ORIGINAL ARTICLE
From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation:
A Review and Reconceptualization of
Cultural Appropriation
Richard A. Rogers
School of Communication, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011
Cultural appropriation is often mentioned but undertheorized in critical rhetorical and
media studies. Defined as the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or
technologies by members of another culture, cultural appropriation can be placed into
4 categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. Although each of
these types can be understood as relevant to particular contexts or eras, transculturation
questions the bounded and proprietary view of culture embedded in other types of
appropriation. Transculturation posits culture as a relational phenomenon constituted
by acts of appropriation, not an entity that merely participates in appropriation. Tensions
exist between the need to challenge essentialism and the use of essentialist notions
such as ownership and degradation to criticize the exploitation of colonized cultures.
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00277.x
Cultural appropriation, defined broadly as the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts,
genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture, is inescapable when
cultures come into contact, including virtual or representational contact. Cultural
appropriation is also inescapably intertwined with cultural politics. It is involved in
the assimilation and exploitation of marginalized and colonized cultures and in the
survival of subordinated cultures and their resistance to dominant cultures. This
essay synthesizes existing literature from critical/cultural studies and related areas to
(re)conceptualize cultural appropriation not only for critical analyses of media,
rhetoric, and commodification but also for intercultural communication theory
and pedagogy.
Cultural appropriation is often mentioned in critical analyses of media representations
and commodifications of marginalized and/or colonized cultures.
Although such works in critical/cultural studies often use the notion of cultural
appropriation, the concept is frequently used without significant discussion or
explicit theorizing (exceptions are discussed below). Therefore, although cultural
Corresponding author: Richard A. Rogers; e-mail: richard.rogers@nau.edu
Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293
474 Communication Theory 16 (2006) 474–503 ª 2006 International Communication Association
appropriation is a common topic in cultural, critical rhetorical, and critical media
studies, at times it is undertheorized in these literatures and is absent in the intercultural
communication literature.1
This essay works to rectify this situation by
examining explicit and implicit conceptualizations of cultural appropriation in order
to identify their underlying logics and assumptions and to subject such assumptions
to critical reflection.
After briefly discussing definitions of cultural appropriation, I define, illustrate,
and critically interrogate four types of appropriation explicated or assumed in
the literature: exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. Although
each of these types of appropriation can be understood as relevant to particular
eras or contexts, transculturation ultimately questions the validity of the other three
categories—not only in an era of postmodernity or globalization but also in historical
contexts. Indeed, these four categories, in identifying increasingly complex
dynamics involved in cultural appropriation, eventually question dominant conceptualizations
not only of appropriation but also of culture itself. Transculturation
points to culture as a relational phenomenon that itself is constituted by acts of
appropriation, not an entity or essence that merely participates in appropriation.
I conclude with a discussion of the ethical and political implications of privileging
transculturation in the conceptualization of cultural appropriation. A variety
of examples are offered for illustration throughout the essay, but in the interest
of thematic unity, I focus on appropriations between Native American and EuroAmerican
cultures when relevant.
Defining cultural appropriation
Communication scholars, generally in the critical tradition, who do discuss cultural
appropriation only infrequently define the term, relying instead on common usage
and the implications of affiliated theoretical frameworks. In reviewing research from
the past 15 years, that repeatedly uses the term in the context of cultural, critical
media, and critical rhetorical studies (e.g., Black, 2002; Buescher & Ono, 1996;
Harold, 2004; Kadish, 2004; Ono & Buescher, 2001; Shugart, 1997; Torgovnick,
1996; Whitt, 1995), I found only one that explicitly defined it (Shugart). Although
many authors in this tradition address cultural appropriation under roughly synonymous
terms or subsets of the larger category, such as incorporation, commodification,
and hybridity, many of these terms are also frequently left undefined or
undertheorized.
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2004) offers two definitions of the verb
‘‘appropriate’’ relevant to the use of the term by critical scholars: ‘‘to take exclusive
possession of’’ and ‘‘to take or make use of without authority or right’’ (p. 61).
Appropriation is derived from the Latin appropriare, meaning ‘‘to make one’s
own,’’ from the Latin root proprius meaning own, also the root of property. These
meanings parallel the use of the term in legal contexts, strengthening the connotation
of an unfair or unauthorized taking—that is, theft. For example, in response to
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controversies over the use of elements of First Nations cultures by non-Natives, the
Writer’s Union of Canada defined cultural appropriation as ‘‘the taking—from
a culture that is not one’s own—of intellectual property, cultural expressions or
artifacts, history and ways of knowledge’’ (quoted in Ziff & Rao, 1997, p. 1).
As Helene Shugart (1997) states:
[T]echnically, [rhetorical] appropriation refers to any instance in which means
commonly associated with and/or perceived as belonging to another are used to
further one’s own ends. Any instance in which a group borrows or imitates the
strategies of another—even when the tactic is not intended to deconstruct or distort
the other’s meanings and experiences—thus would constitute appropriation.
(Italics added; pp. 210–211)
Provisionally, this essay uses a broader, less evaluative sense of appropriation as the
use of one culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of
another culture—regardless of intent, ethics, function, or outcome. I do not limit
cultural appropriation to instances where those engaged in appropriation do so ‘‘to
further [their] own ends’’ or in a way that necessarily serves their own interests.
Cultural appropriation, however, is an active process and, in this sense, retains the
meaning of a ‘‘taking.’’ Mere exposure, for example, to the music or film of another
culture does not constitute cultural appropriation. The active ‘‘making one’s own’’
of another culture’s elements occurs, however, in various ways, under a variety of conditions,
and with varying functions and outcomes. The degree and scope of
voluntariness (individually or culturally), the symmetry or asymmetry of power
relations, the appropriation’s role in domination and/or resistance, the nature of
the cultural boundaries involved, and other factors shape, and are shaped by, acts of
cultural appropriation.
Categorizing cultural appropriation
My first step in (re)conceptualizing cultural appropriation is to develop a rough
typology of appropriation as discussed or implied in the literature for the purposes of
conceptual clarification and systematic critical insight. In identifying these categories,
I was guided by a dominant assumption in the literature: Acts of appropriation
and their implications are not determined by the intent or awareness of those
engaged in such acts but are instead shaped by, and in turn shape, the social,
economic, and political contexts in which they occur. In John Fiske’s (1991) terms,
all acts of communication are socially positioned: Communicative relations are
always social relations and hence political relations. Acts of communication and
cultural appropriation both reflect and constitute the identities of the individuals
and groups involved as well as their sociopolitical positions. As a result of this
broadly shared assumption, cultural politics, specifically the power relations among
cultures, are highlighted and become a primary basis for categorizing acts of cultural
appropriation. Emphasizing the role of sociopolitical context, however, risks erasing
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agency. Socially positioned subjects engage in acts of appropriation for a variety of
reasons and with a variety of understandings concerning the implications and ethics
of such acts. These intentions, motivations, and interpretations are part of the system
in which such acts occur and can serve to reinforce, modify, cope with, or actively
resist that larger system. However, agency is not reducible to an a priori quality of
sovereign subjects (or cultures). Therefore, although the categories mentioned below
emphasize social structure and power relations, attention is also given to possibilities
for individual and collective agency and to the role of appropriation in constituting
culture, identity, and agency.
Based on the range of literature addressing the topic, I identified four categories
of cultural appropriation (adapted from Wallis & Malm, 1984; additional influences
from Bakhtin, 1975/1981; Clifford, 1988; Goodwin & Gore, 1990; Ziff & Rao, 1997).
Based on the assumptions identified above, these four categories can best be understood
as naming the conditions (historical, social, political, cultural, and economic)
under which acts of appropriation occur. After briefly defining each of the four types
of appropriation, I discuss, illustrate, and evaluate each in depth.
1. Cultural exchange: the reciprocal exchange of symbols, artifacts, rituals, genres,
and/or technologies between cultures with roughly equal levels of power.
2. Cultural dominance: the use of elements of a dominant culture by members of
a subordinated culture in a context in which the dominant culture has been
imposed onto the subordinated culture, including appropriations that enact
resistance.
3. Cultural exploitation: the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture
by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or
compensation.
4. Transculturation: cultural elements created from and/or by multiple cultures,
such that identification of a single originating culture is problematic, for
example, multiple cultural appropriations structured in the dynamics of
globalization and transnational capitalism creating hybrid forms.
My review and discussion of these types of appropriation highlights issues of
central importance to the conceptualization of cultural appropriation. Cultural
exchange operates in the literature as an implied baseline for clarifying the inequalities
involved in the other conditions of appropriation and is generally assumed to be
a nonexistent ideal. Cultural domination, in contrast, highlights the asymmetries
under which acts of appropriation occur. Although many approaches to this set of
conditions emphasize the power of the dominant to impose its culture on subordinated
peoples, cultural dominance as a condition nevertheless requires attention to
how the targets of cultural imposition negotiate their relationship to the dominant
culture through a variety of appropriative tactics. Extending this implication, cultural
resistance, a form of appropriation that occurs under the conditions of cultural
dominance, highlights the agency and inventiveness of subordinated peoples by
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examining how they appropriate dominant cultural elements for resistive ends.
