Cultural Appropriation in American Pop Culture
American pop culture has taken advantage of postmodernity to appropriate cultural elements from abroad and living within. In doing so, American pop culture reads into the foreign culture’s original intent and meaning, and “derive their own meanings and feelings from…images, activities.” This ethno-analysis results in an infusion of indigenized, modified expression that poorly reflects the originator’s intent, meaning or use. (Kottak 374-375)
With the blurring of purpose, sanctity of origins and the protection of the emitting culture’s mores, the borrowed, reinterpreted cultural element is altered to fit the needs and identity of the receiving culture. With this occurring, the value of the integrated, divergent cultural term, cuisine, dress or icon is transmogrified, to some extent desecrated as it is assimilated into the American pop-cultural lexicon.
The globalization process, with its “revolutions in communication technology-from print media to telegraph and telephone and radio, television, satellites, and the internet-make it possible to exchange more information with more people faster and over great distances.” This emerging pattern of assimilation and movement has not only affected American popular culture, it eagerly seeks to speed the cultural appropriation response through globe-spanning networks of exchange. (Haviland 12th 370) No longer are cultural elements restricted to “traditional geographic boundaries”. Anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, avers that “territorial borders have become increasingly irrelevant given “cultural Flows” in the wake of the trend of globalization. (Haviland 12th 384)
Manfred Steger reflects on the process of globalization in his book Globalization, A Very Short Introduction,he marks the process as “the intensification and expansion of cultural flows across the globe.” Further, he maintains that this flow is punctuated by the “symbolic construction, articulation and dissemination of meaning…language, music and images constitute the major forms…” Precisely the fountainhead that American pop culture drinks from when appropriating culture. Pop music, pop art, literature, theater, all sources of interest. (Steger 71)
The transnational dissemination of foreign culture elements has taken from the traditional societies dress, speech, icons, religions, and foods. These fundamental components are then reinterpreted, watered-down or devalued to the lending culture. “Facilitated by the Internet and other new technologies…individualism, consumerism and various religious discourses circulate more freely and widely than before.” Being the case,as Manfred Steger, Director of the Globalism Research Centre based at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology writes in his book, “As images and ideas can be more easily and rapidly transmitted from one place to another, they profoundly impact the way people experience their everyday lives…cultural practices frequently escape fixed localities…eventually acquiring new meanings in interaction with dominant global themes.” (Steger 72)
The bastardization of constituent factors of a cultural identity are then integrated into the culture, economics, politics and lifestyle of the accessing them via globalization. This exchange refashions the element due to ideas, beliefs, value and behaviors prevalent in the receiving culture.
One need only to look to the average American’s dress, mannerisms, vernacular, religion, cuisine to find the influence of foreign cultures and the co-option of their cultural elements. Arts, media, tourism and migration have been assisted by the emerging global environment. Manfred Steger implores his readers and students to realize that cultural appropriation, or as he denotes it as, hybridization, “have become most visible in fashion, music, dance, film, food and language.” In other words, pop culture. (Steger 77)
Arjun Appadurai has interpreted the wells from which these hybridizing, pop culture globalization forces emit:
Ethnoscapes: the movement of groups and people
Technoscapes: technologies which move across previously restrictive borders
Fincancescapes: global currencies and financial ties
Mediascapes: arts, media and the capability to spread these over distances
Ideoscapes: state and alternative societal and political organizations and identities
(Haviland 11th 443)
From these venues, American popular culture collects, dissects and recreates a variety of images, icons, movements, norms, values and artifacts into its own vision, into usable elements for America’s use. While losing relevance or respect from the indigenous lender, it now carries relevance to the borrower society. The products of cultural appropriation in American pop culture are not quite parodies, not quite tribute, but a divergent and distinct breed. While many postmodern societies eschew ethnocentrism or cultural imperialism, they are oft apt to overlook the effects of their cultural appropriation, rather viewing it as acts of cultural appreciation.
Works Cited
Haviland, william A., Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, and Bunny McBride.Cultural anthropology the human challenge. 11th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.
Haviland, William A., Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, and Bunny McBride. Cultural Anthropology The Human Challenge. 12th ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2008.
Kottak, Conrad. Cultural Anthropology with Living Anthropology Student CD. 12th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 2006.
Steger, Manfred B. Globalization a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
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