Cultural appropriation

And as accusations of improper borrowing increase, what is at stake when boundaries of collective identity are crossed?

And yet this fundamentalism, he suggests, has an eerie solidarity with its seeming opposite, pluralism, the “ever-growing flowering of groups and subgroups in their hybrid and fluid, shifting identities, each insisting on the right to assert its specific way of life and/or culture” — to draw a line; to protect itself. The problem is not so much the act of appropriation in and of itself, for what is a writer’s job but to imagine the lives of others, even if they fail in the attempt; “to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds,” in the words of the French writer As the Philippine-born chef [Yana Gilbuena has written](https://www.seriouseats.com/halo-halo-5195652), halo-halo is “endlessly customizable.” The issue, then, was a lack of history and context; the magazine took liberties without first explaining what it was taking liberties with. Some called it a “desecration.” Certainly these are nontraditional ingredients, but the tradition in this case is only a hundred years old: The Philippines started receiving shipments of ice in the mid-19th century and, Culture is not static, and within a country or a community there are countless variations on and innovations in tradition (which might be even more vigorously internally policed than the experimentation of outsiders). (He is one of the richest artists in the world.) Among its many pieces, it features a near replica of a brass Ife head (rendered by Hirst in gold) from a set of Yoruba sculptures that date back to the 14th or 15th century. And what happens when members of nondominant groups borrow from each other: Does it become a competition to see who has less cultural capital and is thus “permitted” to do such a thing, as in 2017 when the Black basketball player Kenyon Martin called out the Chinese American basketball player Jeremy Lin for wearing his hair in dreadlocks, to which Lin responded by pointing out Martin’s Chinese tattoos? [racial plagiarism](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/qed.4.3.0067),” zeroing in on how “racialized groups’ resources of knowledge, labor and cultural heritage are exploited for the benefit of dominant groups and in ways that maintain dominant socioeconomic relationships.” This is twofold: Not only does the group already in power reap a reward with no corresponding improvement in status for the group copied from; in doing so, they sustain, however inadvertently, inequity. So few slots are available for nonwhite writers that those who break through are sometimes themselves charged with a kind of self-appropriation: self-Orientalizing or minstrelsy, exaggerating elements of their culture for a white gaze; living up to the image that white writers have created for them, the easier to be packaged and sold. (The law, too, draws a distinction between commercial and personal use: For years, the song “Happy Birthday” was under copyright — until a 2015 legal decision invalidated the claim — which meant that people had to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees to include it in a play, movie or TV show or to publicly perform it in front of a large audience; but anyone could sing it to family and friends for free.) And yet in the ’90s, when a few of these producers were squabbling among themselves over rights to the song, one of them tried to make a case that the original tune was not the product of Linda’s individual imagination but a traditional Zulu melody: a cultural artifact, like the Scottish Highlands air behind “Morning Has Broken” (immortalized by the British singer Cat Stevens in This is not about a white person wearing a cheongsam to prom or a sombrero to a frat party or boasting about the “strange,” “exotic,” “foreign” foods they’ve tried, any of which has the potential to come across as derisive or misrepresentative or to annoy someone from the originating culture — although refusal to interact with or appreciate other cultures would be a greater cause for offense — but which are generally irrelevant to larger issues of capital and power.