Resistance through appropriation, however, demonstrates the ‘‘impurity’’ of acts
of resistance and of culture itself. Cultural exploitation focuses on the commodification
and incorporation of elements of subordinated cultures. However, in defending
the rights of subordinated peoples to protect the integrity of their culture and to
control its use, most of the discourse of cultural exploitation operates from a model
of culture as clearly bounded and distinct, as singular and organic. Such a model of
culture is not only empirically questionable but also complicit in the subordination
of ‘‘primitive’’ cultures. Transculturation further questions the validity of an essentialist
model of distinct cultures that merely engage in appropriation, highlighting
appropriation and hybridity as constitutive of culture, reconceptualized as an intersectional
phenomenon. Although the literature on transculturation is grounded in
the conditions of globalization and transnational capitalism, the implications of
transculturation question the assumptions of the previous three categories in both
contemporary and historical contexts.
Cultural exchange
Cultural exchange involves the reciprocal exchange of symbols, artifacts, genres,
rituals, or technologies between cultures with symmetrical power. Examples include
the reciprocal borrowing of linguistic words and phrases, mutual influence on religious
beliefs and practices, technological exchange, and two-way flows of music and
visual arts. In its ideal form, cultural exchange involves a balance of this reciprocal
flow. Appropriations of this type are generally voluntary, with the ‘‘choices’’ involved
being individual and/or cultural.
With a few exceptions (Colista & Leshner, 1998; Wallis & Malm, 1984), cultural
exchange is only implied in the critical/cultural studies literature. This category
functions as the implicit ‘‘ground’’ against which the meaning and significance of
the ‘‘figure’’ of cultural dominance or exploitation is highlighted. Its function in this
regard is twofold: As an ideal, it establishes ethical standards by which other types
of appropriation should be judged (i.e., reciprocal, balanced, and voluntary); as
a theory, it serves as an easy target for critical scholars to demonstrate the inadequacy
of pluralist and transparent (i.e., liberal) models of power.
In order to understand cultural appropriation as exchange, it is necessary to
ignore what I have identified as the defining trait for types of appropriation: the
context (or conditions) of the appropriations. One way to eliminate context is to
engage in a kind of abstracted accounting of exchange and influence (Ziff & Rao,
1997). Another approach is to use the individual as the primary unit of analysis
(Fiske, 1991), isolating what can appear to be voluntary, reciprocal exchanges from
the larger contexts that clarify the inequalities and constraints on agency involved in
any specific case.
The identification of ‘‘pure’’ cases of cultural exchange may be difficult insofar as
few acts of intercultural communication and appropriation occur in contexts in
which power imbalances are not an important element. For example, although Japan
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may in some ways be an equal partner with the United States, such equality may not
exist on all levels relevant to an act of appropriation. Japan’s ownership of international
media companies may influence USAmerican2
culture in a variety of ways, just
as USAmerican ownership of media companies with substantial presence in Japan
may influence Japanese culture. Nevertheless, the hegemony of certain Western
ideals, such as standards of female beauty (themselves perpetuated through Western
and transnational media outlets, regardless of ownership), can have disproportionate
effects on Japanese culture (Darling-Wolf, 2004), as reflected in the rates
of certain plastic surgeries in Japan (e.g., changes to the nose and eyes to appear more
‘‘Western’’ [Cullen, n.d.]).
This first category demonstrates potential complications in categorizing conditions
and acts of cultural appropriation. First, the identification of symmetrical
or asymmetrical power relations between two or more cultures is complicated by
the varying forms power can take, from economic capital to military might to
cultural capital, and the complex intersections between them. A simple dominant–
subordinate binary may not always apply in instances where the overall relationship
might be characterized as unequal, and a level playing field may not operate in
relation to specific acts of appropriations even if the overall relationship between
two cultures is one of general parity.
Second, multiplicities of power and constraints on agency complicate determinations
of the voluntary nature of cultural exchange. In the Netherlands, many
Dutch university students insist that they and their nation chose to adopt English
as a de facto second language for practical economic purposes but that ‘‘practical
choice’’ has of course been shaped by the historical and contemporary dominance of
Anglo countries, among other factors. Thus, when I teach in the Netherlands, I teach
in English and can get by without learning Dutch on any substantive level. When
my Dutch colleagues come to teach in the United States, however, they must operate
exclusively in English. That is a clear reflection of a power imbalance, even though,
individually and as a nation, the Dutch can make other choices. My appropriations
of Dutch words into my vocabulary are far more voluntary, for example,
than the use of English words in Dutch. The use of English words in Dutch is
increasingly unavoidable, pointing to the next category of cultural appropriation:
dominance.
Cultural dominance
Cultural dominance refers to a condition characterized by the unidirectional imposition
of elements of a dominant culture onto a subordinated (marginalized, colonized)
culture. In terms of cultural appropriation, this category focuses on the use of
elements of a dominant culture by members of a subordinated culture in contexts in
which the dominant culture has been imposed onto the subordinated culture. That
is, following the theoretical assumptions explicated above, cultural dominance refers
to the conditions under which acts of appropriation occur. Cultural dominance
implies a relative lack of choice about whether or not to appropriate on the part
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of the ‘‘receiving’’ culture because of the ‘‘sending’’ culture’s greater political, cultural,
economic, and/or military power. However, this does not mean that members of
subordinated cultures do not negotiate this imposition in a variety of ways, manifesting
at least limited forms of agency in how they appropriate the imposed cultural
elements.
One form of cultural dominance is institutional assimilation, the use of educational,
religious, or other institutions to replace a subordinated culture with a dominant
culture. A particularly overt example of institutional assimilation is the effort
to absorb Native American children into Anglo-American culture via the boarding
school system established in the United States in the late 19th century (Lesiak, 1991),
a case that illustrates both the conditions of cultural dominance and the appropriative
responses of subordinated cultures to those conditions.
By relocating Native American children to a school far from their families, access
to their ‘‘home world’’—both their native culture as a whole and their particular
social relationships and cultural practices—is blocked and maintenance of their
native identity restricted (Goffman, 1961). ‘‘Admissions procedures’’ involve a ‘‘leaving
off and a taking on’’ of one’s ‘‘identity kit,’’ those materials by which a person
maintains performances of self (Goffman). Native children introduced into boarding
schools had their hair cut, their clothing replaced with military uniforms, and were
required to choose Anglo-Christian names. Many of their native practices were no
longer accessible; traditional foods and forms of religious worship were replaced with
those of the dominant culture. They were punished for speaking their native languages
and had English imposed upon them. Finally, boarding school ‘‘students’’
were conditioned to view their culture from the dominant culture’s perspective.
Some boarding schools staged performances of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
poem ‘‘Song of Hiawatha,’’ with the students themselves as the performers (Lesiak,
1991); in later years, students were shown Hollywood cowboy and Indian films and
encouraged to cheer for the cowboys.
These strategies of assimilation via cultural dominance involve the imposition of
the dominant culture onto the subordinated cultures, not its appropriation by
members of subordinated cultures. The imposition of culture made possible by
disproportionate access to resources and modes of power is not in itself cultural
appropriation in the sense of a use or a taking—that is, an active process. However,
insofar as a dominant culture is imposed upon a subordinated culture, the latter’s
members, individually and/or collectively, must adopt one or more tactics for their
use of the imposed elements in order to manage the tensions between their native
culture and the colonizing one (Goffman, 1961). Although this category emphasizes
that cultural dominance is the condition under which some appropriations occur,
a full exploration of cultural dominance as a category of appropriation requires
a focus on the tactics employed by members of subordinated cultures to negotiate
their relationship to the imposed culture. In what follows, such tactics (adapted from
Goffman; Martin & Nakayama, 2000; Scott, 1990) are defined and illustrated
through the case of boarding schools for Native Americans. These appropriative
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tactics range from overt acceptance and internalization to overt rejection of the
imposed culture to covert resistance.
First, assimilation involves internalization of the imposed culture, including
reformation of identity, values, and ideologies. Assimilation involves the displacement
of the subordinated/native culture by the colonizing culture, which necessarily
involves the appropriation (broadly speaking) of the dominant culture by a member
of a subordinated culture, as in the case of a Native American boarding school
student who subsequently became a disciplinarian at the boarding school. Second,
integration involves internalization of some or all the imposed culture without
(complete) displacement or erasure of native culture and identity. Integration can
involve the operation of two distinct cultures within an individual or a group or the
fusion of aspects of each into a single culture and identity. Although some children in
the boarding-school system may have integrated, others undoubtedly used mimicry
and perhaps covert resistance (see below) until their release and then chose to return
to their homes, despite pressures from the schools not to do so, indicating a failure to
assimilate or integrate (Lesiak, 1991). The boarding-school system also demonstrated
that adoption of assimilation or integration as an appropriative tactic does
not guarantee acceptance of assimilated peoples by the dominant culture: Students
who assimilated or integrated were often still stereotyped and rejected due to their
race (Lesiak).
