# The Concept of 'Cultural Appropriation': Beyond Borrowing
> A white DJ at a Los Angeles nightclub drops a track sampling a Yoruba chant she found on YouTube. No credit, no context: just a hook she liked. A few miles away, a boutique sells three-hundred-dollar "tribal print" jackets copied from a pattern belonging to a specific Ghanaian...
**Author:** Michael Kovnick
**Publisher:** About It All (https://aboutitall.org)
**Published:** 2026-09-30T09:36:17.461755+00:00
**Updated:** 2026-09-30T09:36:17.460084+00:00
**Category:** Cultural Concepts
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---A white DJ at a Los Angeles nightclub drops a track sampling a Yoruba chant she found on YouTube. No credit, no context: just a hook she liked. A few miles away, a boutique sells three-hundred-dollar "tribal print" jackets copied from a pattern belonging to a specific Ghanaian textile tradition, one with its own name and its own weavers behind it. Neither transaction breaks any law. Neither is even unusual. Yet both sit at the center of one of the messiest arguments in contemporary culture: what does it mean to take something from another culture, and when does taking become theft?

That's the question this entry sits with. Not to hand down a verdict, but to lay out why the argument exists and why it resists easy rules. "It's just a fashion trend" and "this is exploitation" can both feel true depending on who's talking.

## Definition

> **Cultural appropriation** refers to the adoption or use of elements from one culture, typically a marginalized or historically colonized one, by members of a dominant culture, in ways that strip those elements of their original context, meaning, or economic benefit to the originating community.

That's the working definition scholars generally use. It's worth sitting with the qualifiers, since they're doing most of the actual work. "Dominant culture." "Marginalized." "Stripped of context." Pull out any one of those and the definition falls apart, or at least stops meaning what people usually intend by it.

## Where the Term Came From

The phrase "cultural appropriation" didn't exist in everyday speech until fairly recently, but the behavior it names is ancient. Empires have always absorbed the art, food, and religious practices of the people they conquered. Rome borrowed gods from Greece. Colonial Britain shipped home Indian spices and textiles, and eventually curry itself, reshaped into something that barely resembles its source.

The term as we use it grew out of postcolonial theory and critical race studies in the late twentieth century, gaining real traction in American academic and legal writing through the 1980s and 90s. Scholars studying colonialism needed language for something specific: not just cultural contact, which happens constantly and mostly without harm, but cultural *extraction* under conditions of unequal power. A colonizing nation didn't trade with the cultures it dominated so much as seize what it wanted, often violently, then repackage the seizure as its own innovation.

By the 2000s, and especially through the 2010s, the term had leaked out of academic journals into everyday arguments about Halloween costumes, music festivals, and celebrity fashion choices. Popular use blunted it. What began as a precise analytical tool for describing colonial power structures turned, once it hit social media, into something applied almost indiscriminately to any cross-cultural borrowing. Britannica's overview of the concept traces this shift and is worth reading for anyone who wants the fuller academic lineage instead of the internet-argument version.

## Why Power Is the Whole Point

Here's what people miss when they say "cultures have always borrowed from each other, so why is this suddenly a problem?" They're right that borrowing is old and constant. What's different is who gets to borrow, and who pays the cost when they do.

Consider it this way: when a marginalized group adopts elements of a dominant culture (wearing Western business suits, say, or speaking the colonizer's language), that's usually not appropriation in the sense scholars mean. It's survival more often than not, or assimilation under pressure, or simple access to structures that were closed off otherwise. Nobody accuses a Nigerian executive of "appropriating" the necktie.

Now reverse the direction. A dominant culture picks up a sacred or meaningful practice from a group it has historically dominated, stripped of the history that made it dangerous or costly for the originating people to practice, and the dynamic shifts entirely. A Sioux child could be punished for wearing traditional dress in a U.S. government boarding school a century ago (documented in the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian collections). Decades later, that same silhouette shows up as a festival costume, admired, photographed, sold for profit, with none of the cost the original wearers paid.

That asymmetry, cost on one side and profit or pleasure on the other, is the actual engine of the concept. Without it, "appropriation" is just a fancy word for influence, something every culture on earth participates in and mostly benefits from.

## Appropriation, Exchange, and Appreciation: Not the Same Thing

So how do you tell the difference between someone genuinely engaging with another culture and someone just helping themselves to its surface?

I've spent over two decades running cultural immersion trips through Italy, and this question comes up constantly, usually from well-meaning travelers worried they'll accidentally offend someone by trying out a little Italian at the market. The honest answer is that respectful engagement and appropriation often look similar from far away and completely different up close. The difference lives in the details: credit, consent, whether anything flows back to the people whose culture it is.

Cultural *exchange* implies some kind of reciprocity, even an imperfect one, where groups trade and adapt with at least some awareness of where things came from. Cultural *appreciation* means engaging with a tradition on its own terms and crediting it properly. Cultural *appropriation* skips all that. It takes the aesthetic and leaves the meaning behind.

