Three Different Complaints Hide Inside the Phrase "Cultural Appropriation" — Epoche C1
Arguments about cultural appropriation go badly for a reason that has nothing to do with anyone's sincerity. The phrase covers at least three different complaints, each with its own subject matter, its own evidence and its own conditions of refutation. Because they are different, a reply to one is no reply at all to another, and the two sides in a typical dispute are frequently not contradicting each other. My claim is that separating the three settles more cases than any amount of further argument inside the muddle, and that once they are separated, one of the three turns out to carry no moral weight on its own. Young's distinction, and why a second cut is needed The natural starting point is the taxonomy in James O. Young's Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (2008), the first book-length philosophical treatment of the subject, because it is more finely drawn than the versions usually attributed to it. Young separates object appropriation , in which a tangible artefact changes hands, from content appropriation , in which something intangible is taken up by an outsider — and he divides content appropriation further. Style appropriation is producing work in the manner of another culture without reproducing any particular item of it; motif appropriation takes a specific element, a rhythm or a design; subject appropriation is representing another culture's members and experiences; and voice appropriation , a species of the last, is speaking in the first person as though from inside the culture. Young's own conclusions are worth stating accurately, because they are more permissive than his name is usually used to suggest. He holds that most content appropriation is morally permissible; that the objections with real force are those alleging harm and those alleging profound offence; and that even these are frequently outweighed by the value of free artistic expression and by the aesthetic goods that appropriation produces. Every category in Young's scheme is defined by what is taken . The classification I want cuts across it, and is defined by what is alleged to be wrong . The two are independent: the same act of motif appropriation can attract all three of the complaints below, one of them, or none, and which one is meant determines what evidence would settle the case. Claim one: the property claim Here the objection is that a community's material has been used commercially without consent and without return. The material may be a design, a name, a plant remedy or a sacred object. The wrong alleged is the ordinary wrong of taking what belongs to somebody, and the standards of proof are correspondingly ordinary. The clearest instances are legal ones, and the legal apparatus makes visible what the claim requires. In the United States, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 makes it unlawful to offer or display goods for sale in a manner that falsely suggests they are produced by a member of a federally recognised tribe; enforcement runs through the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. The Navajo Nation sued the retailer Urban Outfitters in 2012 over a range of goods marketed under the Navajo name, and the case settled in 2016. The suit's foundation is instructive: it rested substantially on registered trademarks in the word "Navajo" held by the Navajo Nation, which is a federally recognised tribal government with the standing to hold and enforce them. That detail is the whole difficulty in miniature. Property claims need an owner, and cultures are not always organised in a way that supplies one. A nation with a government and a trademark register can bring a claim; a diffuse tradition shared across borders and generations cannot, not because its grievance is less serious but because there is nobody with the standing to state it. Michael F. Brown's Who Owns Native Culture? (2003) documents a long series of such disputes and argues that the natural remedy — expanding property rights over cultural material — carries costs of its own, since the rights so created must be vested in some particular body, and doing so freezes into law a picture of the culture's boundaries and internal authority that may not survive scrutiny. So the claim is established by a determinate holder, an identifiable item, a commercial use, and the absence of consent. It is refuted by showing that the material was freely shared, or that no holder can be identified. The second refutation does most of the work in practice, and it is not a technicality: it is the reason so many appropriation disputes cannot be resolved as property disputes even when everyone agrees something has gone wrong. Claim two: the harm claim The second complaint is not about ownership at all. It is that a use circulates a demeaning representation, which then shapes how members of the group are seen and treated. Its evidence is evidence about the representation and its reception, not about title. Blackface minstrelsy is the standard case, and Eric Lott's Love and Theft (1993) is the standard study, though it makes a more complicated argument than the shorthand suggests. Lott's thesis is that antebellum minstrelsy expressed a genuinely contradictory attitude among white working-class audiences: fascination with and desire for black expressive culture, the "love", inseparably fused with expropriation and ridicule, the "theft". His point is not that minstrelsy was simply contemptuous; it is that the contempt and the attraction were the same phenomenon, and that the form both drew on real black cultural material and manufactured a caricature that circulated far beyond the theatre. That double structure might look like a problem for my classification, since Lott's own titular word is "theft". It is not, and the reason is that his two elements land in two different boxes. What was expropriated was expressive material, not an object with a holder — no plaintiff could have been named — so the property claim has no purchase. What was wrong was the manufacture and circula