Who Owns Culture?

Josh Landy
Can anyone own a culture?

Ray Briggs
When is it disrespectful to copy someone else’s style?

Josh Landy
How do you draw the line between appreciation and appropriation?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that began at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re asking who owns culture?

Josh Landy
Who owns culture? I feel like that’s a weird way of thinking about the question, right? I mean, look, I understand how someone could own the rights to a particular song they wrote or something. But how could anyone own a whole culture?

Ray Briggs
Well think about like the British Museum. It’s full of artifacts that you bred, stole from other people all around the world? Don’t you think that that’s taking stuff that belongs to another culture?

Josh Landy
Guilty as charged, guv’ner! I mean, yeah, okay, if you wander around the world nicking things and hiking them back to a museum and a different country, I personally think that is stealing. But mostly when we talk about cultural appropriation, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about borrowing an idea and borrowing an idea isn’t taking it away from someone.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but it’s still stealing. I mean, that’s why we have copyright laws.

Josh Landy
Well, okay, I’m not I’m not talking about plagiarism, like stealing a particular song or a book or something. I’m talking about a musical stylez—like what’s wrong with getting inspired by rock or Tango or reggae?

Ray Briggs
Okay, but what if, like, a white artist takes a style that was created by people of color and makes a bunch of money off of it, and then doesn’t give anything back to the people who originally invented it? How is that Okay?

Josh Landy
Well, that’s not okay. But all I’m saying is I don’t think all situations are like that. Think about Paul Simon and his album “Graceland,” right. So he borrowed some South African musical styles, he even featured a South African band, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. And yeah, he made a bunch of money, that’s true, but so did they. And he kind of put their jar on the map for a lot of folks who didn’t know about it beforehand.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, okay. So “Graceland” was a two-way cultural exchange. But what I’m complaining about is more like one way taking, like, what about all those cases where somebody just takes another culture is sacred objects and treats them like their toys, like when white women wear a bindi is is a fashion statement.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that is kind of offensive, but I sort of wonder even there is it also harmful? I mean, like it’s harmful to steal artifact. It’s definitely harmful to profit from other people’s work. But if somebody wears a bindi, isn’t that basically a victimless crime?

Ray Briggs
Well, it’s just disrespectful. I mean, that’s somebody’s religion. It’s supposed to be special and sacred. If everybody wears a bindi, then it’s gonna lose some of that specialness.

Josh Landy
Yeah. I mean, I see what you mean. And I think that could work for bindis. But I still feel like there’s a lot of cases where cultural borrowing really is basically harmless.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, like what?

Josh Landy
Well, a few years ago, there was this whole kerfuffle over hoop earrings, right. I mean, some folks were saying, white women shouldn’t wear hoop earrings because they’re traditionally worn by people of color. I gotta say that that didn’t really make sense to me. I mean, no culture owns the circle. It’s a basic geometrical shape.

Ray Briggs
Okay, that one does seem a little overzealous. But cultural appropriation is a real problem. So what’s wrong with being kind of on guard about it?

Josh Landy
Well, the way I see it one danger is it’s going to stifle creativity. Salman Rushdie said, I think really nicely, “Hybridity is how newness enters the world.” And don’t we want newness to enter the world? We want that kind of two-way exchange. It’s how cultures evolve and grow and stay vibrant.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, okay. I see why you want that vibrancy and why stifling creativity is kind of bad. But if it helps us all get along, maybe it’s still a price worth paying.

Josh Landy
But that’s the thing, right? I don’t think it does help us all get along. It makes us scared to communicate with each other. So we all huddled in our separate cultural boxes for fear of offending anyone.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. I mean, it seems like we really need some way of drawing the line between, like, what’s offensive and what’s harmful and what’s, you know, just good old cultural exchange.

Josh Landy
I agree. We really need some principles to guide us here. And hopefully, our guest today can give us some it’s Dominic McIver Lopes, author of a forthcoming book called “Aesthetic Injustice” that talks about a cultural appropriation and other kinds of harm in the world of art.

Ray Briggs
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to look into examples of white artists appropriating African-American music. She files this report.

Fisk Jubilee Singers
Swing low, sweet chariot…

Holly McDede
Is it really cultural appropriation if you just use your knowledge of another culture in your music composition? In 1892, the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák came to America to lead the new National Conservatory of Music in New York City. One of the burning questions facing classical music composers was how to express a national identity.

