Is Cultural Appropriation Really A Problem?

The Wiki describes cultural appropriation as “the adoption of elements of one culture by members of another culture.” Forgive me, but that is the weakest definition that I’ve ever heard. Maybe it’s like pornography: nobody knows how to describe it, but we’re supposed to know it when we see it.

The problem with that approach is that some people see cultural appropriation everywhere. I’ve come across some efforts to focus the inquiry, such as mention of a power-imbalance (it’s only cultural appropriation when a more powerful culture borrows a piece of a less powerful culture), or the suggestion that former colonial rulers must never appropriate aspects of the cultures of their former colonies. It all leads to further confusion and perverse results. What happens when those injunctions clash? England is the former colonial power for America, but America is now vastly more powerful than England. Who is allowed to steal from whom?

There are clear examples of cultural appropriation that are wrong. A recent example from Australia occurred in the artistic realm. A non-aboriginal artist was creating paintings that borrowed heavily from aboriginal artistic traditions. He got dinged good for that one, and not without reason. I don’t know how far you can take that one, though. The modern art museums of the world are chock full of paintings and sculptures that employ motifs from cultures that the artists did not share. Many of these are high quality works of great innovation that obviously rely primarily on the talent of the person whose name is on the piece. A good example is Picasso borrowing from African art in his early cubist paintings.

Do we give Mr. Picasso a pass while heavily censoring Mr. No-Name Australian painter? I’ll let you be the judge. How much weight are we going to give talent and celebrity? That’s a tough one.

Many of the examples that come to mind take place on the commercial level. Let’s say that I have a gas station on I-10 in Arizona, and that I have attached thereto a store that sells “authentic Indian artifacts,” along with cowboy belts, hot sauce, and jewelry made with rattle-snake skulls. I own the whole set-up. Many of the artifacts are authentic, too, but many of the Apache Kachina dolls, let’s say, were actually made by Navajo Indians. Maybe some of the employees at the store are Apaches, and they don’t seem to care. Is actual injury an element of proof in cultural appropriations?

It would be clearer if I was selling “genuine” Navajo rugs, or “genuine” Apache Kachina dolls, that had been made in Bangladesh. That would be wrong, even if there were Navajos or Apaches working in the store. Would it also be wrong if I were selling Apache war bonnets, the typical feathered kind, made by Indians? Made, perhaps, by Apaches? Well, definitely wrong if the buyer wore it to football games and he was a fan of the Washington Redskins. But what if he just hung it respectfully in his man-cave, which had a western theme? No football involved. These are tough questions.

What if the two cultures have grown up in the same space, at the same time? Constantly borrowing from one another? We often hear about cultural appropriation regarding the theft of black American music by white Americans. The intimate nature of the relationship should in itself render the accusation ridiculous. It is absolutely beyond argument that jazz is the cultural product of black America, but upon closer inspection one immediately notices that the music has always been played on instruments that arose from white American or European culture, and that the jazz music itself borrows heavily from standard European musical theory, and is transcribed using the European method. That jazz was innovative and different is certainly true. That jazz arose from the black community and was something brand-spanking new is also true. We might wonder, though, if the adoption of elements of white European/ American musical culture was completely coincidental, or could it be considered an important part in the development of jazz? No similar music arose in Africa. There is also the fact that neighboring white American musicians took to jazz like ducks take to water, mostly out of love for the music. It is very compelling music after all. “Musician” being the toughest component of the show business in which to make a living, it is likely that most of the musicians who incorporated the new music into their repertoires were doing so not only respectfully and out of interest, but also to help themselves in their effort to put food on the table. Would any fellow musician hold that against them?

I would be willing to bet that anyone accusing white musicians of appropriating black American culture was not, themselves, a musician. Musicians realize that all music is theft, and every musician that ever lived was influenced by everything that he heard and incorporated the parts that he liked into his or her playing. This kind of influence has been operating back and forth between black and white American musicians since we all arrived in the Western Hemisphere.

Something very similar can be observed in authentic black blues music. The oldest forms used one chord, and complexity was added with rhythm. The earliest blues form was the call and response singing of work songs. Not long after that black American slave culture added what is called, “fife and drum” music. This remained a one-chord song form, but with the addition of melody to complement the voices and more levels of rhythmic complexity. More melody was added with the innovation of a wire stretched between nails, one on a fence rail and the other on a post. In a more sophisticated form, this became the Diddley Bow, which was portable and used glass bottles to raise the wire above a stout board. Yeah! And you thought Bo Diddley was a farmer! The man was a musicologist!

