Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment

Yuniya Kawamura, Jung-Whan Marc de Jong

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350170575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de la mode et du textile

Is it ever acceptable to "borrow" culturally inspired ideas? Who has ownership over intangible culture? What role does power inequality play? These questions are often at the center of heated public debates around cultural appropriation, with new controversies breaking seemingly every day.
Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment offers a sociological perspective on the appropriation of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and religion embedded in clothing, textiles, jewelry, accessories, hairstyles and tattoos, as well as in entertainment, such as K-pop, Bhangra, and hip-hop. By providing a range of global perspectives on the adoption, adaptation, and application of both tangible and intangible cultural objects, Kawamura and de Jong help move the conversation beyond simply criticizing designers and creators to encourage nuanced discussion and raise awareness of diverse cultures in the creative industries.

1

Introduction—Culture

YUNIYA KAWAMURA

Objectives:

•To explore where the concept of culture is placed in classical social theory.

•To understand many definitions of culture.

•To distinguish the differences between value-laden and value-neutral culture.

•To identify different schools of thought and intellectual traditions of culture.

•To learn various conceptual tools for cultural analysis.

•To explore how a classical cultural discourse is related to a contemporary cultural discourse.

•To understand the outline and the overall contents of the book.

With a growing number of keen and alert social media watchdogs in the past decade, culturally offensive and insensitive visual images coming out of the fashion and entertainment industries are immediately accused of appropriation or misappropriation, and they globally spark intense debates among Gen-Z and the Millennials, educators, racial minorities, indigenous people, social/political activists, journalists, critics, and industry professionals/practitioners. The levels of our cultural intelligence, awareness, and familiarity are tested and challenged as we continue a dialogue on how best to borrow components from a culture that is not ours. It is a sensitive and delicate topic that we are all emotionally invested in, and this book attempts to put aside our subjective and biased viewpoints and delve deeper into a source of the problem to help our readers investigate and have a thorough understanding of various case studies and images in fashion and entertainment. The concept of culture is at the basis of a debate on cultural appropriation, and the term “culture” is used far too loosely despite its intricacies and subtleties because culture is ubiquitous. We are born into a culture, live in a culture, sustain a culture, and pass it onto the next generation. Ralph Linton, a cultural anthropologist, explained culture as “a configuration of learned behaviors and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society” (1945: 32). In addition, Talcott Parsons, a social theorist, wrote, “Culture… consists in those patterns relative to behavior and the products of human action which may be inherited, that is, passed on from generation to generation independently of the biological genes” (1949: 8). Therefore, one is not born with a culture but into a culture, and acquires it through the process of socialization which continues until one disappears from the earth.

Culture is manifested in different forms and exists in many layers. One may use culture in one way while others may use it in other ways. A rigorous investigation of culture and its related ideas allows us to explore the issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation in more logical, constructive, and objective ways before we jump into a conclusion. It is imperative that we understand the nature of culture and its implications for social life which are influenced in contradictory ways, both positive and negative, and both constraining and enabling (Alexander 2003; Hays 1994). Culture is a process, history, phenomenon, and practice which contains countless dimensions.

Culture is not just about race and/or ethnicity, as many assume. Culture as a coherent racial or ethnic unity is too narrow a categorization, and the idea of one unit of people that we can call a culture, such as Japanese Culture or African Culture, has come under attack (Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz 2000: 35) because it is simply one fragment of or approach to culture which is, more broadly speaking, a selected sphere of life. Culture also refers to values, beliefs, and traditions, which support a particular ideology and direct actions. Different scholars focus on different parts of a culture that is in discussion or dispute. For instance, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn published a book entitled Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952) in which they compiled a list of 164 definitions, and explained that culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; cultural systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other as conditioning elements of further action (1952).

In this introductory chapter, I first trace the concept of culture in classical social theory postulated by Karl Marx, Marx Weber, and Emile Durkheim, known as the three founding fathers who laid the pillars of social theory and later influenced cultural studies and cultural critical theory. Secondly, various schools of thought in cultural analysis in the European and American intellectual traditions, such as the Frankfurt School in Germany, the Chicago School in the USA, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK, are explored, and we learn that there is no one systematic definition of culture that is common to all of the intellectual traditions. Some treat culture as a neutral concept while others grant certain values to the concept. Lastly, a list of relevant conceptual tools, such as hegemony, imperialism, taste, and symbolic boundaries, are provided to further address issues relevant to culture in general and cultural appropriation in particular. Culture is shaped, not only by race and/or ethnicity as indicated earlier, but also by other social groupings, such as class, gender, religion, regions, and ideologies among many others, all of which create symbolic territories that create an actual or implied awareness of insiders and outsiders, and who is in and who is out.