Third, intransigence involves overt resistance: a refusal to appropriate the
imposed culture or other overt means of opposing its imposition, individually or
collectively. Intransigence was present in boarding schools, as evidenced by punishments
and frequent escape attempts. This strategy involves refusal to appropriate the
imposed elements.
Fourth, mimicry involves ‘‘going through the motions’’ without internalizing the
imposed culture. If performed successfully, it will appear to the dominant group that
assimilation or integration has been achieved. Here, appropriation involves an intentional
performance designed to negotiate structures of power while maintaining
one’s native culture and thereby begins to demonstrate the active nature of appropriations
under the conditions of cultural dominance and hence of the crucial role of
agency. Fifth, resistance involves more covert opposition: the adoption of aspects of
the imposed culture in such a way as to maintain a native culture and/or resist
cultural domination, often without the awareness of the colonizing culture. Forms
of appropriative resistance, to be discussed in detail below, may also have been
present at the boarding schools; however, official records would be unlikely to
evidence such a tactic if it was carried out successfully.
Cultural dominance has also been discussed extensively in an international context
in terms of the cultural or media imperialism thesis.3
Boyd-Barrett (1977)
defined media imperialism as:
[T]he process whereby the ownership, structure, distribution or content of the
media in any one country are singly or together subject to substantial external
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pressures from the media interests of any other country or countries without
proportionate reciprocation of influence by the country so affected. (p. 117)
The United States and other (mostly Western) countries produce most of the media
flowing through the international market while often importing little in return. ‘‘The
absence of reciprocation of media influence by the affected country combines both
the element of cultural invasion by another power and the element of imbalance of
power resources between the countries concerned’’ (Boyd-Barrett, 1977, p. 118). Such
an imbalance is particularly evident in the case of the United States, which exports
media products (film, music, television) to the rest of the Western, ‘‘industrialized,’’ or
‘‘developed’’ world and to the ‘‘majority’’ (i.e., ‘‘third’’ or ‘‘developing’’) of the world
without a substantial flow in the reverse direction (see, e.g., Wallis & Malm, 1984, on
music and Miller, Govil, McMuria, & Maxwell, 2001, on film).
Although a discussion of all critiques and reformulations of the cultural imperialism
thesis is beyond the scope of this essay, some central issues in the ongoing
debate over the thesis are useful in clarifying the dynamics of cultural appropriation
in general and cultural domination specifically. Models of media or cultural imperialism
developed out of the political economy tradition (Boyd-Barrett, 1998; Roach,
1997), reducing culture to a function of economics and ignoring cultural imperialism’s
cultural implications. This approach tends to focus on structural aspects of
cultural imposition without attending to particular media texts and their reception,
making cultural claims based solely on an analysis of political economy. This contributes
to a tendency to assume self-evident cultural effects from USAmerican
or Western cultural products on non-U.S. or non-Western cultures (Roach;
Tomlinson, 1991). Put simply, the approach risks assuming that importing
USAmerican cultural products into other countries is the same as importing
USAmerican culture into those countries, ignoring agency, reception, and resistance.
The cultural imperialism thesis illustrates the condition of cultural dominance
but ignores the appropriative tactics of the receiving cultures.
As with institutional strategies of cultural assimilation, appropriation comes into
play in the ways in which those ‘‘targeted’’ by cultural imperialism take up and use
(or not) the foreign cultural products inserted into their environment: for example,
assimilation, integration, intransigence, mimicry, and resistance. Although the political
economy approach might mistakenly assume that cultural dominance results in
assimilation or at least mimicry, we must also account for overt resistance to such
cultural products as well as to the complex ways in which they play a role in
integration or more covert forms of resistance. In doing so, however, we must not
return to a simplistic model of consumer agency that presumes voluntary acts of
consumption. Neither pure determinism (vulgar Marxism) nor pure agency (neoliberalism)
is capable of accounting for the dynamics of cultural appropriation in the
conditions of cultural dominance.
Questions of ‘‘free choice’’ (persuasion) versus coercion do not adequately
capture the dynamics of cultural appropriation generally and cultural dominance
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specifically. Free choice can only be conceived of in a vacuum (which is the ideological
effect of the discourse of the ‘‘individual’’ or the ‘‘consumer’’; see Fiske, 1991),
and outright coercion is often not relevant to the dynamics of postcolonial, neocolonial,
and other contexts (on the latter point, see Tomlinson, 1991). Instead,
a central contribution of hegemony to communication theory is its breaking down
of the persuasion/coercion binary, demonstrating how individuals and groups ‘‘willingly’’
participate in their own subordination due to powerful influences over what is
‘‘taken for granted’’ and naturalized (Good, 1989). The hegemonic influence of
Western media demonstrates not only that the appeal of Western media products
is always already structured in power but also that the political implications of acts of
appropriation are not determined entirely by the intentions, motivations, and interests
of the subordinated cultures doing the appropriating or by the dominant cultures
that are imposing their media products.
These complexities and challenges to the cultural imperialism thesis (and to its
neoliberal critics) are clarified by further discussion of resistive appropriations under
the conditions of cultural dominance. Cultural resistance as a form of appropriation
is a subset of cultural domination, one of the five appropriative tactics discussed
above. I explore this particular tactic in more depth due to the substantial body of
literature analyzing cases of and conceptualizing cultural resistance, its enhanced
focus on the agency of subordinated groups, and its challenge to the purity of
culture, resistance, and agency.
Cultural resistance
The term cultural appropriation has also been used to name the use of elements of
a dominant culture by members of subordinated cultures to resist that dominant
culture. Cultural resistance involves the appropriation of elements of a dominant
culture by a subordinated culture for survival (Clifford, 1988), psychological compensation
(Radway, 1984), and/or opposition (Harold, 2004; Shugart, 1997).
An important development in critical/cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s was
the conceptualization of media texts as polysemic, a development that challenged,
among other things, the media or the cultural imperialism thesis (Roach, 1997). This
challenge to simplistic models of ideological domination can be traced to Hall’s
(1980) explication of negotiated and oppositional decoding strategies and other
important works in the British cultural studies tradition, audience research in the
context of international media studies (e.g., Ang, 1982/1985; Liebes & Katz, 1990),
and De Certeau’s (1984) work on cultural poaching in everday life.
In these approaches, the audience (consumer) is granted a more active role and
the construction of media texts and other products of the culture industries is
increasingly understood to be overdetermined (Althusser, 1971), not linearly determined
by the base, and hence structured with contradictions. These two factors offer
possibilities for alternative and oppositional, as well as dominant, readings of media
texts. Fiske (1989) conceptualized this approach to media analysis via the work of
Bakhtin (1975/1981), De Certeau (1984), and Hall (1980), creating a perhaps
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overly romanticized image of ‘‘the people’’ carrying out guerilla raids on dominant
media and culture systems, crafting ‘‘popular culture’’ out of ‘‘mass culture’’
products to derive pleasures, meanings, and identities that resonate with their lived
experience of contradiction and subordination. Hence, Fiske added to the existing
focus of critical/cultural studies on incorporation (the appropriation of resistant
cultural forms and symbols by the dominant system and their resignification and
redeployment in support of that system) its dialectical opposite, excorporation: the
appropriation by the people of the products offered (imposed) by the dominant
culture in order to create oppositional or alternative meanings, identities, and
pleasures. In doing so, the agency and inventiveness of subordinated cultures are
highlighted.
Despite many criticisms leveled against it (e.g., Schiller, 1991), this approach is
not entirely naive in its conception of power. Unlike neoliberal approaches to media
and culture, Fiske (1989, 1991) does not rely on the a priori sovereign subject of
liberal individualism, nor does he revert to its pluralist conception of power. Instead,
he acknowledges that the ideological construction of subjects does not entirely foreclose
agency, in part due to the contradictions both within mass culture and between
mass culture and lived experience. Although Fiske (1989) may overemphasize the
extent and significance of such ‘‘popular’’ appropriations, and although the impact
of such semiotic struggles on material conditions is debatable, this approach is an
important corrective to the conception of audiences as passive and more specifically
as dupes. Indeed, Fiske (1989) offers a dialectical model of mass/popular culture in
which acts of appropriation are ongoing on both sides: The people rip their jeans as
an enactment of resistance; the culture industry produces preripped jeans to sell to
the people, thereby commodifying and incorporating such resistance; the people
then search for other ways to alter their jeans or for other mass culture products
to alter; and the struggle continues.
Examples of oppositional readings and other practices that rework the products
of mass culture abound in the literature (e.g., Fiske, 1989; Harold, 2004; Jenkins,
1988; Radway, 1984) and are otherwise readily evident, such as a segment in the
documentary Barbie Nation (Stern, 1998), focusing on a lesbian couple who appropriate
Barbie and Ken dolls by giving them genitalia and staging them in S&M sex
scenes. Significantly, the couple asked that their faces be masked to protect their
identities. This dynamic, in which cultural appropriation is used to enact resistance
covertly, relates to James Scott’s (1990) important work on hidden transcripts. Scott
argues that if investigation of cultural domination and resistance is limited to public
events, the conclusion will be that the dominant ideology is operating effectively
toward hegemonic ends and that agency is absent. If, however, we attend to covert
resistance, analyzing the hidden transcripts of subordinate cultural practices, greater
and more robust tactics for opposing the dominant system will be revealed because,
as a consequence of unequal power, stereotyping, and discrimination, such practices
often remain at the level of the private or are only evident to those with knowledge of
the restricted codes of subordinated groups.