Douglas Shadle
Dvořák famously said that African American music needs to be this essential component in American national classical composition.

Holly McDede
That’s Douglas Shadle, a professor of musicology at the Vanderbilt School of Music. Dvořákk told the New York Herald newspaper that in the “Negro melodies of America,” he discovered all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” The New World Symphony premiered at Carnegie Hall the following year, and people had a lot of opinions.

Douglas Shadle
It’s really just funny to read the entire spread, because some people say, Oh, this is clearly heavily influenced by African American music. And some people say, Well, this sounds Irish to me. And some people say, Well, this just sounds Eastern European. And some people say, well, it could just be anything because it’s so generic, it sounds like awful music, and so no one really agree as on how the symphony actually sounds.

Holly McDede
The piece may have included some references to black music, but at the end of the day, it still sounded European. Certain black musicians said it did not work.

Douglas Shadle
because you don’t really understand what this music is what it means because you have not lived this life that I’ve lived.

Holly McDede
Compare that to music by a black composer

Narrator
in America, the rise of jazz signified a shift in the American culture and music. One of those composers who helped with that shift was William Grant Still

Holly McDede
Here’s Still’s “Afro American Symphony” of 1930.

Emmett G. Price
I don’t necessarily agree with Chuck D in his, you know, famous line… Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant, you know, exploitive to me, you know, straight up racist, him and John Wayne.

Holly McDede
Emmett G. Price, the inaugural dean of Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music, says in the debate around cultural appropriation it matters how white musicians use their fame.

Elvis Presley
This is my biggest record. And it goes something like this.

Holly McDede
In this scene from Baz Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis,” the King hangs out with B.B. King and sees Little Richard perform.

Elvis Presley
Man, he sings the hell out of that song! I would love to record that.

B.B. King
If you do you’ll make a whole lot more money than that kid could ever dream of.

Holly McDede
Prices says Elvis is a complicated situation. He grew up in a black neighborhood in Tupelo, Mississippi, raised musically on rhythm & blues and Pentecostal gospel.

Mahalia Jackson
Oe of these mornings…

Emmett G. Price
Elvis used to sit in the back of the church at Eastridge Baptist Church where the Reverend W Herbert Brewster was the pastor, and in that black Baptist Church in Memphis, those brothers and sisters gave him absolute love affirmation and valued him used to call him brother Elvis, and treated him as since a surrogate family member. So did he have access to black people in black culture? Absolutely is no question about it.

Holly McDede
Elvis, his fame rose with the Cvil Rights movement and he had a huge black fan base the prices question is did he leverage his celebrity on behalf of the people who loved him and inspired his music?

Emmett G. Price
With Elvis, you know, recorded “You Ain’t Nothin But a Hound Dog,” I mean, that he didn’t write the song. You know, Big Mama Thornton wrote the song. So how did he leverage his celebrity to help Big Mama Thornton come out of poverty. And the fact that he didn’t do that is where we find the issue.

Holly McDede
But Elvis was lost in his own narrative and didn’t necessarily have the maturity to understand his own power. Then there was the racist and discriminatory music industry eager to use him to sell black music to white audience. Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Colonel Tom Parker
They’re not putting a colored boy on a hayride.

Elvis Movie
That’s the thing—he’s white.

Colonel Tom Parker
He’s… white?

Emmett G. Price
When black folks turn the radio, they didn’t get the pick whose version of the song played. And so Elvis Presley’s music played and was permeated across the radio waves.

Holly McDede
To appropriate from the fictionalized movie version of BB King…

B.B. King
You don’t do the business, the business will do you.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that really interesting report Holly. I’m Josh Landy with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re asking who owns culture.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Dominic McIver Lopes. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and author of “Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value,” as well as the forthcoming book “Aesthetic injustice.” Dom, welcome to Philosophy Talk,

Dominic McIver Lopes
Thank you for inviting me, I’m so pleased to be here.

