Cultural Appropriation
Who Owns a Culture? Why the Borrowing Question Is Harder Than It Looks
The same act — wearing another culture's clothing, playing another culture's music — can be either a form of homage or a form of theft, and the difference between those two things is not as obvious as either side of the debate usually admits.
The Idea
Cultural appropriation is typically framed as a binary: either borrowing across cultures is fine (all culture is exchange, always has been) or it is a harm (dominant groups profit from what marginalised groups were punished for). Both framings contain real insight, and both are incomplete. The sharper framework comes from philosopher James O. Young, who distinguishes between appropriating a cultural object — a garment, a melody, a visual motif — and appropriating a cultural practice with insider significance. Wearing a kente cloth to a wedding sits in a very different category from performing a sacred Lakota ceremony as a weekend retreat. The first might be shallow or clumsy; the second involves extracting meaning from a context that gave it its entire weight. What makes this genuinely difficult is the question of who has authority to draw those lines, and how cultures actually work over time. Cultures are not sealed vaults. Jazz absorbed European harmony. Rock and roll was built on the blues. Yoga has been practised outside South Asia for over a century. The problem is not exchange itself — it is the conditions under which exchange happens: whether it comes with credit or erasure, profit or impoverishment, curiosity or condescension. The word 'appropriation' in its legal sense means taking without permission or compensation. In the cultural sense, that economic metaphor keeps doing real work — particularly when one group's aesthetic is celebrated while the people it came from remain marginalised.
In the World
In 2012, the fashion label Victoria's Secret sent a model down the runway in a Plains-style feathered war bonnet paired with a lingerie set. The backlash was immediate and specific: war bonnets in Lakota, Cheyenne, and other Plains cultures are earned through acts of courage and leadership — they are not decorative. Each feather represents a deed. To wear one as a costume is not simply tasteless aesthetics; it flattens a complex system of honour into a prop. The company apologised and removed the look. But the conversation that followed was more interesting than the apology. Cherokee writer and scholar Joseph Erb pointed out that the harm was not abstract offence — it was part of a longer pattern in which Native visual culture had been commercially exploited for over a century (think of the decades of logos, mascots, and Halloween costumes), while actual Native artists and communities remained economically excluded from mainstream fashion markets. Around the same time, designers like Bethany Yellowtail and Patricia Michaels — both Native American — were struggling to get their work into the same mainstream venues that were freely borrowing their cultural imagery. The asymmetry is the point. When the aesthetic travels but the people do not, something more than rudeness is happening. This is why the debate rarely resolves at the level of individual objects and why it demands a wider lens — one that includes markets, history, and who gets to speak for whom.
Why It Matters
Most of us will encounter this question not as policy-makers or artists, but as consumers — choosing what to buy, what to attend, what to share. The temptation is to retreat to one of two comfortable positions: either treating every borrowing as suspect, or dismissing concern as oversensitivity. Neither posture actually requires you to think. What this framework gives you instead is a set of questions worth asking before you act or judge: Does the borrowing erase or acknowledge its source? Does it come at the expense of the people it draws from, or does it direct attention and resources toward them? Is the element being borrowed a decorative surface or a load-bearing piece of someone's identity and history? Those questions will not always produce clean answers. But asking them shifts you from a defensive crouch into genuine curiosity about where things come from and what they carry. That shift — from reflex to inquiry — is where most of the interesting thinking in cultural theory actually lives, and it makes you a more honest participant in a world where cultures have never, and will never, stop touching each other.
A Question to Ponder
When you encounter cultural exchange — in fashion, food, music, or art — what would it actually look like to engage with it in a way that enriches rather than erases?
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