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The appropriation and resignification of derogatory words (e.g., nigger, bitch,
and queer) and other oppressive cultural forms as a means of resistance by those
targeted by such forms have led to explorations of whether such appropriations are
indeed oppositional or whether the reproduction of such terms perpetuates subordination
(Butler, 1997; Shugart, 1997). In a scene from the film Smoke Signals
(Eyre, 2001), for example, one Native American character, Victor, teaches his Native
friend Thomas how to act like a ‘‘real Indian’’—how to conform to the dominant
image of the stoic Indian in order to be taken seriously by Whites. This strategy of
(re)appropriating a Hollywood image of Native Americans serves as a means of
surviving in the White world but nevertheless plays into problematic stereotypes.
Although Victor’s teaching Thomas may reproduce negative aspects of the
dominating culture, such performances can also demonstrate that the stereotype
of Indians as stoic is itself a performance not an a priori quality. As Butler writes,
language is not
a static and closed system whose utterances are functionally secured in advance
by ‘‘social positions’’ to which they are mimetically related. The force and
meaning of an utterance are not exclusively determined by prior contexts or
‘‘positions’’; an utterance may gain its force precisely by virtue of the break with
context that it performs. Such breaks with prior contexts or, indeed, with
ordinary usage, are crucial to the political operation of the performative.
Language takes on a nonordinary meaning in order precisely to contest what
has become sedimented in and as the ordinary. (p. 145)
Appropriation of elements of the dominant culture by subordinated groups can
denaturalize the dominant culture’s representational systems and/or can provide
the possibility of a form of agency.
Studies on cultural resistance must examine the micro- and macroconditions
enabling and constraining particular readings and appropriations, not just the readings
and appropriations themselves. As Ellu Shohat and Robert Stam write, resistant
readings ‘‘depend on a certain cultural or political preparation that ‘primes’ the
spectator to read critically’’ (quoted in Roach, 1997, p. 58). Agency does not spring
forth out of a vacuum but constitutes and is constituted by discursive, cultural,
political, and economic environments and articulations, including acts of cultural
appropriation. The very discourses that perpetuate the marginalization of subordinate
groups can provide a basis for agency and resistance via appropriation and resignification
(Butler, 1997). For example, although the 1970s ‘‘Keep America
Beautiful’’ campaign featuring Iron Eyes Cody shedding a single tear in response
to a polluted and littered landscape reinforced various stereotypes of Native
Americans—for example, generically ‘‘Indian,’’ stoic, and closer to nature—such
discourses can also create forms of agency (and cultural capital) that have the
potential to articulate resistance to the dominant culture. At the same time, such
images can be deployed against Native groups, as when Native people are deemed
by the dominant culture to no longer be ‘‘real Indians’’ if they participate in the
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exploitation of natural resources or the accumulation of profit (consider in this
context tribes that allow the storage of nuclear waste or that develop casinos on their
reservations [Clifford, 1988; Torgovnick, 1996]), thereby denying Native peoples
what little cultural capital the dominant system has granted them and limiting the
forms of agency and identity available to them. Therefore, the title of this category,
cultural resistance, is not meant to imply that acts of appropriative resistance are
pure or guaranteed in advance.
This demonstrates an important point about cultural resistance via appropriation
of elements of the dominant culture: Insofar as it articulates multiple discourses
and lines of power, an act of appropriation can enact resistance and function hegemonically
at the same time. Just as Fiske (1989) and others identified mass and popular
culture as being structured in contradiction, arenas in which pure resistance is not to
be found, so too are acts of appropriation, especially cultural resistance. Because
agency is constituted in part through acts of appropriation, agency itself is structured
in contradictions. The performance of resistance using the imposed culture of the
dominant indicates the presence of agency but not necessarily an agency grounded in
the a priori subject of liberal individualism.
Cultural exploitation
In the critical/cultural studies literature, cultural appropriation has most commonly
been used to reference acts in which aspects of marginalized/colonized cultures are
taken and used by a dominant/colonizing culture in such a way as to serve the
interests of the dominant. Cultural exploitation commonly involves the appropriation
of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture in which the
subordinated culture is treated as a resource to be ‘‘mined’’ and ‘‘shipped home’’
for consumption, as in the use of indigenous folk music by Western musicians and
companies without financial compensation (Wallis & Malm, 1984). Cultural exploitation
includes appropriative acts that appear to indicate acceptance or positive
evaluation of a colonized culture by a colonizing culture but which nevertheless
function to establish and reinforce the dominance of the colonizing culture, especially
in the context of neocolonialism (e.g., Buescher & Ono, 1996). These instances
often carry the connotation of stealing or of in some way using the culture of a subordinated
group against them; studies on appropriations of Native American cultures
are especially prominent in this regard (e.g., Black, 2002; Buescher & Ono;
Churchill, 1994; Kadish, 2004; Ono & Buescher, 2001; Torgovnick, 1996;
Whitt, 1995).
Ziff and Rao (1997) identified four concerns expressed about acts of cultural
appropriation by dominant from subordinate cultures (i.e., cultural exploitation).
The first concern is cultural degradation. Appropriation ‘‘can have corrosive effects
on the integrity of an exploited culture because the appropriative conduct can
erroneously depict the heritage from which it is drawn.’’ Insofar as the depiction
of the exploited culture is distorted, ‘‘tears can appear in the fabric of a group’s
cultural identity’’ (Ziff & Rao, 1997, p. 9). In the case of the appropriation of Native
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American culture by the New Age commodity machine, for example, one concern is
that non-Natives (some of whom claim to be real Indians) claim authority to define
what Native Americans really are, distorting not only non-Native but also Native
understandings of Native American cultures (Churchill, 1994; Whitt, 1995). The
second concern identified by Ziff and Rao is the preservation of cultural elements.
Arguments against cultural exploitation on the grounds of cultural preservation
claim that cultural objects, symbols, and practices are best understood in their native
contexts and that the priority should be preservation of the integrity of marginalized
cultures. This raises concerns not only over the physical removal of cultural objects
(e.g., to museums) but also over debilitating effects on the culture being appropriated,
such as the disrespect for and inevitable distortion of Native spiritual traditions
enacted by (perhaps unknowing) New Age producers and consumers and, more
broadly, by a ‘‘cultural smorgasbord’’ approach to ‘‘other’’ cultures fostered by
possessive individualism and commodification.
The third concern about cultural exploitation is deprivation of material advantage:
Cultural products, either of the past or of living cultures, are being ‘‘wrongfully
exploited for financial gain’’ (Ziff & Rao, 1997, p. 14). Here, we enter a set of legal
issues, both nationally and internationally, in which intellectual property, a Western
concept, mediates competing claims of ownership. Copyright laws favor individual
ownership over collective ownership such that ‘‘traditional’’ cultural forms placed
are in the public domain (Wallis & Malm, 1984; Whitt, 1995). For example,
Kokopelli imagery, based on variations of flute-player imagery from indigenous
petroglyphs and other visual media of the ‘‘prehistoric’’ southwestern United
States, is widely used in Southwest tourist kitsch/art and marketing without compensation
to living groups due to its presumed legal status as part of the public
domain. Closely related to issues of material compensation is the fourth concern
over cultural exploitation identified by Ziff and Rao: the failure to recognize sovereign
claims. Although Western legal systems and concepts of ownership support the
widespread appropriation of elements of traditional cultures without remuneration,
they also often prevent traditional cultures from blocking what they perceive as
inappropriate uses or adaptations. In the case of Kokopelli imagery, the cultures
affiliated with these images have no formal authority over their use and adaptation.
Bruce Springsteen may have had the economic resources, cultural capital, and legal
standing to impede Republican appropriation of ‘‘Born in the USA,’’ but the indigenous
cultures of the Southwest that claim affiliations with flute-player imagery
do not have comparable control over the use of their cultural heritage due to imbalanced
access to resources and the appropriating culture’s establishment of the
rules. Indeed, economic survival, the dynamics of tourism, and the market for
‘‘Native American’’ arts and crafts may push Native peoples to participate in the
alteration and commodification of that very heritage, as is the case with the images
labeled ‘‘Kokopelli.’’
Most often in the critical/cultural studies literature, such acts of exploitative
appropriation are discussed in terms of commodification, wherein other cultures
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are used in the endless production of differences necessary for the perpetuation
of the commodity machine. This concept has been relatively well theorized in
the critical/cultural studies literature; therefore, I offer only a brief review of the
concepts in order to identify its implications for the conceptualization of cultural
appropriation.
