Cultural appropriation
Based on Wikipedia: Cultural appropriation
In 2009, three people died at a sweat lodge ceremony in Arizona. The event was run by self-help guru James Arthur Ray, who had charged participants nearly ten thousand dollars to attend his "Spiritual Warrior" retreat. Ray had no formal training in Native American spiritual practices. The sweat lodge—a sacred purification ceremony that certain indigenous tribes have practiced for generations—became, in his hands, a lethal improvisation. This tragedy sits at the heart of one of the most contentious debates in contemporary culture: who gets to use what, and what happens when sacred things are treated as products?
Cultural appropriation is, at its most basic, what happens when people adopt elements from a culture that isn't their own. But that definition barely scratches the surface of why this topic generates such intense disagreement. The arguments cut to fundamental questions about ownership, power, creativity, harm, and what we owe each other across cultural lines.
The Anatomy of the Debate
The term "cultural appropriation" first appeared in academic writing in 1945, in an essay by Arthur E. Christy about Western fascination with Asian cultures. But the concept didn't enter mainstream conversation until the 1980s, when scholars began examining how colonial powers had historically extracted not just natural resources and labor from conquered peoples, but also their art, religion, and cultural practices.
Here's what makes appropriation different from ordinary cultural exchange: power.
Anthropologist Jason Jackson describes cultural appropriation as the "structural inversion of assimilation." When a marginalized group adopts the language, dress, or customs of a dominant culture, we call that assimilation—and throughout history, colonized peoples have often been forced to assimilate or face severe consequences. Cultural appropriation flips this dynamic. It's when the dominant group takes from the marginalized one. Jackson's definition is precise: appropriation occurs when "a powerful group takes aspects of the culture of a subordinated group, making them its own."
Critics of this framing argue that all culture is, in some sense, borrowed. Trade routes have always been highways of cultural exchange. The spices in your kitchen, the numbers on your phone, the alphabet you're reading—all of these crossed cultural boundaries to reach you. Why should borrowing a fashion style be different from borrowing a numeral system?
The answer, according to scholars like Linda Martín Alcoff, lies in context and consequences. Mutual exchange happens on what she calls an "even playing field." Appropriation, by contrast, involves pieces of an oppressed culture being taken out of context by people who have historically oppressed those they're taking from—and who lack the cultural knowledge to understand what they're using. A sacred ceremony becomes a spa treatment. A earned status symbol becomes a party costume.
What Gets Lost in Translation
Consider the Native American war bonnet. Among the Plains tribes who created this tradition, a war bonnet is not a fashion accessory. It's a sacred object that must be earned through acts of courage and leadership. Each feather represents a specific deed, a story, a moment of sacrifice. A chief wearing a war bonnet carries visible proof of his community's trust and his own earned honor.
When a model wears a feathered headdress on a fashion runway—as happened at Victoria's Secret in 2012—that entire system of meaning evaporates. Cherokee scholar Adrienne Keene articulated the harm this way: "When it becomes a cheap commodity anyone can buy and wear to a party, that meaning is erased and disrespected, and Native peoples are reminded that our cultures are still seen as something of the past, as unimportant in contemporary society, and unworthy of respect."
This erasure works in multiple directions. The borrowed element loses its original significance. And the people whose culture was borrowed often find their living traditions reduced to "exotic" decoration—frozen in a stereotyped past rather than recognized as part of a continuing, evolving present.
The Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples have been explicit about this. In their Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, they stated their "zero-tolerance" policy for what they called "plastic medicine men"—people, even from within indigenous communities, who authorize non-Indians to practice sacred ceremonies. Their language is unambiguous: such people are "enemies" of the Lakota nations.
The Economic Dimension
There's money involved, too. When major fashion houses sell items inspired by indigenous designs, the profits flow to corporations while the originating communities receive nothing. This isn't just about hurt feelings—it's about who controls and benefits from intellectual property.
Rebecca Tsosie, a law professor and board member of the Native American Rights Fund, argues that indigenous cultural expressions should be legally recognized as a form of collective intellectual property. The key word is collective. Under her proposed framework, no individual would have the authority to give away or sell rights to cultural property that belongs to an entire people. The tribal nations would own these resources together.
