Cultural appropriation

What it is

The taking up of practices, symbols or sacred material from another culture — particularly one that has been colonised, suppressed or dominated — in ways that strip context, ignore the source community's own norms, or generate profit that flows away from it.

The debate is frequently conducted badly, in both directions, because two different claims get run together.

The weak claim is that borrowing across cultures is wrong. This is untenable. Every living tradition on this site is a product of borrowing: Buddhism absorbed local deities across Asia, Christianity absorbed Greek philosophy and Roman festivals, Western esotericism is a compound of Egyptian, Jewish, Greek and Islamic material. A rule against cultural exchange would abolish most of what it claims to protect.

The strong claim is narrower and much harder to dismiss. It is about asymmetry: what happens when practices are taken from a people who were punished for those same practices, by members of the group that punished them, and sold back at a profit. That is not exchange. It is a transaction with only one direction of benefit.

Where it came from

The concept came out of sociology and art criticism and sharpened through the 1980s and 1990s.

In this territory the sharpest single document is the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, issued by the Lakota Summit V in 1993 — a resolution by representatives of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations objecting specifically to non-Native people selling sweat lodges, vision quests and pipe ceremonies. It is worth reading because it is the source community speaking directly, which is rarely how this argument is conducted.

The most serious documented consequence came in 2009, when three people died at a sweat-lodge event in Sedona, Arizona, run for profit by the self-help figure James Arthur Ray, who had no training in the tradition he was imitating. He was convicted of negligent homicide in 2011. The ceremony he was approximating has protocols developed over a very long time, including who runs it and when it stops. He had none of them.

Other flashpoints: the Hindu American Foundation's "Take Back Yoga" campaign from 2010, arguing that yoga's Hindu roots had been erased in its Western commercialisation; and sustained concern about the commercial harvesting of white sage, where demand from the smudging market has raised conservation and access problems for Native communities who use it.

How it is used

In practice a set of questions does more work than the label:

• Is the material restricted? Many traditions distinguish public teaching from initiatory or sacred content. Taking the first is ordinary; taking the second is taking something that was explicitly not offered.
• Is the source community objecting? Not hypothetically — actually, on the record.
• Who profits, and does anything flow back?
• Is there a relationship? Someone who has studied for years within a tradition, with teachers from it, stands differently from someone who watched a video and started charging.
• Is the origin acknowledged or erased? Rebranding a practice as your own discovery is a distinct wrong from practising it.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the asymmetry is real and historically specific. Practices that were criminalised — Native American ceremonial practice was legally suppressed in the United States until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 — being marketed by outsiders while living practitioners are still recovering from that suppression is not the same situation as two neighbouring cultures trading festivals.

We can say source communities are not monolithic, and that this is the part most often flattened. Some Native teachers have shared publicly and deliberately; others regard that as betrayal. Some Hindu teachers actively exported yoga; others object to how it arrived. Anyone claiming to know what "the community" thinks is usually describing one faction. The honest response to internal disagreement is to say so, not to pick the faction that licenses what you already wanted to do.

We can say the harm is not primarily about offence. It is about restricted knowledge being exposed, safety protocols being discarded — people have died — living practitioners being undercut by imitators, and traditions being reshaped in the imagination of a market.

We cannot say where every line falls, and this site will not pretend to. What it will do is follow its own rule: describe living traditions at a public-knowledge level, from sources authored within them, with no ritual instruction and no restricted material. That rule does not resolve the argument. It just keeps this site from being another party to it.

Further reading

• Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality (1993) — short, and the source community in its own words.
• Andrea Smith, Conquest (2005) — on spiritual appropriation as part of a longer pattern.
• Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga (2014) — careful on commercialisation without treating exchange itself as the offence.