Commodification is sometimes used in nonscholarly (and some scholarly)
accounts as if it was limited to the transformation of an object, person, or idea into
something to be owned, bought, and sold, limiting its implications to issues of
sacrilege (e.g., the commodification of religion) and appropriate compensation. This
misses many cultural implications of commodification. In the conditions of capitalism,
any object that enters the exchange system is inescapably commodified. Commodification
abstracts the value of an object (or form or person) so that it can enter
systems of exchange. In this process, the use-value and the specificity of the labor and
social relations invested in the commodity are lost; it becomes equivalent to all other
commodities (Marx, 1986). To create the appearance of difference (and hence value)
amid this equivalence, additional meanings are attached to the commodity. The
commodity becomes a fetish, a representation of values with no intrinsic relation
to the object’s use-value, production, and circulation. These meanings are the (illusory)
ends to which the commodity itself becomes the means of attainment. These
meanings are reifications; their artificiality must be obscured, forgotten, and collapsed
into the object. This both enhances the illusion of the commodity’s ‘‘intrinsic’’
(fetishized) value and serves to mystify the social relations involved in its production
and consumption. By obscuring conditions and relations of production with reified
meanings, consumers are not faced with an awareness of their participation in
the exploitation of others’ labor, culture, and identity (Ono & Buescher, 2001;
Whitt, 1995).
Commodification, by abstracting the value of a cultural element, necessarily
removes that element from its native context, changing its meaning and function
and raising concerns about cultural degradation. Commodification also plays a key
role in perpetuating unequal power relations such as neocolonialism. In fetishizing
and reifying ‘‘artificial’’ meanings onto the elements of living cultures, the social
relations and history involved in that act of commodification are obscured and
neocolonial relations justified. As Buescher and Ono (1996) demonstrate in their
analysis of Disney’s Pocahontas, for example, feminism is appropriated to cast Pocahontas
as a victim of barbaric patriarchy, thereby justifying historical colonialism
(and, in the context in which the film is viewed, neocolonialism) on the grounds that
it will liberate Pocohontas. Ultimately, many acts of appropriation, even when carried
out under the banner of ‘‘honorable motives’’ such as cultural preservation and
cross-cultural understanding, function to undermine the cultures being appropriated
and serve the interests of the dominant. Commodification is therefore a key
element in the hegemonic strategy of incorporation, in which an alternative or
oppositional practice is redefined by the dominant culture in order to remove any
genuinely oppositional meaning or function. Hence, those appropriating Native
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American cultural elements may believe that they are opposing the very system they
are supporting through their consumption and circulation of commodities,
potentially degrading the very culture they intend to honor and protect (Churchill,
1994).
These concerns over cultural exploitation raise issues of importance to the conceptualization
of cultural appropriation, including the implications of concepts such
as sovereignty and degradation, problems with an essentialized view of culture,
and the complexities of agency. First, the concepts of ownership and sovereignty
articulate models of both the nation–state and the sovereign subject of liberal
(possessive) individualism. These analogs (culture-as-state, culture-as-individual)
perpetuate the notion of cultures as singular, clearly bounded and autonomous.
Several critics of the appropriation of Native American cultural elements explicitly
articulate an analogy to territory—that Anglos stole Native American lands and now
they are stealing Native American culture and spirituality. This may be a historically
grounded and rhetorically effective argument and is often repeated in scholarship
critical of the exploitation of Native culture (Black, 2002; Churchill, 1994; Torgovnick,
1996; Whitt, 1995). However, the analogy further perpetuates the view of culture
as a bounded entity that is found throughout the literature.
The discourse of cultural exploitation also implies, especially via the trope of
‘‘degradation,’’ that sovereignty involves a right to remain pure, uninfluenced by
others, and that the purity of subordinated/colonized cultures is maintained by being
static, not dynamic—the former associated with primitive peoples and the latter with
the ‘‘developed’’ world (Clifford, 1988; Torgovnick, 1996). For example, Marianna
Torgovnick’s reading of Dances with Wolves demonstrates that its narrative licenses
White appropriations of Indian culture by positing the extinction of Indians as
inevitable, Indian culture as invaluable and in need of preservation, and Whites as
its legitimate inheritors. However, the logic of the narrative goes deeper. The film
makes clear that Whites possess agency: the ability to appropriate, to be dynamic,
and hence to survive. At the end, the two White characters who have ‘‘become’’
Indian leave the ‘‘real’’ Indians, presumably to save them from attack by the soldiers
looking for Dances with Wolves/Dunbar (played by Kevin Costner). Yet, as contemporary
viewers, we know that (in general) the Indians themselves will be attacked
and killed and the Whites who appropriate Indian culture will survive. Indians are
defined by the essence of their culture (harmonious, rooted in nature, spiritual),
remain traditional, and die. Whites are defined by their ability and willingness to
appropriate, adapt, and survive. Therefore, when Native Americans exhibit agency,
acting in dynamic ways, actively appropriating non-Indian values and strategies, they
risk being denied the status of real Indians by the dominant culture (Clifford;
Torgovnick). The underlying logic is that essence and agency are mutually exclusive,
at least for ‘‘other’’ cultures.
Second, the commodification of cultural elements relies upon and constitutes
culture as essence via fetishization. The conceptualization of culture as a bounded
essence, an entity analogous to an individual or state, feeds into the process by
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which a culture is reified and transformed into a commodity fetish. As is clear in
Torgovnick’s (1996) analysis of New Age appropriations of Native American culture
and Lesley Kadish’s (2004) analysis of the use of Native American culture in marketing
health food, an essentialized image of a generic Native American belief system
is necessary for commodities’ fetishization of culture and concealment of the
power relations involved in such exploitations. Commodification, therefore, both
relies upon and constitutes culture as essence, perpetuating the denial of agency,
dynamism, and invention to Native Americans. This same essentialist view of
(subordinated/colonized) culture is embedded in critiques of cultural exploitation
on the grounds of cultural degradation.
Third, understanding the dynamics of cultural exploitation requires complex
conceptualizations of agency. Just as one ‘‘common-sense’’ (liberal) response to
the media imperialism thesis is that no one is holding a gun to the heads of people
in Thailand to make them view Baywatch, a common defense against criticisms of
acts of cultural exploitation and commodification is that Native Americans, for
example, offer their culture for sale. These arguments raise the issue of voluntariness,
holding that if Native Americans are themselves producing Kokopelli images to sell
to tourists, then the Euro-Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and others who consume
these products are on safe ethical ground. As with cultural domination, however, the
simplistic binary of free choice versus coercion is inadequate: Native peoples do not
choose to market and sell their cultural elements in a vacuum, nor do they always
have their culture taken from them forcibly or otherwise without their consent. The
production and sale of elements of subordinated/colonized cultures with their active
participation occurs under economic conditions in which few other opportunities
may be available to earn a living in the economic system they have entered without,
in many cases, their consent. In addition, the elements these groups produce for
sale are shaped and constrained by, for example, the tourist market and dominant
aesthetic ideologies (e.g., primitivism; see Clifford, 1988).
However, these forces are not the constraints on agency; if we reject the essentialized
(boundaried, static, and pure) view of culture, these conditions also enable
(constitute) at least limited forms of agency. Native Americans themselves may
engage in the distortion and commodification of their own cultural forms to produce
objects that will be considered of value to tourists and collectors and may also engage
in the appropriation of the cultural forms of other tribes in order to increase their
incomes (Cooks, 1998). Both of these dynamics operate, for example, in the marketing
of kachina dolls, the tourist/collector version of traditional Hopi katsinas, which
often bear minimal resemblance to traditional katsina figures and are also produced
by members of other tribes as well as by non-Natives. In addition, not always evident
to outsiders are the ways in which some Native Americans, as individuals and/or
tribes, engage in the intentional distortion of their cultural forms in the production of
goods for outsiders in order to protect the sanctity and integrity of their culture. As
this last example makes clear, a focus on structural and ideological constraints on free
choice does not necessitate a denial of agency in cultural appropriation.
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Transculturation
Transculturation involves cultural elements created through appropriations from
and by multiple cultures such that identification of a single originating culture is
problematic. Transculturation involves ongoing, circular appropriations of elements
between multiple cultures, including elements that are themselves transcultural. Lull
(2000) describes transculturation as ‘‘a process whereby cultural forms literally move
through time and space where they interact with other cultural forms and settings,
influence each other, produce new forms, and change the cultural settings’’ (p. 242).
‘‘Transculturation produces cultural hybrids—the fusing of cultural forms’’ (p. 243),
but ‘‘hybrids such as these never develop from ‘pure’ cultural forms in the first place’’
(p. 245). To explain how transculturation and hybridization occur, Lull adds the
dynamic of indigenization, in which ‘‘imported cultural elements take on local
features as the cultural hybrids develop’’ (p. 244). For example, musical forms appropriated
by the culture industry from urban African American culture (e.g., hip-hop),
forms already structured in multiple cultural traditions and matrices of power, are in
turn appropriated and localized by Native American youth living on rural reservations.
Significantly, ‘‘transculturation processes synthesize new cultural genres while
they break down traditional cultural categories’’ (p. 242). Transculturation refers not
only to a more complex blending of cultures than the previous categories but also to
a set of conditions under which such acts occur: globalization, neocolonialism, and
the increasing dominance of transnational capitalism vis-a`-vis nation states.