This approach challenges Western legal traditions, which typically recognize only individual property rights. But Tsosie contends that this legal recognition is essential for indigenous self-determination. Her long-term goal is a legal system—potentially established through treaties—that acknowledges both indigenous peoples' governance rights over their collective property and the unique nature of traditional knowledge as shared intellectual wealth.
The fashion industry has repeatedly found itself at the center of these debates. In 2017, the British retailer Topshop sold Chinese-manufactured playsuits that imitated the keffiyeh pattern. The keffiyeh is a traditional Middle Eastern scarf that has become a symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance. To critics, mass-producing it as a party outfit exemplified how fashion can strip cultural items of their political and historical significance while profiting from their aesthetic appeal.
The Spiritual Marketplace
Perhaps nowhere is cultural appropriation more fraught than in matters of religion and spirituality.
The modern New Age movement is, by one account, essentially a shopping mall of borrowed spiritual practices. Practitioners might combine Hawaiian Kahuna magic with Australian Aboriginal dreamwork, South American ayahuasca ceremonies with Hindu yoga, Chinese feng shui with Native American vision quests. Each tradition gets sampled, mixed, and sold—often by people with no deep connection to any of these paths.
For some members of these originating communities, watching sacred practices become consumer products is painful. When a non-Hindu celebrity wears a bindi—the dot traditionally worn between the eyebrows for religious and cultural reasons—as a fashion accessory at a music festival, some Hindus see their faith reduced to decoration. When a wellness retreat offers sweat lodge ceremonies without proper training, participants can be seriously harmed or killed, as happened in Arizona.
The safety issue is worth emphasizing. Traditional practitioners undergo years, sometimes decades, of training before leading certain ceremonies. They understand the physiological risks and spiritual dimensions involved. When untrained people attempt to replicate these practices—often after reading about them online or attending a weekend workshop—they're missing the context that makes the practice safe and meaningful. Deaths and injuries from improperly conducted sweat lodges have been documented in 1996, 2002, 2004, and 2009.
The Counterarguments
Not everyone accepts the framework described above. Critics of the cultural appropriation concept raise several objections.
First, there's the question of who gets to police cultural boundaries. Cultures are not monolithic. Within any group, you'll find people who are delighted when outsiders engage with their traditions and people who are offended by the same behavior. A 2024 study of international K-pop fans found that perceptions of appropriation varied widely based on context and individual perspective. One Asian-American respondent distinguished between American K-pop fans, whom they saw as engaging in appreciation, and "Koreaboos" who adopted Korean names and mannerisms for comedic effect, which they considered appropriation.
Second, critics argue that strict anti-appropriation norms could stifle artistic creativity and cross-cultural dialogue. If artists can only draw on their own cultural backgrounds, how impoverished would art become? Jazz, rock and roll, and hip-hop all emerged from complex processes of cross-cultural borrowing and innovation. Should white musicians have been prohibited from playing jazz? Should Japanese fashion designers avoid Western cuts?
Third, some scholars question whether cultures can be "owned" at all. In a 2023 paper, researchers Jonas Kunst, Katharina Lefringhausen, and Hanna Zagefka explored what they called "the dilemma of cultural ownership." They noted that cultures are not discrete, bounded entities with clear membership rules. They overlap, blend, and evolve constantly. The very notion that a culture could be appropriated from might rest on a flawed premise.
Fourth, there's concern that appropriation discourse reinforces group divisions rather than transcending them. By emphasizing differences and grievances, critics argue, this framework discourages the kind of cross-cultural empathy and engagement that could actually build solidarity.
Strategic Anti-Essentialism
Cultural theorist George Lipsitz offers a more nuanced framework. He uses the term "strategic anti-essentialism" to describe how people deliberately adopt elements from outside their own culture to construct new identities. This happens in all directions—minority cultures adopting from majorities and vice versa.
The key, Lipsitz argues, is recognition. When a majority culture borrows from a minority culture, it must acknowledge the specific historical circumstances and significance of what it's borrowing. Failure to do so perpetuates the power imbalances that made appropriation problematic in the first place.
