Thesis Format
Monograph
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Political Science
Supervisor
Dick, Caroline
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.
Summary for Lay Audience
At its core, cultural appropriation is about meaning. What is at stake when objects or practices are appropriated are the meanings embedded in these objects and practices. When cultural members discuss cultural appropriation, they explain and resist the appropriation by sharing their cultural understandings. Leading accounts of cultural appropriation miss the critical importance of meaning in their focus on sharing or oppression. In comparison, this dissertation develops a critical meaning-making account of cultural appropriation. It starts by identifying how cultures are sites of meaning-making wherein individuals make sense of the world through their cultural understandings. However, these understandings cannot be separated from context and power. Cultural groups have existed over time, but they are not without history, change, or engagement with further cultural groups.
The account of critical meaning-making shared in this dissertation offers an understanding of how cultural groups as sites of meaning-making are situated in the surrounding socio-historical context, power relations, and further sites of identity like racialization, gender, and ability. By centering meaning in cultural appropriation, what is taken through appropriative acts is found to be a specific form of property termed herein as constitutive cultural property. Constitutive property is not like other forms of property that may be easily exchanged and replaced. Rather, it includes those items that are closest to oneself such as family heirlooms and sentimental items. For cultural groups, constitutive cultural property is those central objects and practices that they use to tell their story.
When constitutive cultural property is taken through cultural appropriation, cultural group members are harmed because what is meaningful to them comes to be used by others for their own purposes. For marginalized cultural groups, the loss of their constitutive cultural property threatens to further oppressions they face which erase their identity, stereotype the cultural group, and serve to economically benefit others through the taking of their labour.
Recommended Citation
Lalonde, Dianne, "Cultural Appropriation: How Meanings Are Taken, Distorted, and Destroyed" (2025). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 10849.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/10849
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