In light of the previous categories and the emphasis throughout this discussion
on the conditions in which appropriation occurs, a key question concerning transculturation
as a category of appropriation is whether it refers to a relatively new set of
conditions in which appropriation occurs or to a new paradigm for thinking about
cultural appropriation, a paradigm that challenges the validity and embedded
assumptions of the previous categories. Transculturation engages multiple lines of
difference simultaneously, whereas the other three categories engage entwined pairs
of entities: in the case of exchange, two equals; in the cases of dominance and
exploitation, the dominant and the subordinate. Transculturation conceptually
problematizes aspects of the preceding categories of cultural appropriation. Cultural
exchange, domination, and exploitation presume the existence of distinct cultures.
Nevertheless, unless culture is mapped directly onto nation, territory, or some analog
thereof—a highly problematic move—the boundaries here are, at best, multiple,
shifting, and overlapping.
Identification of boundaries presumes that cultures are separate entities, distinct
wholes, a view that Clifford (1988) demonstrates is rooted in Western conceptualizations
and metaphors—that is, culture as organism. Indeed, the commonly
expressed concerns over cultural exploitation identified by Ziff and Rao (1997),
cultural degradation, preservation, and sovereignty, reflect just such a conception.
According to Clifford, ‘‘expectations of wholeness, continuity, and essence have long
been built into the linked Western ideas of culture and art’’ (p. 233). Culture is
viewed metaphorically as an organism that cannot survive radical environmental
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shifts, loss, and/or replacement of substantial elements, or radical hybridization.
Fragmentation and disjuncture are incompatible with this view of culture; their
presence signifies the death of the culture. Therefore, among other implications, this
organic view is incapable of accounting for (trans)cultural dynamics:
The culture concept accommodates internal diversity and an ‘‘organic’’ division
of roles but not sharp contradictions, mutations, or emergences .. Groups
negotiating their identity in contexts of domination and exchange persist, patch
themselves together in ways different from a living organism. A community,
unlike a body, can lose a central ‘‘organ’’ and not die. All the critical elements of
identity are in specific conditions replaceable: language, land, blood, leadership,
religion .. Metaphors of continuity and ‘‘survival’’ do not account for complex
historical processes of appropriation, compromise, subversion, masking,
invention, and revival. (Clifford, 1988, p. 338)
As an alternative, Clifford argues that ‘‘identity is conjunctural, not essential’’ (p. 11).
Identity and culture are not discrete entities, but relationships, intersections. ‘‘‘Cultural’
difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters
of power and rhetoric rather than of essence’’ (p. 14). Purity, wholeness, and integrity
may reflect the felt experience of some cultures; nevertheless, the discourse of cultural
purity, especially with regards to ‘‘other’’ cultures, is complicit in essentializing
culture and Western discourses of the primitive.
Clifford’s (1988) view has significant implications for conceptualizing cultural
appropriation beyond highlighting the centrality of appropriative resistance to the
survival of colonized peoples. It posits that appropriations do not simply occur
between cultures, constituting their relationships, but that such appropriative relations
and intersections constitute the cultures themselves. Certainly, in an era often
described as postmodern (involving cultural fragmentation, multiplicity, indeterminacy,
pastiche, and bricolage), postcolonial (in which previously colonized cultures
work to recreate themselves from the remains of their precolonial and colonial
cultures), and globalized (involving an unprecedented flow of people, discourses,
and cultural forms around the world), cultural appropriation is a central process.
Clifford’s reconceptualization of culture comes closer to capturing these dynamics
than organic metaphors that reflect Western discourses of the primitive more than
contemporary cultural experience. Nevertheless, the implications of transculturation
and Clifford’s critique of the organic view of culture are not necessarily limited to the
postmodern, postcolonial, and global, suggesting that a conjunctural view of culture
may apply to (pre)modern and (pre)colonial conditions as well, questioning the
applicability of cultural dominance and exploitation not only to contemporary contexts
but also to historical ones.
Hybridity: transculturation as a contemporary condition
Although its ‘‘roots’’ in an organic metaphor for culture may be unfortunate given my
discussion of Clifford (1988), the concept of hybridity is useful in clarifying dynamics
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of appropriation under transculturation, understood here as a historically specific
condition. Kraidy (2002) discusses hybridity in the context of cultural globalization,
focusing on its potential for international and intercultural communication studies.
Despite problems with prior uses of the concept, Kraidy sees no ‘‘credible substitute to
characterize the dual forces of globalization and localization, cohesion and dispersal,
disjuncture and mixture, that capture transnational and transcultural dialectics’’ (p.
332). Kraidy warns against the importation of hybridity into communication studies
as a merely ‘‘descriptive device, i.e. describing the local reception of global media texts
as a site of cultural mixture’’ (p. 317). Instead of understanding hybridity as the
product of local–global interactions, ‘‘hybridity needs to be understood as a communicative
practice constitutive of, and constituted by, sociopolitical and economic
arrangements’’ (p. 317). Kraidy’s approach highlights ‘‘the mutually constitutive
interplay and overlap of cultural, economic and political forces in international communication
processes’’ while positing ‘‘the relationship between structure and agency
as a dialectical articulation whose results are not preordained’’ (p. 333).
Following Kraidy (2002), transculturation is not only distinct from cultural
exchange in that multiple cultures and multiple acts of appropriation are involved
but it also retains the implications of unequal power of cultural dominance and
exploitation while acknowledging the radically different nature of appropriation in
the global–local contexts of transnational capitalism. Transculturation highlights, in
ways that cultural dominance and exploitation do not, the hybridity of cultural
forms and, following Clifford (1988), the lack of ‘‘authenticity,’’ ‘‘purity,’’ and
‘‘essence’’ in the elements being appropriated and in the appropriations themselves.
The point, however, is not to return to a pluralist conception of power, or to pretend
that the implications discussed under cultural dominance and exploitation no longer
apply. Transculturation and hybridity are as inescapable as cultural appropriation
itself—an ‘‘always already’’ condition of contemporary culture. Although specific acts
of transcultural appropriation vary in the degree of choice involved, for most individuals
and cultures today, the condition of transculturation is an involuntary one.
The case of Hopi kachina dolls produced for consumption by tourists and
collectors of indigenous arts from the southwestern United States (mentioned earlier
under cultural exploitation) demonstrates the international and transcultural contexts
in which even seemingly ‘‘domestic’’ appropriations occur. These products are
shaped by the domestic and international market in Native arts, including commodification
of Western fantasies about Native Americans; by the efforts of Hopi and
other Native groups to establish economic viability in the U.S. economy; and by the
dialectic of cultural assimilation and cultural survival. Some kachina dolls (and
numerous other Native art forms) are not only made by non-Natives but also produced
outside the United States, adding an international component of both cultural
and labor exploitation to the kachina doll trade. ‘‘Imitation’’ kachina dolls abound,
leading to a heavy emphasis on authenticity by dealers in Native arts. However, the
creation of ‘‘hybrid’’ kachina dolls (as well as potentially hybrid forms of traditional
katsina figures), such as those incorporating nontraditional materials, even by
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‘‘traditional Native artists,’’ complicates notions of purity and authenticity. In a context
in which hybridity is inescapable and in which colonized peoples necessarily
appropriate aspects of other, often dominating, cultures, ‘‘cultural or artistic
‘authenticity’ has as much to do with an inventive present as with a past, its objectification,
preservation, or revival’’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 222). This ‘‘inventive present’’
includes the (involuntary) condition of transculturation as well as the appropriative
tactics used by subordinated cultures, few of which could be considered pure.
Even if their presence originates from cultural dominance, pickup trucks, country
music, rap, and rodeo are a part of tribal life in the southwestern United States
along with katsinas, corn pollen, and eagle feathers—not only as cultural impositions
or evidence of assimilation but also as part of the ongoing dynamics of culture,
identity, survival, and resistance. Even a seemingly random teepee at a roadside
Native American arts outlet—oddly placed, an object more appropriate for the Great
Plains and its tribes than the Southwest, serving to cue the Western image of ‘‘the
Indian’’ more than to represent any particular tribal identity or heritage—cannot be
dismissed a priori as alien, inauthentic, and nothing more than a ploy to lure in
ignorant tourists (though it is). Its (in)authenticity is more complex than an organic
or primitivist view of culture can accommodate, and its dismissal as inauthentic
obscures the cultural dynamics of a living people as much as its alien presence.
