2.6: Whose Culture Is It Anyway?

Appreciation, Appropriation, and the Business of Borrowing

Culture travels because people borrow. That is not a problem. In fact, if humans had never borrowed from one another, most of what we think of as culture would barely exist in recognizable form. Music evolves through exchange. Languages absorb foreign words. Recipes change when ingredients move. Designers study unfamiliar materials and techniques. Religious traditions interact. Artists experiment. Borrowing is one of the engines of cultural creativity. So why do some forms of cultural borrowing produce admiration while others produce anger? The answer is that cultural exchange does not happen outside history. When cultural forms cross boundaries, they carry histories of empire, race, migration, discrimination, inequality, commercialization, and ownership with them. The object may travel easily. The history does not disappear.

Cultural Appropriation: More Than Borrowing

Cultural appropriation is commonly used to describe the adoption or use of cultural elements by people outside the community associated with them, particularly when the relationship involves unequal power, inadequate acknowledgment, distortion, commercialization, or use of practices that a community considers sacred or restricted.

The key word is not simply borrowing.

It is power.

Calling every cross-cultural interaction appropriation would make the concept nearly useless. The difficult cases are those in which cultural material moves upward through an unequal hierarchy: a marginalized community develops a practice, a more powerful actor adopts it, the cultural meaning is stripped away, and the adopter receives prestige or profit that the original community does not. Fashion scholarship has examined precisely these tensions surrounding traditional and Indigenous cultural expressions (Lee, 2019; Gebru, 2021).

The Double Standard Problem

A community may be stigmatized for its clothing, hairstyle, accent, food, religion, or language. Then a more socially powerful group adopts the same practice. Suddenly it becomes fashionable, interesting, edgy, worldly, or chic. The practice did not change. Its social position did. This is why appropriation often cannot be understood solely through individual intention. Good intentions matter they just do not settle the argument.

Fashion: Inspiration, Collaboration, or Extraction?

Fashion operates through reference and borrowing. But the question becomes more difficult when an influence is rooted in a community whose cultural expressions have historically been marginalized or whose cultural knowledge carries sacred or restricted meanings. Gebru (2021) argues that conventional fashion-law assumptions fit Indigenous cultural expressions poorly because many are collectively held and culturally restricted rather than individually authored in the manner assumed by conventional copyright law. A design may belong collectively to a people. Knowledge may pass between generations. A motif may signal kinship, place, ceremony, status, spirituality, or historical memory. No single individual “invented” it. That does not mean nobody owns it. It may mean the law is asking the wrong question.

Traditional Cultural Expressions

International policy increasingly uses the term traditional cultural expressions for traditional designs, music, stories, symbols, performances, rituals, and artistic practices maintained within communities over time. A fashion company can look at an Indigenous textile motif and see a design. A community may see genealogy. The company sees a pattern. The community sees memory. The company sees inspiration. The community may see property. Those perspectives are not interchangeable. Something can be legal to copy and still ethically exploitative.

Mexico, Indigenous Textiles, and Global Fashion

Indigenous textile traditions in Mexico have become a highly visible site of appropriation debates. Researchers examining Mexican Indigenous designs argue that describing commercial reproduction as simple inspiration can obscure relationships among cultural identity, traditional knowledge, economic inequality, and global profit (Barragán-Esqueda & Barragán-López, 2022). An artisan may spend days producing a textile rooted in generations of cultural knowledge. A multinational company can reproduce the visual idea industrially. The company reaches global consumers. The original artisan may remain economically precarious. The cultural element traveled. The economic value did not necessarily travel back. That is cultural globalization and global inequality occupying the same piece of fabric.

Sacred Is Not the Same as Stylish

Not every cultural object is equally available for borrowing. Communities may distinguish between cultural expressions intended for broad public use and those reserved for particular ceremonies, families, social roles, initiates, or spiritual purposes. A sacred song is not simply a song. A ceremonial object is not simply décor. A religious symbol is not merely a graphic. A ritual is not simply entertainment. Removing an object from its context can transform what it means. Sometimes that transformation is harmless. Sometimes it is the harm.

Music Has Always Borrowed

Music makes appropriation debates especially complicated because musical history is full of borrowing, adaptation, collaboration, sampling, fusion, imitation, and reinvention. Research on Nigerian hip-hop, for example, shows how artists combine global hip-hop conventions with local language practices, creating new forms of linguistic and cultural identity rather than simply copying an American genre (Omoniyi, 2006). Reggae provides another example. As reggae traveled internationally, non-Jamaican performers sometimes adopted elements of Jamaican Creole as part of performing recognizable reggae identity (Gerfer, 2018). When an artist adopts a culturally specific accent to sound more authentic, are they honoring the tradition, performing an identity, commercializing it, or perhaps doing all three? Context matters.

Appreciation Versus Appropriation

Students often want a rule. Unfortunately, Global Studies is going to disappoint you. There is no universal equation. But there are better questions. Consider the historical power relationship connecting the groups, whether the cultural element retains connection to its original meaning, whether community participation or consent was relevant or obtained, whether creators were credited, who received economic benefit, and what happened to the source community afterward. These questions do not guarantee agreement. They produce a better conversation.

Collaboration Changes the Question

Instead of asking Can we use your culture?, the question can become Can we create something together? Community members become designers rather than references. Artisans become partners rather than invisible suppliers. Communities can refuse uses they regard as inappropriate. The difference between appropriation and collaboration is often visible in who gets to say no.

Food: Can Anyone Own a Recipe?

Who owns hummus, curry, dumplings, ceviche, barbecue, biryani, or a taco? The answer is often nobody, several communities, and history—all at once. Yet food can still reveal unequal power. An immigrant community’s food may be dismissed as smelly, strange, cheap, or unhealthy. A generation later, an upscale chef “discovers” it. The dish is redesigned, renamed, photographed, and sold for three times the price. The problem is not that someone cooked the food. The interesting question is: What changed when the social status of the cook changed?

Museums: When Borrowing Becomes Possession

Some of the most consequential appropriation debates involve objects sitting quietly inside museums. Collections across Europe and North America include objects acquired during colonial expansion, archaeological expeditions, missionary activity, military conquest, unequal trade, and other encounters whose terms are now contested. The contemporary movement for restitution or repatriation asks whether certain objects should return to the societies or communities from which they originated. The question is no longer How did this artifact travel? It becomes: Did it have a right to leave?

The Cultural Borrowing Test

When evaluating cultural borrowing, examine the history connecting the groups, the meaning of the cultural element in its original context, whether it is public or restricted, whether source communities participated, who received attribution and economic benefit, how substantially the cultural form changed, and what consequences followed for the source community. Then ask: Would the exchange look different if the source community had equal power?

Exchange or Extraction?

Cultures cannot survive without exchange. The challenge is not preventing cultural borrowing. It is creating exchanges that recognize history, respect community authority, distribute benefits fairly, and allow cultural creativity without pretending power does not exist. Perhaps the most useful distinction is not between borrowing and not borrowing. It is between exchange and extraction. Exchange creates relationships. Extraction removes value.

Think about it!

Find a real example of cultural borrowing involving fashion, music, food, language, art, or social media. Do not begin by deciding whether it is appropriation. Apply the Cultural Borrowing Test and then argue whether the case is best understood as appreciation, adaptation, collaboration, appropriation, commercialization, extraction or some combination