Culture Swap
The post industrial world has come with the luxury of factory produced items in bulk, which translates to the availability of products that have equal aspects of functionality and aestheticism, beyond just buying for an item because of it’s necessity. There are over hundreds of thousands of chairs, for example, available on the market that fulfill the purpose of a chair, to have a place to sit, and all vary based on someone’s personal preference of size, look, and feel. However, before we were able to mass-produce items, creating an explosion of options available to buyers, we did not just live in a black-and-white world with identical copies of items that just served their functional purpose.
Every day objects created through different cultural origins and cultures with different traditions may look different and may be made differently, all depending on where they came from. This allows for the idea of people being able to show their cultures through the objects they create, whether that be a bamboo-woven chair or a plushy leather couch. Now, with the ability to mass-produce items, and the very easy access to a look inside alternate areas around the world through the creation of the internet, certain countries and areas may take from other’s traditional creations for themselves. With this, the question of whether or not this is a good thing or bad thing arises. On one hand, if someone, settled in Ohio, finds a traditionally Indian piece of furniture, such as a hand carved wooden cabinet embellished with floral designs, going well with the color scheme in their home, what are the implications of buying a mass-produced/ made-in-Germany carbon copy of such thing, or even the implications of having this piece originally from India shipped personally to the user? Are they capitalizing on the beauty of the object, disregarding the cultural traditions that came with it, just for a nice side table in their home?
At what point does culture-swapping become offensive and insensitive? Does it give certain objects a place to be discovered and appreciated by different cultures? Or does it take away from the importance of the original object and everything that led up to it’s creation itself?