Stereotypes perpetuated about Native Americans via Hollywood (including teepees
as a Native American universal) are complicit in the subordination and exploitation
of Native peoples, but they also constitute part of the lived experiences of those
peoples, experiences that are never determined in advance by the political economy
of their representation by the dominant culture and that can serve to provide forms
of agency (e.g., possibilities for reappropriation) not otherwise available. Appropriations
in such transcultural contexts—involving multiple Southwestern tribes with
varying degrees of traditional and assimilated practices as well as the descendants of
Spanish, Anglo, and Mormon colonizers, using a means of habitation employed by
tribes of the Great Plains to attract tourists off a highway paved with rock taken from
a Hopi sacred site, buzzing with cars (some with indigenous names such as Cherokee,
Pontiac, and Touareg) carrying tourists not only from Phoenix and Los Angeles but
also from Sao Paolo, Berlin, and Tokyo, who are reading guidebooks to the region
distributed by transnational media conglomerates and who just might purchase
a Kokopelli t-shirt or kachina doll—articulates not only a dizzying array of factors,
none determinant, but also possibilities for a variety of potentially effective agencies.
These appropriations and agencies are inauthentic but perhaps thrive precisely
because of such inauthenticity. This is not a world of autonomy, equality, and
genuine pluralism but of domination, struggle, survival, and resistance; one which
can be better understood via hybridity and indigenization and in which concepts
such as purity, authenticity, and continuity can do as much to perpetuate (neo)colonial
relations as to overcome them (Clifford, 1988).
At the same time, however, concepts like transculturation and hybridity can be
deployed to delegitimize (legitimate) claims of cultural ownership by subordinated
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groups, potentially perpetuating (illegitimate) acts of cultural exploitation and
thereby questioning whether transculturation should supplant cultural domination
and exploitation as valid types of cultural appropriation. The bind here is that
although cultural essence and its attendant traits (singular, bounded, static, and
proprietary) perpetuate primitivist, organic, and static conceptions of culture
(especially with regards to indigenous cultures) and enable exploitative commodifications,
many of the same assumptions inhere in arguments for the rights of
colonized cultures to oppose exploitation and to practice, perpetuate, and (re)claim
control over their culture (e.g., Whitt, 1995). Hence, as mentioned above, many
cultural critics draw parallels between the theft of indigenous lands and the theft of
indigenous culture—a rhetorically useful but nevertheless conceptually problematic
analog.
Transculturation as an ‘‘always already’’ of cultural existence
Whereas many of the conceptualizations of transculturation and related concepts
(hybridity, indigenization) are grounded in the particular conditions of transnational
capitalism, the critique of the very concepts of culture and appropriation
that undergird the first three types of appropriation can be extended beyond the contemporary
condition to previous eras. That is, transculturation questions whether
the conception of culture as singular, bounded essence has ever had empirical validity
or conceptual coherence. Transculturation, as conceived here, calls not only for
an updating of the understanding of contemporary cultural dynamics but also for
a radical reconceptualization of culture itself: as conjunctural, relational, or dialogic;
as constituted by, not merely engaged in, appropriative relations; and as an ongoing
process of absorption and transformation rather than static configurations of practices.
Transculturation is not, however, a neoliberal licensing of cultural imperialism
or an embracing of the radical indeterminacy and antimaterialism of some postmodern
theories of culture. Transculturation questions many of the assumptions
undergirding cultural dominance and exploitation, but it remains oriented toward
the material dimensions and implications of cultural practices and sensitive to the
complex dynamics of disproportionate power. Transculturation identifies forces of
cultural homogenization and highlights the influential role of economic, political,
military, and other forms of power while also recognizing how cultural appropriation
can be constitutive of cultural particularity and agency. The ongoing imposition
of the essentialist view of culture embedded in the first three types of appropriation
onto various others (marginalized and/or colonized peoples) may constitute the kind
of ‘‘epistemic violence’’ critiqued by Spivak (1988).
The history of Navajo weaving demonstrates the validity of transculturation’s
conception of culture and appropriation in situations prior to the current globalized
era. Weaving has long been a central part of Navajo (Dine´) culture, and this continues
today as Navajo weavers prepare rugs for display and sale in museums, Native
arts outlets, and trading posts on or near the Navajo Nation, and other uses. However,
although a particular idea of ‘‘authentic’’ Navajo weaving (in terms of materials,
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techniques, and patterns) affects the value attached to such weavings, the past
150 years of Navajo weaving have included a wide range of materials and patterns,
born of both the conditions under which the Navajo have survived and Navajo
inventiveness. A brief review of the recent Eyedazzlers Project (n.d.) and related
research by Sheri Burnham (2005) concerning the Germantown period in Navajo
weaving and its recent revival illustrates the complex cultural intersections, conditions,
and agencies involved in acts of appropriation and the limitations of an
essentialist view of culture.
In 1863, the U.S. Army forced the defeated Navajo on the Long Walk to Bosque
Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Bereft of their sheep and unable to grow crops or
otherwise support themselves, Navajo women began unraveling Army-issue blankets
and reweaving the materials (Burnham, 2005). Eventually, Germantown yarn from
Philadelphia was provided to the Navajo via the railroad. This finely spun and
brightly colored yarn was very different from their traditional handspun and naturally
dyed yarn, contributing to the development of a distinct style of weavings
referred to as Germantowns or Eyedazzlers. The use of Germantown yarn and related
styles of weaving continued for approximately 40 years before a return to more
traditional patterns and materials. For some, Germantowns represented a loss of
authenticity and tradition; a return to earlier styles was driven in part by efforts to
market more traditional or authentic weavings to collectors and tourists of the exotic
Indians of the Southwest.
In the 1990s, some Navajo weavers and the trading posts through which many of
their weavings were sold began a revival of the Germantown style. This revival,
among other things, called attention to the inventiveness of Navajo weavers and
to the ability of cultures to patch themselves together and survive—by literally
unweaving and reweaving the text(ile)s of the colonizing culture, then using that
culture’s materials to create a new but nevertheless ‘‘Navajo’’ style. Of course, resistance,
like culture, is never pure. Navajo weaving is intimately linked to the marketing
efforts of non-Indians and the commodification of the dominant culture’s
fantasized image of Native Americans and the Southwest. Both the Germantowns
and the subsequent weaving styles are not pure expressions of traditional
Navajo culture but are shaped by the dynamics of (neo)colonialism. These weavings
are not only ‘‘simply’’ (essentially) expressions of Navajo culture and history but are
also products of European and Euro-American markets, of the railroads, of tourism,
and of the trading posts (themselves cultural hybrids of Native and Western, Anglo
and Navajo, Mormon and Spanish), which mediated between the weavers and those
who eventually purchased their weavings. Even the pre-Bosque Redondo Navajo
weaving styles were involved in interactions with other Native American tribes
(the Navajo likely learned weaving from the Puebloan cultures that inhabited the
region before their arrival) and a system of trade relationships (Burnham, 2005).
Indeed, the sheep from which they obtained their wool were a result of Spanish
colonization; hence, the pre-Germantown woolen weavings were themselves hybrid
even if the yarn was handspun and naturally dyed. If the history of a cultural practice
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is traced far enough, its hybridity (impurity) will almost inevitably be demonstrated
(cf. Rogers, 1998).
A dismissal of the Germantown weavings as inauthentic is not only driven by the
essentialist, organic view of culture outlined by Clifford (1988), it overlooks the
important role of cross-cultural appropriations in both ongoing cultural development
and cultural survival. Such dismissals perpetuate the view of indigenous cultures
in particular as static and without agency, and overlooks the important role of
appropriation and hybridity in the ongoing constitution of identity as well as resistance—even
prior to European contact and colonization. Power dynamics are an
intrinsic part of these hybrid forms, but not as simple, one-sided formulas of powerful–powerless.
The concerns here are whether the categories of cultural dominance
and exploitation can effectively capture these dynamics and whether they do
‘‘epistemic violence’’ to the Navajo. As this case illustrates, transculturation is not
always or only degradation or homogenization; it can also be constitutive of cultural
particularity, agency, identity, inventiveness, and resistance—not only for those at
Bosque Redondo and those who eventually resettled Navajo lands but also for the
weavers, traders, and others involved in the contemporary revival of Germantown
weaving. These contemporary Germantowns are, of course, also not ‘‘pure’’ but
incorporate digital designs and colors of significance to the Native American Church
(another hybrid cultural entity) and call forth parallels between the history of
the Long Walk and Bosque Redondo with today’s struggles for cultural survival
(Eyedazzlers Project, n.d.).
Transculturation and telos
What is to be gained or lost by replacing cultural exchange, domination, and exploitation
with transculturation and its attendant implications? Does an acceptance of
transculturation’s validity necessitate a rejection of the other three types of appropriation,
including the two characterized by unequal power? To address these questions,
I examine Ono and Buescher’s (2001) analysis of Disney’s appropriation and
marketing of Pocahontas. In this essay, Ono and Buescher advance the cipher as an
updated conceptualization of commodification processes: ‘‘A cipher is a figure
through which various commodities with multiple exchange values are marketed,
and it is a social concept that circulates like a commodity’’ (p. 26). Through ‘‘appropriation,
resignification, and commodification,’’ the historical figure of Pocahontas
was rendered as a ‘‘newly constituted figure’’ (p. 26). Their conception of the cipher
as a late capitalist commodity form necessitates ‘‘examining multitudinous meanings
located within and revolving around a nodal point .. Because the cipher is never
fixed, never fully seen in its totality, and always changing, it becomes increasingly
difficult but all the more necessary to pinpoint and evaluate’’ (p. 37). The cipher
‘‘shifts attention away from images, representations, and products to the process
by which images, representations, and products come to have meaning’’ (p. 27).