A small, almost silly example makes the point well. In Italy, ordering a cappuccino after an evening meal counts, for most Italians, as a genuine faux pas. Milk-heavy coffee drinks belong to the morning; after dinner, you're meant to reach for espresso, or maybe grappa or limoncello. A visitor who learns this and adjusts isn't "appropriating" Italian coffee culture. They're respecting a small rule that carries real weight for the people who hold it, even if outsiders find it puzzling. The traveler who orders the cappuccino anyway, then posts about their "authentic Italian evening," is doing something much closer to the appropriation pattern: taking the aesthetic of the culture while ignoring its actual logic. Same coffee. A completely different relationship to the place it came from.

That principle scales up. If you're curious how this plays out elsewhere, the etiquette around izakaya culture in Japan works on similar logic: unspoken rules that only make sense once you understand the social function behind them, not just the surface behavior.

## Case Studies: Where the Arguments Actually Happen

Abstract definitions only get you so far. The real disputes cluster around a handful of recurring battlegrounds.

**Fashion and sacred objects.** The Native American headdress, or war bonnet, is probably the most cited example in North American discussions of appropriation, for good reason. Among many Plains nations, a war bonnet was earned through acts of bravery or leadership and carried specific spiritual weight. When it shows up as a festival accessory at Coachella, stripped of that meaning, the objection isn't really about who gets to wear feathers. It's about a sacred, earned object flattened into a generic costume prop, available to anyone with enough cash for a knockoff.

**Food.** This one's genuinely more contested, and honestly should be, since food has always traveled with people more freely than almost anything else in culture. The tension shows up less around "should non-Mexican people eat tacos" (a strange question on its face) and more around who profits from Mexican, Thai, or Ethiopian food once it's reshaped for a mainstream market, and whether the communities who developed those dishes get economic access to that success or just get displaced by it. Anyone wanting the fuller picture of how deep and regionally specific Mexican food culture actually is, well beyond the flattened "Tex-Mex" version most Americans grew up on, should look at the complete guide to Mexican gastronomy, which gets into how much context gets lost when a cuisine gets simplified for export.

**Music.** Rock and roll's debt to Black American blues musicians is maybe the most studied case in modern music history. White artists in the 1950s and 60s achieved commercial success, often astronomically greater than the Black musicians whose sound and technique they were drawing from, sometimes note for note. This is appropriation in close to its purest historical form: credit and profit flowing overwhelmingly to the borrowers while the originators, in many documented cases, died in poverty.

**Spiritual and healing practices.** Yoga's global commercial explosion is a genuinely complicated case. Its roots in Hindu philosophy go back thousands of years, and its modern Western form, stripped of most spiritual content and repackaged as fitness, has become a multi-billion dollar industry with little financial connection back to India or Hindu religious institutions. Smudging, a ceremonial practice using burning sage among various Indigenous nations in North America, faces a similar pattern, showing up in wellness shops and Instagram posts detached from the ceremonial protocols that give it meaning within its originating communities.

None of these examples resolve cleanly. That's sort of the point. Appropriation debates rarely offer a satisfying verdict; they leave you with a set of questions worth sitting with.

## What Gets Lost: The Impact on Originating Communities

It's easy to treat this whole conversation as an aesthetic or etiquette dispute over who's allowed to wear or cook what. But where scholars and originating communities describe real harm, it tends to fall into a few overlapping categories.

Economic exclusion is the most measurable one. When a fashion house profits from a pattern lifted from an Indigenous textile tradition, that profit almost never flows back to the weavers or the community that developed the design over generations. The originators get cut out of the market their own creativity built.

Then there's the flattening of meaning. A ceremonial object, a religious symbol, a healing ritual gets reduced to a look, a vibe, something marketable. What was once specific or sacred becomes decorative. Over time this can erode the practice's meaning within its own community, particularly for younger members who encounter their own heritage first as a commercial trend rather than as something with weight.

There's also the problem of misrepresentation. Outsiders adopting a tradition without understanding it tend to get the details wrong, and those wrong details spread. UNESCO's work on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage exists partly because of this concern: practices passed down through oral tradition can be distorted or lost once extracted from the communities who actually hold the knowledge. UNESCO's framework for intangible cultural heritage is a good starting point for understanding why some traditions are considered fragile in a way objects in a museum aren't.

Underneath all of it sits a kind of quiet insult: the sense that a dominant culture gets to pick and choose the parts of a marginalized culture it finds appealing while ignoring, or actively suppressing, the people who created them. The costume gets celebrated. The community that originated it often still faces the discrimination that made the practice marginalized in the first place. That contradiction, admiring the aesthetic while disregarding the people, is really the emotional core of most appropriation arguments, more than any specific rule about who can wear what.

## Not Everyone Agrees, and That's Worth Saying Plainly

Here's where I should probably undercut some of what I just laid out. Not every scholar, and certainly not every member of a marginalized community, agrees that cultural appropriation is always harmful, or even that it's a coherent category to begin with.

