In recent
months cultural appropriation has becomes a ubiquitous term in the armoury of a
growing band of social justice warriors, determined to sacrifice free speech and
politics itself in the pursuit of ‘social justice’. On a small but growing
number of US campuses, and tentatively here in the UK too, Halloween costumes,
fancy dress, gestures and words have been censured as examples of cultural
appropriation. Cultural appropriation is taken to mean the adoption of dress,
speech or style from a group without privilege by a group with privilege.
Culturally
appropriate someone else’s culture and you may find yourself accused. You may
not have meant to hurt anyone’s feelings, but that is likely to be considered
irrelevant. As American comedian Louis CK asserted with regards to the wave of
accusations of cultural appropriation and ‘microaggression’ on US campuses, ‘you
don’t get to choose what offends me’.
One notable
but not exceptional case in the USA recently is that of Erika Christakis at Yale University.
Students called for her
resignation after she responded to and questioned the need for advice from the school’s Intercultural
Affairs Council about the cultural implications
of students' Halloween costumes. Protesters also confronted her husband, Nicholas
Christakis, who defended her statement. You can read her original email here. This was far from being the only
case where Halloween was deemed culturally problematic
on US campuses. Forms of dress, hairstyle, musical style, gesture and even yoga have also been criticised for their complicity in cultural appropriation.
Yale
formally encourages students to ‘think the unthinkable, discuss the
unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.’ It informs students that ‘the
provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox’ must be tolerated. ‘When you
encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to
honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or
offensive to you.’
Yet if dress
and gestures in the spirit of having a good time are censured, or, as happened
in more than one case, students have been offered formal official advice on
what constitutes an acceptable Halloween costume, where does that leave open
debate on race, Palestine-Israel or pretty much anything else? In fact as has
been widely reported there is a growth
in speakers being disinvited both in the US and the UK due to offence taking,
violation of ‘safe space’.
Some - too few - have asserted their right to wear
what they want and say what they want, and other people’s right to say what
they want back. This used to be (generally)
encouraged by radicals and in Universities. In fact struggles for equal rights
and against oppression (as opposed to struggles to have Halloween costumes
censured and native American style head dresses banned at concerts) have
generally sought to extend rights that some have to all people, including
speech rights. The ‘right’ to dress as you want was never even an issue!
Cultural
appropriation is not a new term, but its usage has expanded. Until relatively
recently it was used in relation to physical cultural artefacts from one
society displayed in a museum in another country, or the selling on of such
artefacts without the originators seeing the economic benefit of this. The
Elgin marbles (originating in ancient Greece) and the Benin Bronzes
(originating in the Benin kingdom, part of modern day Nigeria) are consider by
some to have been appropriated by Britain from their original society and
culture.
In a sense
the term itself has been appropriated. Now cultural appropriation has been
detached from any claim to material ownership of things. The new world of
cultural appropriation sees psychic harm to people inflicted by a gesture here,
an offending fancy dress outfit there, a
copied figure of speech here or a hairstyle there.
On US campuses
the impact of the growing politics of cultural appropriation is having damaging
consequences. It contributes to demands for ‘safe spaces’ for people from
minority groups, and the growth of accusations of microaggression. Principals
have acceded to some of these demands, and some staff support them. To fail to
support demands around cultural appropriation or to criticise them itself can
be deemed to constitute a microaggression (as Christakis found out to her cost). This is identity
politics writ large where people have to be constantly guarded about their
behaviour and words, and constantly reflect on where they came from (their
identity, their privileged / unprivileged position), rather than what they have to say or who
they want to become.
I strongly
suspect that cultural appropriation will surface any time soon in geographical,
ethical and anthropological studies of tourism. Tourism has long been assumed by
many writers to be profoundly problematic with regard to culture. The key ideas
adopted by writers on the sociology and anthropology of leisure travel include
the demonstration effect, acculturation and staged authenticity. The demonstration
effect refers, simply, to people from one culture aping that of another on the
basis that the other is associated with things they aspire to. Acculturation is
a general term referring to cultural change when two cultures interact. The term staged authenticity
originated with Erving Goffman’s 1910 analysis of inter personal interaction, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He argued that society has a metaphorical front stage and back stage.
People act for outsiders front stage, but reserve a back stage for themselves
and their own community, the latter in a sense authentic.
Very often these
terms are invoked in the context of arguments that view cultural encounters
between tourist and host as very problematic. As Pete Smith and I have argued, it is quite common for tourism to be
associated with cultural imperialism, neo-colonialism or an insidious
neoliberalism. Cultural encounters are already heavily problematized and viewed
pessimistically. More fundamentally, the predominant mode of thinking about
intercultural encounters in tourism geography, tourism studies and human
geography in general is cultural relativism. What is taken to define the
individual is their membership of a culture, and culture is always plural.
I argued in
the Moralisation of Tourism (2003) and elsewhere against the emphasis on cultural relativism in and
the complete absence of humanism in writing about tourism and tourists from
sociological and human geographical perspectives. Culture is always viewed in
terms of cultural difference, whilst any notion of human culture is missing. Put
simply, cultures are too often seen as defined by their differences, with
common struggles and aspirations for the future ignored. Presentism is the
result – cultures defined by their present relationship to the natural world,
with cultural transformation viewed as an external threat.
My prediction
is that cultural appropriation will start to feature as a prism through which
to view tourism’s cultural impacts. Things that were fun and playful such as
wearing imitations of local dress or sporting indigenous headgear will be
interpreted as unwitting expressions of neo-colonial arrogance. Also the cultural
etiquette encouraged by the need to ‘check your privilege’ in the presence of
people of other cultures is just as likely to reinforce culture as a barrier
between people, making speech more guarded and reducing the potential for true friendships and real understanding. We may avoid the
odd cultural faux pas, but the price for that is to fail to connect with
individuals who become viewed as repositories of Culture with a capital ‘C’.
Ultimately,
where some of tourism’s cultural critics and the purveyors of the new politics
of cultural appropriation get it wrong is failing to see that all culture is appropriated. To misquote Marx, we were born into cultures
not of our own making and we make our own culture in that context. As columnist
Patrick West puts it, cultures are ‘… organic and
fluid, they mutate over space and time, like people’s personalities, the shape
of clouds, or the contours of our coasts’. Better to leave culture as a space
for openness, fun and discovery.