The view of culture embedded in transculturation also focuses on processes and
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relationships; culture ‘‘is never fixed, never fully seen in its totality, and always
changing’’ because it is a network of relations, not an entity.
Ono and Buescher’s (2001) use of the cipher enables an understanding of
how a multitude of relationships and intersections are involved in any instance of
appropriation and commodification. The cipher works by configuring these multiplicities
in particular ways: the sexualization of Native American women for heterosexual
White men, the reconfiguration of Native American history for neocolonial
purposes, the provision of the materials necessary for children to ‘‘play Indian,’’ the
appropriation of feminism to further commodification, and so on. The cipher allows
for a commodity to take on radically different meanings as contexts shift, bringing
certain meanings to the fore while obscuring others, playing various cultural elements
with and against each other. The cipher accounts for these relationships while
highlighting their role in the perpetuation of power and the maintenance or transformation
of material conditions. In short, the cipher appears to be consistent with
transculturation in that it assumes no ‘‘original,’’ emphasizes relationships among
diverse cultures and contexts, focuses on cultural processes over products, and highlights
multiplicity over singularity.
Nevertheless, Ono and Buescher (2001) remain committed to criticizing a mode
of exploitative appropriation more akin to my discussion of cultural exploitation
than to transculturation. Statements such as ‘‘when Disney imported the figure of
Pocahontas into mainstream commodity culture’’ (p. 25) indicate a model of cultures
as bounded entities akin to nation states or territories. By prefacing claims
about what Disney’s use of Pocahontas accomplishes with statements such as ‘‘by
ignoring the historical context of the originary figure, and by disregarding and
dishonoring the traditional culture in which it has historically had meaning.’’
(pp. 25–26), they explicitly posit an original form against which one can judge the
distortions of the Pocahontas cipher as well as implicitly assume that Native Americans
have a more legitimate claim to the historical figure and her contemporary
representation. However, their method of analysis, guided by the concept of the
cipher, does not necessitate such assumptions or claims: That is, the analytic insights
offered by the cipher, a concept at least roughly consistent with the assumptions of
transculturation, does not require a bounded and proprietary notion of culture, nor
a concept of the authentic or real. Ono and Buescher advance a cogent critique of
Disney’s use of Pocahontas, and I see no indication that their commitment to
opposing the exploitation of Native peoples hinders their analysis via the cipher,
even though that commitment is not intrinsic to the concept.
Ono and Buescher’s (2001) analysis demonstrates that critics, while guided by
concepts grounded in transcultural assumptions, may nevertheless find it necessary
or desirable to revert to the terms and conceptions of cultural domination and
exploitation to manifest their commitment to telos (Ono & Sloop, 1992). That is,
what kind of cultural politics a transcultural model offers is unclear, including
whether its analytic usefulness needs to be supplemented by external political commitments.
The first three types of appropriation offer a semicoherent ethical system
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and political justifications that are readily recognizable within the common sense of
Western liberalism. Although transculturation recognizes issues of power, assumptions
of cultural purity, degradation, bounded singularity, and essence are problematized
as both empirically questionable and ideologically circumspect due to the
implication of such assumptions in (neo)colonialism and other oppressive systems.
Hence, although transculturation may conceptually and even empirically trump the
other three categories of appropriation explored here, the political commitments of
critics may encourage a retention of the previous categories, at least until the political
affiliations of transculturation are further clarified.
Conclusions
Cultural appropriation is inescapable, but that is not to say all acts of appropriation
are equal. Acts and conditions of appropriation vary in terms of the degree and
relevance of (in)voluntariness, (in)equality, (im)balance, and (im)purity. The four
categories of appropriation presented above presume particular models of culture
and cultural relations. Cultural exchange recalls an ‘‘innocent’’ era or context in
which cultures freely and without power implications mutually share cultural elements,
perhaps with the effect of greater cultural understanding and creativity.
Cultural domination and exploitation are modeled on dominant–subordinate relations
roughly equivalent but not entirely reducible to historical models of colonization;
although complexities and developments in these relations are acknowledged,
the model retains a binary structure of power and is implicitly based on a desire to
(re)turn to the ‘‘ideal’’ of cultural exchange. Cultural resistance as an appropriative
tactic under the conditions of cultural domination, however, highlights agency and
inventiveness on the part of subordinated cultures, which begins to question a static,
essentialist conception of culture. Finally, transculturation is an effort to theorize
appropriation in the conditions of global capitalism in a neocolonial and postmodern
era. It still draws, therefore, from the domination–subordination model of
cultural domination and exploitation while working to acknowledge complexities
in culture, power, and appropriation that question the possibility (or desirability) of
a (re)turn to cultural exchange. However, I argue that transculturation and its
implied conception of culture question the validity of the assumptions embedded
in the previous types, not just in the contemporary world but historically as well.
The challenge for cultural, critical media, critical rhetorical, and intercultural
communication studies is to reconceptualize culture not as bounded entity and
essence but as radically relational or dialogic. Cultural practices, including appropriation,
are both constituted by and constitutive of culture (in general) as a realm of
relationships. We need to leave behind the sovereign subject of liberal individualism
and its macrolevel analog, the distinctive, singular, clearly bounded, sovereign culture
that is so easily conflated with the nation state and continue to grapple with
Clifford’s (1988) recognition that we are dealing with matters of ‘‘power and rhetoric
rather than of essence’’ (p. 14).
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Such a shift, however, is not without its complications. New conceptions of
culture necessarily affect cultural politics and ethical evaluations of processes such
as cultural appropriation. For example, as discussed above, attempts on the part of
indigenous cultures to protect the integrity and coherence of their cultural traditions,
as well as strategies for survival, are often grounded in claims concerning ‘‘ownership,’’
‘‘property,’’ ‘‘degradation,’’ and other culture-as-essence notions. Where does
the conceptual shift advocated in this essay leave subordinated, especially indigenous
peoples? What is the new ground for their efforts to overcome historic and resist
ongoing oppression, for the constitution of oppositional agencies? Could this reconceptualization
of culture and cultural appropriation also constitute a kind of
epistemic violence? The felt experience of indigenous peoples of cultural continuity,
integrity, and degradation as a result of systems of power should not be dismissed
a priori, nor should the political impulse behind critical examinations of cultural
appropriation. Yet, the implication of the culture-as-essence view in colonial and
neocolonial oppression should not be overlooked.
I contend that cultural appropriation, including all four types discussed here, is
still useful: analytically, heuristically, and pedagogically. These categories and their
underlying conceptualizations of power, culture, and agency provide a set of tools for
thinking through cultural dynamics, sorting through different interpretations and
implications, and clarifying various ethical and political commitments, thereby
enabling an active scrutiny, not merely rote repetition of, familiar claims concerning,
for example, cultural exploitation. They also remind us of the variable conditions in
which appropriations occur and of the distinct perspectives that various participants
in cultural appropriation will bring to appropriation processes, products, and evaluations
thereof, thereby enabling appropriately historicized conceptualizations of
appropriation and culture. Therefore, although this essay argues for a privileging
of transculturation and a reconceptualization of culture as dialogic or conjunctural,
a qualified retention of the other models and types of appropriation is still warranted.
Notes
1 Although cultural appropriation is often mentioned but rarely systematically conceptualized
in the critical/cultural studies and international communication literatures, it is
almost entirely absent in intercultural communication studies, despite the ubiquity of
the phenomenon in intercultural contexts. In my search for work on cultural appropriation,
almost none of what I found is framed in terms of intercultural communication
contexts or literatures. A review of recent books and anthologies surveying and
synthesizing the field of intercultural communication identified no references to cultural
appropriation or potentially related concepts such as cultural dominance, cultural
imperialism, or cultural resistance. A review of intercultural communication textbooks
revealed none that directly mention the concept. One notable exception is Martin and
Nakayama’s (2000) text, which does not use the term itself but which does discuss
cultural imperialism and subordinate cultures’ use of mass culture for resistance, topics
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that are somewhat unsurprising given this text’s unique mix of traditional and critical
approaches to the subject. Therefore, two of the goals of this essay are to demonstrate
the importance of cultural appropriation to intercultural communication and to
highlight what the critical/cultural studies literature can offer to intercultural
communication studies.
2 I use ‘‘USAmerican’’ instead of ‘‘American’’ to reference facets of the United States,
thereby distinguishing it from the rest of the Americas and avoiding the ethnocentrism
implicit in the use of the latter.
3 Although often challenged, media or cultural imperialism remains an influential if
contested perspective in international communication and has undergone some revision
(e.g., Boyd-Barrett, 1998; Schiller, 1991). Cultural imperialism remains the point of
reference, and much of current global media studies is still working to reformulate or
refute the thesis (e.g., Colista & Leshner, 1998; Goodwin & Gore, 1990; Kraidy, 2002;
Lull, 2000; Miller et al., 2001; Tomlinson, 1991).
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