With Halloween fast approaching, it’s time to consider safe trick-or-treating for kids, whether the carved pumpkin will have a happy or scary face — and whether the costumes to be worn with pride violate the relatively new doctrine of cultural appropriation.
Human society, or culture, progresses through two different but not necessarily mutually exclusive paths: 1) through independent invention and 2) through diffusion (borrowing). While independent invention is rare, borrowing is common.
Historically, it occurs when members of two different cultures come into contact. Once this contact occurs, members of each group may be exposed to new technologies, beliefs, knowledge, weapons, cooking techniques, clothing, or art. This common routine of contact, followed by borrowing, has flourished since the first humans roamed the earth. Once exposed to new cultural ways, members of each culture can choose to accept, reject, or modify them. Only when one group is dominant over another and forces subordinate members to adopt its beliefs and technology does acculturation become coercive.
The progress of human cultural evolution has been possible primarily through selective cultural acquisition. How did this progressive human process pass into its contemporary negative connotation?
In today’s United States, we are said to value diversity and even claim that it is America’s “greatest strength.” We continue to pay homage to the notion of “America, the Great Melting Pot” and our oft-stated commitment to multiculturalism. After all, is there a college or university today that doesn’t have an Office of Multicultural Affairs?
However, somewhere along this evolutionary tale, the appropriation (borrowing) of a cultural object, dress, belief, hairstyle, clothing, food, art, etc. from another culture, not only did he become repulsive; it can now result in the exposed perpetrator being censored, shamed, shunned, expelled from school or even fired. As an early example, in 2015 the University of Ottawa’s student government association canceled yoga classes, claiming they represented an insensitive example of cultural appropriation.
The current and negative concept of cultural appropriation is a relatively new phenomenon. Its roots can be traced to America’s universities during the early 1980s, when it emerged from the academic movement of post-colonial revisionism. Although the term “cultural appropriation” was added in 2017 to the Oxford English Dictionary, it does not enjoy a widely accepted definition. For example, during the Halloween season three years ago, a USA Today reporter asked for “experts” on cultural appropriation. One of those “experts,” Neal Lester, director of his Humanities Project at Arizona State University, defined cultural appropriation as “taking elements of someone else’s culture without permission!”
The obvious question that arises from Lester’s ludicrous definition is, in any given culture, from whom should permission be sought? If your child would like to dress up as Moana for Halloween this year, who is the guardian of traditional Hawaiian culture? Do you have to ask permission from a full-blooded Hawaiian of principal status, or would a Hawaiian of more ordinary status suffice? Should such permission be in writing and notarized?
Did Katy Perry commit an unforgivable sin when she wore a traditional Geisha costume to the 2013 American Music Awards, or was Perry just trying to pay homage to traditional Japanese geisha culture? Perry’s critics labeled her actions an inappropriate and insensitive display of cultural appropriation.
How do we draw the line between appreciating a culture’s cuisine, beliefs, dress, and technology, versus appropriating such cultural elements? The appreciation and subsequent appropriation of various cultural objects and beliefs form the backbone of human evolution.
It seems that diversity can only be our strength when others determine how and if it can be earned and celebrated. A widely accepted and alternative definition of cultural appropriation states that it occurs when “a member of a majority group benefits financially from the culture of a minority group.” It is likely that many academics would have a problem with this definition, since any professor who is a member of the majority group would be prohibited from earning a salary for teaching courses about African, Asian, Latin American, Eastern cultures, societies Central or Native American. , history, art, literature or cuisine. That day may come if we continue down the slippery slope of revisionist cultural appropriation. After all, revolutions often backfire to the point where their followers eat their own.
Remember when picking out a Halloween ensemble was fun and exciting rather than nerve-wracking? I wonder if any of those capitalistic suit manufacturing companies that profit from their cultural appropriation strategies have a variety of snowsuits.
Richard A. Marksbury is a cultural anthropologist and a professor emeritus of Tulane University.
