The problem with “cultural appropriation”
I remember the 2010 World Cup for two things: vuvuzelas and Shakira. While most people loved “Waka Waka”, there was also some enraged tweeting about “cultural imperialism”. What right did this white (South) American woman have to come to Africa and sing an African song with a bunch of African musicians? (Other than having a great voice, having loved the song since her childhood, and being invited.) These days, whatever crime Shakira may have committed would go under the heading of “cultural appropriation”. This term, which sounds like something only anthropologists would understand, has recently moved out of left-wing micro-discourse and into the general speech community, particularly after Lionel Shriver upset so many people in Brisbane.
The reaction to Shriver’s speech was typical of the histrionic left. Yassmin Abdel-Magied, for example, wrote an article in The Guardian about how she felt compelled to walk out of the hall, saying to her mother “I cannot legitimise this,” as though merely being in the same room as Shriver somehow legitimised her ideas, and walking out was an act of moral courage. In some cases, of course, we are obliged to walk out of a speech, but Shriver was not using the podium to advocate racial purity or female circumcision; she was merely lampooning a currently fashionable doctrine, not in the vicious manner of the alt-right, but as someone who is more-or-less on the same side — or at least so she thought.
Shriver used a reductio ad absurdum argument to attack the notion of cultural appropriation, starting with a few examples which were already absurd, then arguing that if taken to its logical conclusion, the doctrine could result in the even more absurd situation of writers being unable to write about anyone other than people exactly like them: Europeans couldn’t write about Asians, men couldn’t write about women, straights about gays, atheists about religious believers, young people about old people, and so on.
Shriver’s examples were indeed extreme, and perhaps atypical. I had already blogged about the yoga class in Canada that was closed because some students thought a Westerner teaching yoga was cultural appropriation (they tried to rename it “mindful stretching” but came up against another cultural problem because no one could translate that into French). Another example is worth quoting in full:
Let’s start with a tempest-in-a-teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which — the horror — numerous partygoers wore.
When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.”
The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with “all the students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and demanded that administrators “create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.” The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that “creates an environment where students of colour, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” In sum, the party-favour hats constituted — wait for it — “cultural appropriation.”
Now there’s a thin line between reductio ad absurdum and straw man, or in other words between showing the weird extremes a flawed argument can lead you to, and taking those extremes as representative. Spoilt kids whining that they’ve been “injured” by “lack of empathy” and demanding “safe spaces” make an easy target, but many of those talking about cultural appropriation are serious people with serious grievances. But none of this justifies reacting to her as though she were on a level with Donald Trump.
The tendency of many on the left to assume that anyone who criticises them is evil is a whole other topic; the interesting question here is whether the notion of cultural appropriation is as bankrupt as Shriver claims, and if so, whether anything better can be put in its place.
I think Shriver is right that the idea is fatally flawed. The problem is not merely that people apply the term “cultural appropriation” in a silly way. People apply perfectly sound concepts, like feminism or democracy, in silly ways. The problem with cultural appropriation is that it mirrors the twisted logic of corporate law, where corporations are persons and ideas are property. Cultures are seen as analogous to people (or corporations), and the images, sounds and ideas associated with a culture are seen as their intellectual property, so using them without permission is a violation of intellectual property rights.
But a culture is not a person. It’s not even a bunch of people. It’s something that people do. You can’t ask permission from a culture to use its products because the products are the culture. All you can do is talk to people who are more familiar with the culture than you before using them in public. If you want to use the muezzin’s call to prayer in a video, and you aren’t a Muslim, it would be worth asking some Muslims whether it’s a good idea. (Chances are if it’s a documentary about religion they’ll say yes, and if Miley Cyrus is twerking to it, they’ll say no.) But this is not asking permission from the culture; it’s just trying to be well-informed and not offend people for no good reason.
Likewise, ideas are not property, however hard corporate lawyers try to present them as such. If something is your property, that means that you have exclusive rights to it and can transfer those rights to another person by selling it or giving it away, at which point you no longer have exclusive rights to it, of course. Forcible transfer of those rights is appropriation, whether legal (eminent domain) or illegal (theft). Using the music, art, dress or rituals of another culture is not appropriation because these things are not property in the first place.
This is not semantic nit-picking. Treating ideas as property not only results in ridiculous copyright and patent laws, it leads to the absurdity of the sombrero ban. Sombreros are, in this view, the intellectual property of Mexicans, so non-Mexicans should ask permission to use them. Why this applies to sombreros and not to tequila is not clear. Why should it not also apply to more practical cultural products, so that people should ask permission from the Scots before watching TV, or from the Chinese before wiping their bottoms?
This, then, is the long and winding road that the idea of appropriation leads us down. But as I’ve said, there are serious, genuine grievances that are labelled “cultural appropriation”, and if we abandon, criticise or poke fun at the label, we need to make sure we don’t legitimise the source of these grievances. While the tequila party seems pretty innocent, there are some cases where sombrero-wearing may not be. We’d probably think there was something fishy about a bunch of Trump-supporters in brown-face, riding donkeys, wearing giant sombreros, strumming guitars and going “Ayayayayaay!”
We need another word for the insensitive — or downright hostile — use of culture that doesn’t regard cultures as monolithic entities and doesn’t treat ideas as property. In the meantime, let’s remember that criticising the idea of cultural appropriation doesn’t mean that you think all the things described as cultural appropriation are acceptable, and that criticising the Left doesn’t put you on the Right.
