ap·pro·pri·a·tion
/əˌprōprēˈāSH(ə)n/ noun
The action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission. "The appropriation of parish funds."
Example: critics have admonished non-Indigenous people for
wearing feathered headdresses or traditional regalia as costumes for Halloween.
From language to the herding of food animals, inventions quickly become community property. At least predating intellectual property law, the term “cultural appropriation” was nonexistent. Culture is essentially the development of shared property, sourced between cultures, across time. It is not proprietary to individuals or to even groups.
The modern wish to own and control familiar icons, expressions, even possessions, and to determine how and by whom they can be used, is a limited, non-historical, and idealized notion balancing control over artifacts and ideas against the natural need to innovate, borrow, and connect. With the advent of major cities from Rome onward, the world became a stage for models of idea-sharing and the dynamic of a creative commons.
Even the settlements of the most recent Ice Age saw the flowering of arts and invention, on the way to the shared wealth of cultural exchange. Since the Middle Ages, cultural acceleration worldwide gave us the mechanical clock, printing press, the compass, and paper money (with China a major contributor). At least historically, it is not an act of bullying, in which what’s yours is taken away to become mine—the “without permission” edge of appropriation--but the connectivity of cultures that has been key to their development and flourishing.
The shared mental construct of language—we don’t know when language was first born, or where - is the shared legacy of many thousands of years by the billions of homo sapiens. As more dominant economies produce and disseminate products, ideas, images, and stories, it becomes clear that these have contrasting functions and meanings across cultures and varying impacts as well. World culture is a marketplace of ideas that shapes both originators and adaptors. Imports also show a valuing of the foreign for its own sake, as in French wine and cuisine, Russian caviar, and Italian cars. American films, jeans, tobacco, and music are world exports long shared as first-world status symbols. As Americans, this wide adoption of our icons is accepted as a natural process along with the rise of democratic rule.
The adaption of Buddhism to American ideals, and its understanding in the contemporary US as against its ancient Indian origins and Chinese dominance, is another case in point. The Japanese tea ceremony is an unrepeatable “transience” experience. Christianity is worldwide, but the practice and ideology looks different even between North and South America, vividly apparent in the contrast between Anglo and Latin themeing of churches.
Appropriation is a decision-making process of group evolution. Of all the possible choices we make, none are pre-determined; experimentation leads to finding the imported solutions and accommodation that make the most sense and therefore, over time, catch on. When times change, the desire for and use of imports (like foreign loan words) change, leaving most in the dust. The universal bias toward copying, importing, sharing, and improving can be read in the history of trade (imports and exports).
This dissemination can be handed back to the authentic origin, sometimes without recognition that it was even adapted by Culture B from Culture A. St. Patrick’s Day, for example, is heavily celebrated in Ireland only because American tourists have come to expect it to be celebrated as in the US (which it never was, by tradition), making March 17 a large share of tourist revenue. Before this, it was a day of worship wearing a shamrock complete with roots and dirt. Tivoli Gardens, inspired by Italy, was adopted in Copenhagen where it began the process of inspiring the theme park in the mind of a tourist, Walt Disney. Inspiration and adaptation are in no way cultural appropriation but an example of the power of the open flow of ideas.
Seashell and cowrie (snail) beads have been described as the original personal decoration (“adornment” in anthropology). Both personal and social identity can be communicated—and are still—by the jewelry we wear. The beads go back 300,000 years and are touted as the start-point of self-awareness and social status. But this doesn’t account for less durable goods, like flowers, seeds, wood, feathers, and other perishable “pre-jewelry.”
“Sudden events” have long obscured long-term origins, says archaeologist Alexander Marshack in The Roots of Civilization (1991). Marshack proposes the concept of “cognitive archaeology,” the record of how homo sapiens have seen, abstracted, symbolized, and imaged their world in time and space as a way of dealing with reality. He calls this approach “a part of the ongoing and broadening inquiry into the nature of being human.” His analysis of the African Ishango bone for its mathematical genius and the transition from the lunar to solar calendar illustrate this cumulative appreciation of culture.
“Transhumance” was mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski’s term for cultural evolution beyond the biological, spanning many eons, back beyond Ice Age inventions. In his exploration for “great moments of human invention” he notes: “In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world…. That series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution…. Man ascends by discovering the fulness of his own gifts.” (The Ascent of Man, 2013).
Like following reindeer herds, which the Lapps continue to do, group inventions quickly become community property. Cultural appropriation has only suddenly been invented in the sense of unjustified purloining--which it clearly is not. Denim jeans are an American creation. Should they be restricted only to the American-born? In some countries they are considered a status symbol, and you will be approached on the street with offers to buy the ones you are wearing. American Cultural innovations over time are enduring as untitled public goods: the accumulated property of all generations. Since language, fire, tools, and weapons, the pencil, Mercator map, and the theory of evolution, this common wealth has accelerated the pace of progress from the calculating machine to the current artificial intelligence frontier.
The mark of multiculturalism is a global culture that emerged thousands of years before the digital age or the World Wars. This ongoing traffic in ideas, objects, and practices is a mapping of memes that enjoy a life of their own by repetition, imitation, and morphing. A French Academy can’t hope for a pure French language or expect its speakers to bar “foreign” elements. When you teach me how to read, that transfer doesn’t subtract from your abilities in reading—nor in your further ability to teach innumerable others.
Wherever invented, no group or locale has a lock on the idea of either written or spoken language, nor what is written or spoken within them. This is the way culture works – and in fact, what it is. Its higher values are what make it a unique civilization or singular cultural influence on the rest of the planet, not just its content, its museum of people, places, and things. Do Brits complain about “colonials” holding high tea? This ritual looks different in Bangalore than in Birmingham, because shaped by the borrowing culture, keeping some elements while letting go of others as less consonant with its needs. On the other hand, the pineapple and Boxing Day in Great Britain are Christmas symbols that never mingled with American yule traditions. These are rooted in invisible but highly active class values.
The complex nature of culture and cultures, now a global showcase for interacting material, ethical, and economic processes, causes the journey of appropriation to become widespread, rapidly evolving, and tricky to model or track. Overall, mass media and social media have made the mapping of material and social diffusion increasingly complicated. One thing is certain: Cultural exchange is happening at an increasing rate and will not be slackening anytime soon. We can only look to the collective fruits of that exchange over time as a promise, not a threat, of more to come.