Culture in Classical Social Theory

Culture was initially within the domain of a material culture studies conducted by archaeologists and museum curators who collected cultural artifacts from foreign lands, and investigated where the objects originated from, located in, and what they mean. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, sociology and cultural anthropology thinkers began to explicitly or implicitly write about culture, and in social sciences, there are three founding fathers who laid a theoretical foundation of social theory, namely Karl Marx (1818–83), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who are known as cultural critics and the theorists of modernity. While they did not come up with a cultural theory per se in their classical writings, many of their ideas appear in the later discussions on the topic, and they made a major contribution to cultural studies/theory and critical theory. They provided a basis not only for social scientists but for all future scholars of culture. While Marx and Durkheim looked at society and culture from a macro-structural perspective, Weber saw them from both macro and micro perspectives. Their ideas are incredibly useful and continue to be theoretically relevant in examining culture and its related concepts, and that is why it is meaningful to go back to these three pillars in sociology.

Marx’s primary interest was in the analysis of societies categorized into social classes based on the relations of production in the economy: those who own and control the means of production known as capitalists, and the workers who do not own the means of production and use their own physical labor to earn their living who are known as proletariat or non-capitalist (1956). This resulted in a two-class structure in a capitalist society, i.e., a division between the haves and the have-nots, and the domination of the rich capitalists led to a class conflict, struggle, antagonism, and hostility between the owners and the workers.

His analysis was focused not only on economic domination and subordination but also on ideological domination and subordination. For Marx, culture manifested through and operated as a dominant ideology with capitalists’ hidden interests and exploitative social forces imposed on the poorer working class who had no or little wealth. Thus, he linked culture to power and oppression in capitalism. Like capitalism with the structure of power relations, culture that is managed by the ruling class serves to justify social inequalities. He pointed out that the workers took all the social differences and distinctions as a given, and this was later called “false consciousness” by Marxist scholars. He wanted non-capitalists in the lower and working class to become more aware of the unfairness and subordination to which they were subjected. Marx contributed to the tradition of critical cultural theory that is used to analyze racial, gender, and global stratifications. While his analysis of social class in dichotomy has been criticized as too simplistic with a dialectical approach, he provided a fundamental framework for more sophisticated theories and conceptual/analytical tools to develop. Marxism influenced and inspired subsequent intellectual traditions and scholars around the world to uncover hidden and apparent social inequalities and injustices.

Like Marx, Weber also paid much attention to the concept of class in his critique of modernity but also included the notion of status and distinguished it from class. He treated class and status as separate concepts, although in many instances they overlap and intersect with each other. Elites have a distinctive culture with a specific value system which are different from that of non-elites, and that is how the elites separate themselves from others. Boundaries and territories delineated between different status groups are cultural and symbolic. Weber is known for his Verstehen (understanding) approach in which an observer tries to understand or construct the subjective meanings that influence one’s action and recreate common cultural values. In his Economy and Society (1968: 9), Weber wrote: “for science which is concerned with the subjective meaning of action, explanation requires a grasp of the complex meaning in which an actual course of understandable action thus interpreted belongs.” Weber gives two types of action: Wertrational, a value-oriented action driven by cultural beliefs and goals, and Zweckrational, a goal-oriented action which is driven by cultural norms of efficacy, and this is found in modernity and modern culture.

Weber’s another contribution to cultural analysis is the concept of authority (or legitimate domination) with three ideal types (1968):

1Traditional authority is a kind of authority that is bestowed upon a person at birth so there is little that one can do to change it.

2Charismatic authority is given to a person with exceptional gift, talent, and power.

3Legal-rational authority is found in contemporary modern cultures and is invested in a set of rules and rule-bound institutions.

These types are determined not by the economic order but by intangible rewards that individuals may possess, be granted, or gain, and they imply social differences based on the degree of authority that people have.

Furthermore, for Durkheim, society is a moral phenomenon which is represented through people’s thoughts and actions and binds people together in various ways, and culture is maintained through moral solidarity and social cohesion. In his Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim talked about two types of solidarity that are shaped by different levels and degrees of cultural norms: mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. In the pre-industrial societies where communities are smaller and simpler, people think and behave alike which is a reflection of a homogenous society because they conform, more or less, to their cultural norms and abide by existing rules, and there is a mechanical solidarity based on the close-knit kinship ties. In contrast, in modern advanced societies, people have different cultural values and norms and are not the same in their behaviors and thoughts, but they are interdependent and complement each other. This is found in a complex industrialized society where there is a division of labor in the workplace, and people perform their own specialized tasks so they need to rely on others to complete the task. This is organic solidarity based on mutual needs in the specialization of work.

In addition, in his The Elementary Form of the Religious Life (1965 [1912]), Durkheim looks at the meaning of social integration and attachment in religion, which is also another form of culture, as a social phenomenon. Religion separates the sacred from the profane, and religious rituals, a collective event, performed for the sacred bring followers closer together physically, spiritually, and psychologically, which gives them a deeper sense of attachment and emotional involvement as they share the same cultural values and norms emanating from their religion. Durkheim defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative ...