Cultural Appropriation: How Meanings Are Taken, Distorted, and Destroyed
Abstract
The state of the literature on cultural appropriation is largely bifurcated between arguments that cultural appropriation is desirable as it promotes cultural sharing and arguments that cultural appropriation is harmful as it exploits marginalized cultural groups. This dissertation makes a novel contribution to the literature by shifting the focus in theorizing and discussions on cultural appropriation to the meaning at risk through appropriation. Such a shift aligns with the way cultural members describe cultural appropriation where they focus on the meaning of what was taken. Centering meaning in cultural appropriation requires analyzing how meaning is present in understanding culture, property, and harm.
Following the interpretive tradition, culture is found to be a site of meaning-making wherein cultural members interpret their culture collectively and those collective interpretations impact their identity. However, a drawback of current meaning-making accounts is that they tend to insulate cultures from the surrounding socio-historical context and resist cultural change through the assertation of essential cultural features. As a corrective, critical meaning-making is proposed herein as a comprehensive theory of culture that enhances existing interpretive works by engaging in radical contextualization, acknowledging the spectrum of cultural change, and centering the density of everyday, embodied cultural practices.
This critical meaning-making account of culture is then applied to understanding the property taken through cultural appropriation. Traditional property frameworks have struggled to account for cultural property rooted in ongoing meaning rather than title. As a new way to understand cultural property, this dissertation introduces constitutive cultural property – property that holds deep meaning for cultural members, causes pain when lost, and performs functions for the cultural group like eliciting memory and expressing identity. When cultural appropriation occurs, it is constitutive cultural property that is taken.
Due to the nature of constitutive cultural property, when cultural groups experience cultural appropriation, they may endure three forms of harm: symbolic, psycho-affective, and hermeneutical. For subaltern cultural groups, these harms are compounded by oppressions such as objectification, erasure, and structural exploitation which hinder their full social, political, and economic participation in society.