'Cultural Appropriation Without Cultural Essentialism?' by Erich Hatala Matthes in (2016) 42(2)
Social Theory and Practice 343 comments
Cultural appropriation in the arts is a diverse and ubiquitous phenomenon. It might plausibly
be thought to include occurrences as varied as 1) the representation of cultural practices or experiences
by cultural “outsiders” (sometimes called “voice appropriation”); 2) the use of artistic styles
distinctive of cultural groups by non-members; and, 3) the procurement or continued possession of
cultural objects by non-members or culturally distant institutions.
Cultural appropriation can often seem morally problematic. When the abstract schemas
above are filled in with details from actual events, we often find misrepresentation, misuse, and theft of
the stories, styles, and material heritage of people who have been historically dominated and remain
socially marginalized. For example, consider representations of Native Americans in Hollywood
Westerns, use of Navajo motifs in fashion and marketing, and the continued retention and display of
Australian Aboriginal artwork by the British Museum. The actions of pop music artists such as
Miley Cyrus and Iggy Azalea have also helped to usher the language of cultural appropriation into the popular lexicon. Yet cultural appropriation has received scant attention from philosophers.
Moreover, there is a mismatch between the sentiments of some of the major philosophical writings
on cultural appropriation and the concerns expressed by scholars and critics in other disciplines.
James O. Young, the philosopher who has written most extensively on cultural appropriation,
acknowledges that representations or uses of cultural stories and styles by outsiders is potentially
offensive, but is doubtful about its harmfulness. Indeed, he writes: “I am deeply skeptical about the
claim that artists will do much harm to the cultures from which they borrow,” and he is similarly
skeptical about the extent and frequency of those harms that he does acknowledge can befall cultural
members. His monograph is, by design, largely a moral and aesthetic defense of cultural
appropriation. In contrast, writers outside the discipline of philosophy have expressed much more
concern about the harmfulness of cultural appropriation, particularly with respect to its power to
oppress and silence, though explanation of the mechanisms by which appropriation causes these
harms is not always fully developed.
Consequently, my first task in this paper is an intervention in the philosophical literature on
cultural appropriation. I aim to take seriously the claim that cultural appropriation can be harmful,
and objectionably so. Indeed, I believe that philosophers have developed powerful conceptual
resources that can be employed to bolster our understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural
appropriation can cause harm by oppressing and silencing. I demonstrate this by bringing the
literature on cultural appropriation into dialogue with recent philosophical work on harmful speech
and epistemic injustice. Despite the fact that artistic expression is widely regarded as a form of
speech, almost no one (to my knowledge) has considered how the harms of cultural appropriation
might be illuminated by reference to philosophers’ work on dominating speech. One of the key
insights of that literature concerns the relationship between harmful speech and systems of
oppression and marginalization, and I employ this observation in order to argue that cultural
appropriation is just one way, among others, in which social marginalization can interact with speech
in order to cause harm. Thus, on my account, cultural appropriation has some descriptively unique
features, but does not issue in a unique kind of harm.
My second task in this paper is to consider a problem that nevertheless faces moral
objections to cultural appropriation. These objections are predicated on making a distinction
between cultural “insiders” and “outsiders,” or “members” and “non-members.” However, as a
range of scholars has pointed out, such distinctions have the potential to fall prey to a harmful cultural essentialism. Roughly, because essentialist theses about culture are false, practices of
distinguishing cultural insiders from outsiders on the basis of such theses are prone to be harmfully
exclusionary. Moreover, with my account of appropriative harms in place, we can see that the harms
of cultural essentialism are eerily similar to the harms of cultural appropriation. Thus, persons who
make claims objecting to cultural appropriation predicated on essentialist distinctions between
insiders and outsiders risk causing harms of a similar kind to the appropriations to which they are
objecting. A few scholars have noted this problem in the context of cultural appropriation, but I
argue that none have identified an adequate solution. In response, I argue that the account of
appropriative harms that I present here, informed by work on the systematic nature of dominating
speech, has the resources to explain many of the general harms of cultural appropriation while
eschewing the identification of cultural outsiders in individual cases. Thus, the account not only
bolsters our understanding of how cultural appropriation can cause harm, but, moreover, may
provide the resources to lodge objections to cultural appropriation without exacerbating the harms
of essentialism.
This move, however, is not without dangers of its own. Though it allows us to avoid charges
of cultural essentialism, jettisoning the practice of distinguishing insiders from outsiders in individual
cases may sometimes vitiate objections to acts of cultural appropriation, leaving us without the resources to adequately explain the nature of the wrong in question. Thus, in such cases, the risks
of essentialism must be weighed against the importance of lodging the most complete and fitting
objection to the harmful act.
