How can you understand and address the harm that is being done? How can you unravel your own intent versus actual impact? Cultural appropriation is just one symptom of larger issues around power dynamics. The question remains: What are ways you can contribute to building more equitable systems of power in the future for marginalized communities? Ultimately, slow down. Be vulnerable and recognize you simply cannot know how much you do not know.
Consider who should be centered in the conversation around appropriation, versus who should be held accountable. Food is a particularly touchy topic when it comes to appropriation, given how intricately tied it is to cultural history and context.
In addition to being a necessary source of sustenance for humans, food plays an instrumental part in shaping the structure of our societies — from developing a social hierarchy to influencing national economic priorities. In particular, food is a significant way to exert control. One of the major differentiating factors of the Dalit the lowest caste in India is that they eat the meat and other parts of animals — even from cows, which is considered sacred by Hindus, who generally make up the upper castes.
This is a result of economic necessity, yet has also become a point of social ostracization. The use of sugar — an extremely laborious crop to harvest — was not common until slavery became widespread in Central and South America. As part of the U.
In addition to being essential to shaping culture and structure, food is also extremely personal and emotional, given its importance in continuing and maintaining a group identity. Across history, food is often one of the few cultural objects people are able to bring with them when resettling in a new place permanently. Especially when this resettlement is not voluntary — e. With the American population shifting to become more diverse than ever , individuals who have seen their food cultures suffer the negative effects of history are, unsurprisingly, carefully scrutinizing the power structures of who is able to obtain popularity, success, and profit cooking foods from the same cultures that have already been exploited, marginalized, and erased by dominant groups.
In particular, the subject of appropriation tends to arise in the food industry when:. There are unequal socioeconomic, cultural, and political power between the main subject e. This results in opportunities being granted to this person — be it capital to open a restaurant, or mainstream publicity in food media — that is otherwise unavailable to members of the original community, even if those members are contributing the same output.
Much of this damage is difficult enough to reverse e. At its core, cultural appropriation in food is another avenue by which dominant identities are able to utilize the cultural capital of another group for their own gain. While the fluidity of food culture over time does mean that many aspects of food culture today are inherently a fusion of tastes, ingredients, and cuisine traditions from across the world, the power dynamics that have evolved food culture over time are not all equal.
There must be nuance in examining how these acts of transference and cultural cross-pollination took place — and what consequences still play out today. The resulting cultural staples come to mind easily: Irish bangers and mashed potatoes; a plethora of Italian tomato-based pasta sauces; spicy nam prik from Thailand. But often missing in this conversation, however, are stories like the resulting explosion of slave labor to fuel the international sugar trade, uprooting African peoples from their families and traditions including food , or the violence of the Spanish in overthrowing the Aztec empire and disseminating Indigenous populations, resulting in huge losses of culinary traditions.
The realities of centuries of colonization, imperialism, genocide, enslavement, and exploitation have had a lasting impact on the lens in which we view or are able to even learn about different cuisines, and by extension, the communities of people they embody.
Consider, for example, that enslaved people were forbidden to read and write, thereby limiting their ability to pass on culinary knowledge across generations. This lack of written documentation is then used to justify the dominance of cultures with robust written accounts of food and detailed recipes, such as the French. For example, European elites rejected the use of flavorful spices imported from the Middle East and Asia after they had become too accessible to the general public.
The negative connotations associated with foods and people do not end at price, however. Modern ideas of clean or healthy food is one harkening back to the spiceless foods of European nobility. Next class. Indian food was heavy. The throughline between these two restaurants is the juxtaposition of white elevation, prestige, and profit at the expense of the community they are supposedly inspired by, and taking from. As Shreeta Lakhani writes in Gal Dem ,.
It is important to note that public sentiment towards food does change over time — particularly when it is complemented by socioeconomic mobility of the wider group. However, this reassessment is one that can only be undertaken by those with the monetary and social means to influence wider perception — typically white men with the access and capital to establish expertise and physical restaurants of the cuisine in question.
