appropriation & commodification
how to be a witch without stealing
“authenticity [plays a]…constitutive role in shaping the practices of vernacular religions.” (Romberg 2003, 257)
How does witchcraft get commodified? How do you know if you’re appropriating someone else’s culture? What does all this have to do with authenticity? We’re getting into all these questions with today’s sources.
What we’re reading
- Keene, “Sephora’s Starter Witch Kit’ and Spiritual Theft”
- Joho and Sung, “How to Be a Witch without Stealing Other People’s Cultures”
- Romberg, “The Halloween Extravaganza,” from Witchcraft and Welfare
Keywords
- appropriation
- commodification
- authenticity
commodification, appropriation, and authenticity
We talked a bit about commodification in our last conversation. Commodification, you remember, is the transformation of concepts, practices, histories, and materials into things that can be bought and sold.
Joho & Sung and Keene are helping us think through how to recognize appropriation, which is what we call it when members of a privileged group (for example, white folks in the United States) remove a minoritized group’s resources, teachings, material culture, and/or practices from their original contexts and adopt them for their own purposes, profit, and pleasure, often to the detriment of the minoritized group.
Does this sound an awful lot like colonialism? It sure does. Guess why.
That’s right! Commodification + appropriation = financial colonialism, basically. The philosophy is the same; it’s just corporations and consumers instead of nations who are extracting the value from minoritized communities.
Witchcraft and magic-working provide a useful framework for us to think about commodification and appropriation, and how they can be harmful to minoritized groups. Commodification changes a bundle of white sage, which some Native folks harvest and use in their ritual practices, into a thing you can buy at Sephora. Sephora makes money because consumers (here: primarily white women) identify the commodified sage as authentic (connected to and representative of a “real,” essential, unchanging cultural identity). Sephora offers the sage AS valuable because of its supposed authenticity— as an object and as a connection to Native religious practices.
Appropriation happens when consumers (again, in this case primarily white women) want to possess and access authenticity without supporting the community from which the authenticity derives. Simply put: white ladies want to buy a “starter witch kit” at Sephora in part because they see white sage as authentically witchy, because of its connection to Native ritual practices. But no Native people benefit from the sale of this “authentic” object. Sephora isn’t kicking back profits to or fighting discrimination against Native folks. And in treating this bundle of sage as something to just buy because they want to be “authentically” witchy, consumers ignore the violent oppression of Native religion in the United States until 19-freaking-78.
That’s right: until roughly 40 years ago, the official policy of what is now the United States was to eradicate Native religion. The US removed Native children from their families, attempted to stamp out their cultures and their languages, and punished Native people for trying to practice their religions. And this oppression isn’t over. 30 years ago, the Supreme Court refused to protect Native religious practices if those practices contradicted state laws. The US is still prioritizing corporate profit over Native peoples’ sacred land. So when we’re talking about appropriation, we’re not talking about hurt feelings or people being offended. We’re talking about corporations and consumers both ignoring and profiting off violent systemic oppression.
European colonizers punished enslaved Black people and their descendants for practicing African Diasporic Religions like Yoruba, Lucumí, and Vodou, and their offshoots, Conjure/Hoodoo/rootwork. European colonizers punished attempted genocide-surviving Native people for practicing their religions. It matters that minoritized, oppressed peoples are still fighting to practice their religions freely, while corporations like Sephora are strip-mining those same oppressed peoples’ cultures for shit to sell to white ladies. And that’s what we’re talking about today.
Side note: usually this lesson has a mini-lecture about capitalism, but everything takes a million times longer online. Here’s the thread I did at this time last year, just as we were pivoting to distance learning, if you want more info about religion, class, and economic systems.
Keene, “Sephora’s Starter Witch Kit’ and Spiritual Theft”
Dr. Adrienne Keene (Dr. Adrienne K. / @NativeApprops) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. The piece we read for today helps us both understand the role of white sage in Keene’s own daily practice and why the commodification of sage is such a problem.
As you’re reading this piece, think about:
- why smudging is important to Keene
- why the commodification of sage is problematic
- and what all this has to do with witchcraft
A few pull-quotes to get you started:
“In addition to the violent and bloody suppression of Native spirituality through these tactics, our ceremonies were explicitly made illegal, with punishments ranging from fines, to prison sentences, to being sent to asylums for ‘insane Indians.’ This wasn’t just a threat. It was written into law.” (Keene 2018)
What’s the connection Keene draws here between the commodification of Native religious practices and the history of violent colonialism in what’s now the United States?