Some critics, including scholars within the communities most often cited as "victims" of appropriation, argue that treating culture as something ownable and gatekept actually works against minority interests in the long run. Culture has always spread through contact, they point out, and demanding purity or permission before any borrowing occurs risks turning living traditions into museum pieces: untouchable rather than alive. There's also a reasonable worry that "appropriation" gets applied so broadly online, to anything from hairstyles to hoop earrings, that the term loses its usefulness for the genuinely exploitative cases involving real economic harm or historical violence.

I don't think this critique erases the concept. I think it means the concept needs the specificity it started with: power, context, consequence. Not just "someone outside the culture did the thing."

## It's Not Universal: Regional Differences Matter

One more complication worth naming directly: there's no single, global consensus on what counts as appropriation, because history and power dynamics differ enormously by region.

In Japan, the debate over kimono-wearing by non-Japanese people has run in a somewhat different direction than the American discourse might predict. Some Japanese cultural institutions and kimono associations have actively encouraged foreign visitors to wear kimono, framing it as appreciation and even cultural diplomacy, while American commentators have sometimes flagged the same act as appropriation. Neither position is simply wrong. They reflect different histories: Japan was never colonized the way many Indigenous nations in the Americas were, so the power calculus, while real, isn't identical.

Contrast that with Aboriginal art in Australia, where theft and commercial exploitation of Indigenous designs by non-Indigenous manufacturers has been documented and legally contested for decades, closer to the American pattern of extraction without consent or compensation.

The lesson isn't that appropriation is meaningless because it varies. It's that the concept only works when applied with actual knowledge of the specific history between the two cultures involved, not as a blanket rule imported from one country's racial history and slapped onto every cross-cultural interaction everywhere else.

## A Working Framework for Telling the Difference

So, practically, how does someone tell whether they're engaging respectfully with a culture or lifting from it? There's no perfect test, but a few honest questions tend to sort most cases reasonably well.

Who's telling the story, and who's profiting from it? If people from the originating culture are absent from the credit, the profit, or the storytelling, that's a warning sign.

Do you understand what the thing actually means, or just what it looks like? Wearing a symbol without knowing its function or its rules for use usually means you've taken the aesthetic and left the substance behind.

Was this shared willingly, or taken? Traditions actively taught, gifted, or opened to outsiders by the people who hold them (many culinary traditions work exactly this way) sit in a different category than traditions extracted without consent.

Does anything flow back? Respectful cultural engagement tends to leave the originating community better off economically or in visibility, rather than simply draining value and walking away.

This is, more or less, the philosophy behind responsible cultural travel done well: not collecting experiences as souvenirs, but living inside a place's customs long enough to understand why they exist, learning the language, eating on the culture's schedule instead of your own. Aldous Huxley wrote that "to travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries," and the same holds true of culture generally. Most appropriation happens not out of malice but out of never bothering to find out what you were actually taking.

## Contemporary Context: The Internet Sped Everything Up

None of this is new, but the pace has changed radically. A traditional pattern, dance, or slang term can now travel from a specific community to a viral TikTok trend to a fast-fashion product line within weeks, far faster than the slow diffusion of colonial-era trade or migration. That speed leaves less time, and less incentive, for anyone in the chain to stop and ask where something came from.

It's also made the conversation itself more visible and more contentious. Public callouts, brand apologies, and viral backlash have become the main mechanism for holding companies and individuals accountable, for better and worse. Sometimes this produces real correction: credit given, licensing deals struck, designers pulled from shelves. Sometimes it produces a performative apology with no structural change at all, a statement posted and nothing else different. And sometimes, honestly, it produces outrage aimed at genuinely innocent cross-cultural curiosity, punishing exactly the kind of respectful engagement that ought to be encouraged.

The concept of cultural appropriation, in other words, is still being fought over in real time: not just in academic journals but in comment sections, courtrooms, and fashion week reviews. That's probably fitting for a concept fundamentally about power. Power arguments rarely settle quietly.

What seems clear, at least to me after years of watching cultures meet each other up close, is that the difference between theft and exchange rarely lives in the object itself. A dish, a pattern, a rhythm can travel toward genuine connection or toward extraction, depending on who's asking, who's answering, and who's left holding anything once the transaction is done.

## Key Terms

**Cultural exchange**: mutual sharing of cultural elements between groups, generally involving some reciprocity or equal footing between the parties.

**Cultural exploitation**: the extraction of economic or aesthetic value from a marginalized culture's traditions without consent, credit, or benefit flowing back to that culture.

**Intangible cultural heritage**: practices, knowledge, and skills passed down through communities, often orally or through lived practice, recognized by UNESCO as requiring protection distinct from physical artifacts.

**Postcolonial theory**: the academic field examining the cultural, political, and economic legacies of colonialism, from which much of the modern language around appropriation originates.

**Cultural gatekeeping**: the practice of restricting who may access, represent, or profit from a cultural tradition, often invoked in appropriation debates on both sides of the argument.

## Further Reading

For a fuller academic grounding in the concept's origins and ongoing debate, Britannica's entry on cultural appropriation offers a solid overview of the term's development and its contested boundaries. For the specific question of protecting traditions themselves, UNESCO's framework on intangible cultural heritage lays out why certain practices are considered fragile and worth active safeguarding, separate from the objects or symbols associated with them.