Rick Bayless, for example, has become the poster child for making Mexican cuisine more accessible and mainstream in the U. For the less well-capitalized, many food makers — especially BIPOC ones — sell their food on the streets, which is often subject to law enforcement crackdowns and portrayed as detrimental to the aesthetic of public spaces.
Because I didn't see a space for myself there. Conversely, BIPOC are not given the same flexibility in the scope of food they are able to cook and profit from.
There is also great consequence in our mass uplifting of a sole — or only a few — disseminators of information about a cuisine. With a field as vast as food, it is impossible for any one person to know the intricacies of a cuisine, and a great danger to purport one opinion as representative for all. Shortly thereafter, Bon Appetit published a recipe for halo-halo that drew fury from the Filipinx and Filipinx American community for its disrespectful recreation of a beloved dish.
While not exactly appropriation, it is also worth noting that when mainstream media and its celebrities hold so much clout in shaping popular understanding of dishes and cuisines — and by extension the culture and people behind them — the way foods and people are presented when receiving positive press is also important.
For example, culinary historian Jessica B. Civil Eats. Similarly, the mainstream wellness and vegan movements in the U. When a singular attribute from a cuisine is commodified by mainstream white culture, it often undergoes a transformation for approachability. This does not even begin to delve into the hierarchies of restaurants, and the reality of more and more white chefs rising to fame and reaping awards singularly cooking non-white cuisines while employing a largely BIPOC staff.
As writer Anna Sulan Masing summed up very succinctly,. It is also worth mentioning that much of this is happening in parallel with the gentrification of neighborhoods, where hip restaurants — and more well-stocked grocery stores — begin to replace long-time tenants in neighborhoods they supposedly aim to uplift.
Our noses literally pressed to the window? Some of the new residents have seemingly carved out all-white spaces for themselves in certain restaurants and bars Cultural appropriation seems to enter the room every time Fashion Week hits the streets or now, our virtual feeds.
Homage is given to a past, almost mythic version of Egyptian culture, while current Egyptian fashion remains unseen by the international eye. While Fashion Week grabs headlines and directs global fashion in a top-down manner, filtered through influencers and celebrities, appropriation appears in our fast fashion shopping cart as well.
In , fast-fashion retailer Zara came under fire for culturally appropriating both a traditional South Asian garment known as a lungi , as well as the Somali baati in the form of a tie dye maxi dress. The fashion industry is incredibly concerned with cracking down on copycats or illegal duplicates, yet high fashion and fast fashion designers alike are eager to appropriate themselves. Moreover, fast fashion often exploits the labor of marginalized and migrant women who may wear these garments in their daily lives, perpetuating a cycle of capitalist dominance that belies cultural appropriation.
In , thenyear-old Keziah Daum who is white blew up on the internet for wearing a qipao to her high school prom in Utah, surrounded by others in traditional tuxedos and shoulder-less dresses. She had found the dress in a vintage store, and was welcomed with compliments during the actual prom night — before being hit with Twitterstorms on both sides.
In the case of Daum and the qipao, various social ideologies are at play. Within China, cultural exchange and Western trends are viewed favorably by some, particularly as it applies to fashion, pop culture, music, and the like. However, in America where the incident occurred, different social ideologies and symbols take force. Did Daum take any responsibility to educate anyone at her prom about the qipao, or know why an Asian person wearing the same may not have received the same praise?
Did Daum understand that the qipao she freely wore was a source of internalized shame and exclusion for some Asian Americans, historically and now?
Examples of cultural appropriation in fashion are endless, but it is not impossible to get it right. Fashion is neither trivial nor superficial, and participates heavily in the production of cultural identities. For more on fashion, this from the Center for Art Law is a great read. When taken as such, dance forms are less a series of choreographed steps and more about self-expression, livelihoods, and culture — which is often not how the world views hip-hop. Born in the Bronx in the early s, hip hop was conceived by Black and Brown teens who blended elements of multi-ethnic Black and Latinx communities, remixing the past and present.
In other words, without this Knowledge, cultural appropriation reduces the depth and hardships behind hip-hop to simply aesthetic, dance, or music trends. The appropriation of hip-hop is not new. I guess, like, everybody has to stay in their lane? We shake our heads at Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, among many others as they benefited from the fame and imprint of Blackness, with none of the lived implications.
Black back-up dancers are regularly employed by white artists to twerk or jive on stage, again used as racialized prop as hip-hop becomes a profitable enterprise for the same whiteness that continue to segregate, oppress, and murder Black and Brown communities across America. The appropriation of hip-hop goes much beyond whiteness and America.
With the rise of K-pop and the international Hallyu wave , hip-hop has become heavily commercialized, reduced to hairstyles and accessories like baggy clothes, cornrows, gold chains, and ski masks.
While K-pop artists are increasingly naming and giving credit to their influences, the reality remains that when K-pop and other international artists go home, they are able to leave hip-hop — and its cultural implications — behind. Even though rap is among the U.
This collective amnesia of Black origins can also be witnessed in many quintessential dance and music forms, from swing, to jazz, the lindy hop, the foxtrot, and the Charleston. Today, digital blackface and the cultural appropriation of Black art continues on the internet. However, Black people must be compensated as white people are:.
Across the board, the most frequent defense against cultural appropriation is that literature — fiction, poetry, and the like — are a product of imagination. Any force that attempts to stop the imagination, they argue, embarks on the slippery slope toward censorship. Of course, the nature of a slippery slope is to also ignore past context — including the fact that most people penning these op-eds are white or in close proximity.
This brings us to more recent examples — a particularly infamous one being American Dirt. Cummins allegedly received a seven-figure sum for the book, and Hollywood snapped up the film rights before a single copy was sold. Additionally, American Dirt constructs an extremely stereotyped version of the Mexican refugee narrative.
Acculturation will be discussed more in the chapter on Race and Ethnicity. An ongoing exchange of cultural traits between groups that have continuous first-hand contact; both groups experience change while remaining two distinct groups. The integration of world markets and technological advances of the last decades have allowed for greater exchange between cultures through the processes of globalization.
Beginning in the s, Western governments began to deregulate social services while granting greater liberties to private businesses. As a result, world markets became dominated by multinational companies, a new state of affairs at that time.
We have since come to refer to this integration of international trade and finance markets as globalization. Increased communications and air travel have further opened doors for international business relations, facilitating the flow not only of goods but also of information and people as well Scheuerman Globalization will be covered in more detail in a later chapter of this book.
A series of processes that work trans-nationally to promote change in a world in which nations and people are increasingly interlinked and mutually dependent Kottak p.
Though technology continues to impact changes in society, culture does not always change at the same pace. Often there is a delay when integrating a new feature into the rest of the culture.
Because often other elements of the culture have to change to meet or maintain the needs of the new cultural trait or feature. The automobile is a good example of an invention that took some time to become a part of the mainstream culture.
People had to be persuaded that the automobile was a better form of transportation, roads had to be constructed, a way to procure fuel needed to be developed, mechanics were needed to fix cars, efficient production of cars had to be developed, safety concerns needed to be addressed as well as rules of the road, and numerous other elements had to catch up with the invention of the automobile.
Material culture tends to be adopted more quickly than nonmaterial culture; technology can spread through society in a matter of months, but it can take generations for the ideas and beliefs of society to change.
Sociologist William F. Ogburn coined the term culture lag to refer to this time that elapses between the introduction of a new item of material culture and its acceptance as part of the nonmaterial culture Ogburn People are usually open to adapt or try new objects and inventions before modifying their values, beliefs, norms, expressive symbols, or practices.
The time that elapses between the introduction of a new item of material culture and its acceptance as part of the nonmaterial culture. This occurs when people immigrate and keep as many original cultural traits as possible. Chinatown in San Francisco is a good example of the salad bowl. The different types of acculturation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Even in the case of cultural pluralism people must adopt certain traits of the host country; i. Host conformity occurs when an individual has fully assimilated into the host culture.
Bohannan, Paul and Mark Glazer. High Points in Anthropology, 2nd edition. Skip to main content. Chapter 2: Culture. Search for:. Culture Change Elwood Hayes in his first automobile. Cultures change in a number of ways. The only way new cultural traits emerge is through the process of discovery and invention.
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