Some Skepticism about "Cultural Appropriation" and the Ethics of Bluegrass Music

Greetings,

This week I have some skeptical thoughts on the idea of “cultural appropriation.” Also, thoughts on the history of bluegrass music. Also Barak Obama.

I was recently reading a science fiction novel in which one of the characters complained that something felt “appropriative.”  Once genre fiction can use such an ugly neologism with the assumption that readers will understand and sympathize, a concept has probably been baked into the popular culture.  Still, I think that the idea of cultural appropriation remains confused and potentially harmful.

By cultural appropriation I mean the idea that certain kinds of cultural expressions belong to particular ethnic or cultural groups and that those outside of the group ought not to use cultural expressions that don’t “belong” to their own group.  I think that this concept of cultural ownership rests on a misunderstanding of how both identity and culture work.

First, it seems to me that cultural appropriation rests on a reified idea of cultural identity.  The problem is that few if any people have the kind of simple or pure cultural identities that the idea of cultural appropriation seems to require.  Think of Barak Obama.  His father was Kenyan.  His mother was an American of largely British descent.  What is his “real” identity?  Kenyan, despite the lack of any life experience in Kenya? White American, despite dark skin? British, despite generations of ancestors living in North America?  African-American, despite the lack of a genetic relationship to the largely West African slaves brought to the Americas? I suspect that the correct answer is everything and nothing.  It doesn’t really make sense to ask what Obama’s “real” identity is because there isn’t such a thing as a single, reified ethnic identity. Yet the idea of cultural appropriation requires that we have an answer to the question of Obama’s “real” identity if we are to decide whether or not, for example, his use of rhetorical tropes from the preaching tradition of the African-American church constitute cultural appropriation.

Obama is a wonderfully complicated and salient example, but I suspect to a greater or lesser extent this is how all cultural identities work.  We are always members of multiple tribes based on genealogy, culture, experience, and the way that others treat us.  Obama was once challenged on whether he was “really” Black given his ethnic background.  His response was “I have stood in the rain trying to get a cab in New York City as empty taxies have driven by.  Of course, I’m a Black man.”  In other words, his ethnic identity isn’t really about ethnicity at all.  It’s about a shared experience of being a dark-skinned person in the United States.  This strikes me as a pithy and insightful way of capturing both the arbitrary fluidity of ethnic identities and the at times pernicious tenacity of their false reification.

It seems to me that the idea of cultural appropriation only works if we deny this messy reality and imagine that everyone can be neatly assigned to discrete and self-evidently defined cultural identities.  As a metaphysical matter, I suspect that such simple, reified identities simply don’t exist.  As a practical matter, I think that “cultural appropriation” as a concept invites ugly and ultimately intractable disputes about who is “[INSERT CULTURAL IDENTITY HERE]-enough” to use this or that cultural expression. (Is Brandon Flowers a “real” enough Latter-day Saint to use the Mormon imagery that he does in his music? What a fruitless and ugly conversation!)

I think that the idea of cultural appropriation is also a problem because it misconceives how cultures work.  It imagines that cultures are stable things that allow us to clearly identify what is in or out of any particular culture.  To the extent that it acknowledges change, it seems that the idea of cultural appropriation imagines that cultures develop through a kind of pure, inner logic of their own, or else they are defiled through either invasion or appropriation.  I also don’t think that this idea really makes sense. 

First, cultures are dynamic not static.  They are always recreating and reinterpreting themselves.  The unchangingly pure culture is a fiction, a bit of romantic projection. Most often it’s something that people use to reinterpret their own culture in the face of change. Alternatively, it is a mechanism that an outsider uses to simplify what is otherwise too complicated to be easily grasped. As often as not that simplification is in the service of spurious claims to understanding and authority. 

Second, cultures develop through a constant process of borrowing and alteration.  We shouldn’t see this as an inherently sinister matter of “appropriation” but rather as an inherently creative process by which our cultural life is constantly renewed and enriched.  Shakespeare was certainly guilty of “cultural appropriation” in his use of Italian stories and poetic forms, but he wasn’t unique in such borrowing.  This is what cultures do, and we will be worse off if idealogical puritans are able to convince everyone that such borrowing is inherently illegitimate.

That said, I think that there is an important ethical concern that the idea of cultural appropriation gestures toward, albeit in an ultimately incoherent way.  Cultural borrowing can certainly be fraught.  One can use a cultural expression in a way that is disrespectful and dishonest.  Consider an example:

I love bluegrass music.  As a genre, bluegrass is a fairly recent creation.  It developed out of so-called “Old Time” music in the 1940s and 1950s.  That music, in turn, borrowed all sorts of musical ideas from various traditions of African-American music.  I don’t think that there is anything inherently problematic about this cultural borrowing. That said, the way in which bluegrass and Old Time music borrowed from African-American traditions was NOT morally neutral.  The main point of contact was via minstrel shows, in which the pathos and tragedy of the African-American experience was viciously Bowdlerized through various racial stereotypes, and the musicians and culture that produced African-American music were belittled and mocked, even as audiences enjoyed a small part of their riches.  Elsewhere, Old Time and bluegrass musicians simply copied the songs of African-American “jug bands” (street performers using an eclectic mix of home-made instruments) and falsely claimed them as their own.

The ethical problems of bluegrass do not come from the fact of cultural borrowing.  That cultural borrowing was a marvelously productive artistic moment.  The interaction of African-American musical traditions with other cultural strands, such as the Celtic-descended music of poor whites in Appalachia, has created one of America’s more wonderful and unique cultural productions.  However, this borrowing was not done in an honest or respectful way.  The problem is not that banjo music is the proprietary possession of a particular ethnic group.  That isn’t how culture and identity work, thank goodness.  Rather, the problem is that at its birth bluegrass music was neither respectful nor honest about its debt to African-American traditions. 

Honesty and respect strike me as much better concepts for mediating the ethics of cultural influence and change than ideas of ownership and appropriations. It’s too much to hope for, but I think we would all be better off if we just dropped the idea of cultural appropriation.

See you next week.

Nate

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