This framework suggests that borrowing itself isn't the problem. The problem is borrowing without understanding, without acknowledgment, and without addressing the power dynamics that determine who benefits and who is harmed.
Historical Echoes
Debates about cultural borrowing are not new. Historians of the Ottoman Empire and ancient Egypt have documented how architectural traditions were frequently misattributed—Ottoman and Egyptian styles praised as Persian or Arab by Western observers who couldn't distinguish between these cultures or didn't care to.
In Australia, white artists in the 1920s and 1930s appropriated Aboriginal motifs. In 1930, the prominent artist Margaret Preston actually advocated for using indigenous Australian imagery in contemporary art—without, of course, any acknowledgment that living Aboriginal people might have opinions about how their cultural heritage was used. This history has led contemporary Aboriginal artists to push for an "authenticity brand" that would help consumers identify genuine Aboriginal art and avoid purchasing from appropriators. The movement gained momentum after John O'Loughlin was convicted in 1999 for selling paintings he falsely claimed were by Aboriginal artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.
In Canada, visual artist Sue Coleman drew criticism in 2017 for appropriating and mixing various indigenous art styles. Coleman described herself as a "translator" of indigenous art forms—a framing that many found deeply offensive. Indigenous artist Carey Newman wrote an open letter arguing that being accountable to indigenous communities is "the antidote to appropriation."
The Sports Mascot Battleground
For years, the Washington football team used the name "Redskins"—a term many Native Americans consider a slur. The team's logo and imagery were drawn from stereotyped depictions of indigenous peoples. This wasn't appropriation of the appreciative kind; it was the use of an entire group of people as a mascot, their complex cultures reduced to a cartoon logo.
The debate over Native American sports mascots became a flash point in broader conversations about representation and harm. Author Kevin Bruyneel argues that these symbols cause real harm to indigenous communities by reinforcing colonial dynamics and perpetuating stereotypes. For non-Native fans, the imagery might seem harmless—just a logo, just a name. For Native Americans, it's a constant reminder that their cultures are treated as costumes and caricatures rather than living traditions.
After years of pressure, the Washington team finally changed its name in 2020. But hundreds of high schools, colleges, and professional teams continue to use Native American names and imagery, ensuring the debate will continue.
The Line Between Appreciation and Appropriation
Is there a clear line between respectful appreciation and harmful appropriation? Some argue yes—that the difference lies in consent, compensation, and context. If you're invited by members of a culture to participate in their traditions, if creators from that culture are credited and compensated, and if the cultural significance is understood and respected, that's appreciation. If you're taking without asking, profiting without sharing, and using without understanding, that's appropriation.
Others argue that no such clear line exists, that every case must be evaluated individually based on specific circumstances. Still others contend that the entire framework is misguided—that culture is inherently fluid and trying to police its boundaries does more harm than good.
What seems clear is that this debate reflects genuine disagreements about fundamental values. People who prioritize collective rights, historical justice, and the protection of marginalized communities tend to see appropriation as a serious harm. People who prioritize individual freedom, artistic expression, and cultural fluidity tend to see anti-appropriation activism as overreach.
These aren't easily reconcilable positions. They emerge from different understandings of what culture is, who it belongs to, and what obligations we have to one another across lines of difference.
Living With the Tension
Perhaps the most honest conclusion is that this tension cannot be fully resolved—only managed, case by case, with attention to power dynamics, historical context, and the specific harms or benefits at stake.
A fashion house copying indigenous designs without acknowledgment or compensation is different from a chef learning to cook another culture's cuisine with respect and attribution. A wellness entrepreneur selling sacred ceremonies they don't understand is different from a musician studying another tradition for decades under the guidance of masters from that culture. A sports team using a racial slur as a mascot is different from a writer setting a novel in a culture they've researched carefully and written about with nuance.
Context matters. Power matters. Consent matters. Compensation matters. Understanding matters.
And perhaps most importantly, listening matters. The people most affected by these debates—indigenous peoples, minority communities, those whose cultures have been historically exploited—have been speaking clearly about what harms them and what doesn't. The least appropriative response might be simply to hear what they're saying.