“That smudge stick represents the deep pain, sacrifice, resistance, and refusal of Native peoples. It represents a continuing legacy of marginalizing and punishing Native spirituality. So when our religious practices are mocked through these products, or folks are commodifying and making money off
our ceremonies it’s not about who has the ‘right’ to buy or sell. It’s about power.” (Keene 2018)
How does Keene help us better understand the stakes of commodification and appropriation?
“We’re not magical creatures, we’re contemporary peoples who are still here, and still practice our spiritual traditions…Positioning Native spirituality as ‘witchcraft’ was also part of the tactics of oppression… So along with placing Native peoples as fantasy creatures, it also draws upon that painful history and collapses diverse Native spiritualities onto the same level as magic crystals.” (Keene 2018)
Why does the commodification of Native religious practices as “witchcraft” matter? What’s at stake here?
Joho and Sung, “How to Be a Witch without Stealing Other People’s Cultures”
“Whether it’s learning of witchcraft’s colonialist history, avoiding practices not meant for you, or creating your own rituals, many Latinx, Indigenous, and Black witches who practice their craft on the web have actionable advice for how we can all do better.”
(Joho and Sung 2020)
This seems like a good goal, yeah? So what strategies do the authors offer us if we want to be witches but don’t want to steal other people’s cultures? Is that even possible? Why or why not?
We’ve already talked about a lot of the issues Joho and Sung raise in this article, so this is a great place to put those earlier sources in conversation with today’s reading. Think about:
- why not everyone might find being called a “witch” liberatory
- why the historical and cultural context of practices and ritual objects matters
- why not all witches should use all practices or ritual objects
- who profits off witchcraft being cool/popular/commodified and why that matters
- how even practices that are meant to be liberatory can recreate systemic inequality (like white cis-heteropatriarchy)
- how witchcraft and magical practices can be tools for fighting back against oppression
- why crediting witches and magical practitioners of color matters
Romberg, “The Halloween Extravaganza”
This is another chapter from Witchcraft and Welfare. In this one, Romberg helps us complicate our thinking of commodification and authenticity. As Keene said: it’s all about power. So how does our thinking about authenticity and commodification shift if minoritized groups are doing the commodifying of their own authenticity?
Think about:
- how “The Halloween Extravaganza” helps us understand brujería as vernacular/lived religion
- the relationship between commodification and authenticity in brujería
“In the context of globalized processes of consumption, the quest for a pristine ‘natural’ experience is a quest that does not escape vernacular religions.” (Romberg 2003, 257)
We’ve already talked about how a perceived authenticity can make magical practices or objects commodifiable.
How does authenticity work to make Cuban brujería commodifiable on Halloween, according to Romberg?
“Instead of being anchored in a specific form, magic draws on the potentialities of infinite materialization, creating new sets of correspondences in its trajectory as it irreverently crosses borders that should not be crossed.” (Romberg 2003, 265)
What does Romberg mean by “infinite materialization?” What relationship is she positing between magic and the marketplace?
“Commodified images of brujería feed in to the need for brujos to create updated images of themselves that do not necessarily betray the ways in which outsiders and insiders have historically imagined them while simultaneously playing with the magic of commodities.” (Romberg 2003, 269)
How does Romberg help us better understand the agency brujos exercise in presenting a marketable image of magical practice?
Brujería COMMODIFIES — it sells — authenticity. Cuba uses brujería to attract tourists (despite historically punishing ADR practitioners). People want to come to these rituals because they’re the “real thing.” But there’s no such thing as an unchanging, essential core to any religious tradition. “Authenticity” is a gimmick.
That said, Romberg shows us that selling authenticity to Halloween tourists doesn’t invalidate the brujos or their practice. Quite the opposite:
And what does all of this have to do with Halloween?
Brujos who do this work haven’t forfeited authenticity (because we can’t access a pure, timeless, untouched past); they’re adapting their lived religion for a transnational context. Basically, if you’re going to have capitalism, religious rituals and lived religion in general is ALWAYS going to change in response to markets.
Lived religion is complicated and sometimes contradictory, so Romberg’s challenging us to see brujería in Cuba and Puerto Rico in its complexity, rather than decide ahead of time what practitioners are or should be doing or what their work should mean. Ultimately, brujos and brujas decide how brujería gets practiced and why — and Romberg says that these religious experts are shaping brujería in the context of global capitalism. (Remember when she talked about spiritualized materialism? This is what she means.)
We’ll talk more about how commodification shapes lived religion and how it can benefit historically minoritized people and communities when we talk about the Hoodwitch next month.
Next time, you’re re-watching Daughters of the Dust and writing your reflection threads in conversation with the assigned sources for this unit. Don’t forget to include the class hashtag (#NUwitches) so other students can read & respond to your work! And then we get to take a catch-up day: no assignments; just vibes.