After the Civil War, black American musicians with guitars or banjos were traveling to make a living singing and playing when and where they could. They learned as many songs and as many styles as possible, because the more versatile they were, the more jobs they could get. They were happy to play at white people’s parties, even if the white people wanted to hear traditional English and Irish folk songs. By the 20^th Century this experience became the OG blues of the 1920s, with roots in every musical style that had been absorbed by the black musicians. What we know as twelve-bar-blues is itself a European song form, and the blues has always used European/ American influences that had been bent to the needs and ingenuity of the black musicians. The “blues scale” is a standard European scale that has been modified for emotional impact by borrowing a feature of African music. Applied to the standard scale, it substitutes flat thirds and flat fifths. Nobody’s getting ripped off here. We are all brothers in the American nation, for better or worse.

Speaking of the same space. I live in South East Asia, and there is a certain type of shadow puppet that is popular in the area. The figures are cut from dried cow skin and painted a bit, and they are manipulated behind screens on sticks and backlit so that the shadows show up nicely on the screen. These stories, and characters, the entire kit-and-kaboodle, are part of the traditions of the cultures of at least three of the countries in the region. Now one of the countries, not the one that I live in, is asserting possession of the art form as part of their unique cultural heritage. Putting aside for a moment the question of who, exactly, in the dim past, came up with the ideas in the first place, how to you forbid entire countries to enjoy an art form that spread organically over an entire region of the world over one thousand years ago? You don’t, in my opinion. I’d call that a “shared” cultural heritage.

I’m thinking that the entire idea of cultural appropriation is a non-starter, except in clear-cut instances where an underprivileged group is clearly being taken advantage of. It’s always a tough call. Pat Boone covering Tutti Frutti to capture the white-only radio market was cultural appropriation. I think that one is clear, because there was no respect in it. It was purely a money transaction. Elvis singing Hound Dog? I’m not so sure. Elvis respected the black music. Sun Records was a salt-and-pepper outfit. They were pitching their records to a mixed audience, and the records were played on radio stations that had mixed audiences. This whole thing is hard to pin down.  

What do you make of this rather strange example? I lived in Kiel one summer long ago, studying German at the local university. There were eighty-five of us in the group, all foreigners, and after hours we often went out to bars. Kiel is a mid-sized, very German city, a bit out of the way and not cosmopolitan in the manner of Frankfort, Hamburg, or Berlin. One place that we liked was both a regular German bar, casual and good humored, with fifteen beers on tap, and almost a regular restaurant, too. Meaning that they had more than the typical few items of German bar food. Where do you focus the cultural appropriations here?  

The bar was called the “Henry VIII Pub.” The entire front of the building was made to look like a timbered, Tudor style shop front. There was a pub sign, featuring Henry, and his likeness was also painted larger than life sized on the building front. The inside was decorated in much the same way, tables, chairs and all, with another large Henry VIII on the wall for good measure;

The owners of the bar were Turks, and almost everyone who worked in the bar was Turkish. There had been many Turks in Germany since the auto industry began inviting them to work in its factories. That would have been, I’m not sure, the 1960s? In any case, the Turkish/German community was well established by 1984. All of these “Turks” spoke native German and anybody under the age of twenty had probably been born in Germany;

The menu was entirely Italian. Mostly pizza, but also offering simple dishes like lasagna, baked ziti, “Mediterranean” salads, cutlets with spaghetti and red sauce, like that. The pizza was delicious. They had a real pizza oven, and there was nothing to complain about with the pizza. I’m a New Yorker, and I was perfectly happy with the pizza. You could notice a slight Turkish note in the sauce, some hints of clove and maybe star anise, allspice or something, but it only added to the experience.

We were standing at the intersection of England, Germany, Turkey, and Italy. Was anybody’s culture being appropriated? These days that would start an argument in some circles. The “Supreme High Council of Neapolitan Pizza” would probably declare that it wasn’t actually pizza at all! There are no cloves in a pizza sauce recipe! Case closed! But I doubt if it’s that simple.

It would be better if we avoided small matters like cultural appropriation and concentrated on the larger issues facing us. Several of those matters threaten the very existence of humanity in particular, if not life on earth in general. Such matters deserve our immediate attention, do they not?