recognizing the horrible things that so many cultures around the globe were and are still subjected to should not entitle us to create barriers between our cultures and our arts. Yes, there is such a thing as cultural appropriation, and we should be mindful not to fall into it. But let’s not swing all the way toward cultural expropriation either. Art belongs to everyone.