Josh Landy
So tell me, how did you first start getting interested in this topic?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Well consider my surname. The McIvers are from a village off the northwest coast of Scotland, and the Lopeses from a village in southwest India. And throughout my life, I have sometimes felt pulled in different directions. And I’ve sometimes enjoyed opportunities to mix it up. So I can make a curry and wear my kilt at the same time. And I guess, working in aesthetics, it was kind of inevitable that I would turn my mind to cultural contact contact between different cultures, and how that can sometimes go well and sometimes go poorly. And it certainly goes poorly when cultural appropriation is a problem.

Ray Briggs
So Dom, I see why, why that’s got some kind of personal significance for you, and probably for a lot of our listeners, and judging by how often debates about cultural appropriation are in the news, they’ve got personal significance for a lot of people. But what do you think is at stake in them philosophically speaking?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Well, Josh, and Ray had a lot to say about that. It’s set it up very nicely. Let me make it a bit of a puzzle. So here’s a great thing about human beings. I think we are curious, we are migratory. We’re magpies and recyclers we use so that there’s that Rushdie quote, made large hodgepodge a bit of this and a bit of that, that’s how newness enters the world. That’s absolutely right, we should embrace it. And yet, at the same time, we know that our borrowings can cause harm. Now, that’s a serious problem, and we need to address it. But at the same time, we can’t address it in a way that has a chilling effect on the good kind of borrowing. And that means we need to understand what’s really going on when things go wrong. And here, I think that our understanding of what goes wrong, is too simple. So if you Google around, people are concerned about property and permission. And they’re concerned about giving offense. But I think that that really kicks the can down the road, it doesn’t get at the heart of the matter.

Ray Briggs
So wait, what’s wrong with saying you shouldn’t steal stuff that doesn’t belong to you? That seems like a perfectly sensible way of thinking about things, doesn’t it?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Good. That is a perfectly sensible way of thinking about things. Things can be property, property isn’t a thing. Property is a system of rules for excluding from use. And that system of rules is supposed to serve a purpose, it’s ultimately justified because it serves a purpose. So we have agricultural property to incentivize agriculture, feeding ourselves, we have intellectual property, theoretically, to incentivize creativity, pay people back for their new ideas. And so the question then is, what are the interests that are being addressed by cultural property? Sometimes those interests are being harmed, that’s where we have bad cultural appropriation, and sometimes they’re not. So we need to get beyond is it property to what’s the justification for the property? What are the values that are in play?

Ray Briggs
Right? So I guess if I, if I were, like, certain kinds of Marxist or anarchist, I would think like, all property is kind of nonsense. And then I wouldn’t be able to complain about cultural appropriation, would I?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Oh thar’s a problem for your Marxist. And I don’t know what to say about that. Except that, you know, there’s, there’s private property, there’s common property, and there’s the public domain. So private property is when I own something, I can exclude you from using it. Common property is the commons in the village that everybody could use to graze their livestock on. And that excluded people from using it in ways that prevented the community from being able to graze the livestock. And then there’s public domain where anybody can do anything that they want. And really, maybe a way to think about it is when should a bit of culture be public domain when should it be common property? When should it be private property?

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about cultural appropriation with Dominic McIver Lopes from the University of British Columbia.

Ray Briggs
Do you feel protective of your cultural heritage? Have you drawn inspiration from other cultures? How do we draw the line In between borrowing and stealing,

Josh Landy
Owning, taking, and sharing—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

JonoJosh
I know who I am and I found my pocket / Put me in a box I’ll find the key when you lock it / Mixing up the world every day I vow / That imma say I’m young half black and proud

Josh Landy
Can you celebrate all your cultures, or do you have to choose one? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re asking who owns culture with Dominic McIver Lopes, author of “Aesthetic injustice.”

Josh Landy
Have you got questions about cultural appropriation? Email us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and get access to our library of more than 550 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Dom, you were just asking a question, you know, when should a piece of culture be private property or common property or nobody’s property? So how do we answer that question? How do we get some principles here?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Well, I think we need to understand what values are at stake. So what good is the bit of property doing for the community from which it originates? I’m not convinced there’s one simple answer, because we’re talking about culture and cultures are diverse. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? And so they have different values. And that means we need to proceed on a case by case basis that there might be some pretty general things that we can say. But we should be attentive to the particulars of their circumstances.

Josh Landy
That seems fair, and it seems like there are different ways of doing things wrong. Right. So we talked a little bit ago, Ray and I about literal theft, you know, my fellow Brits wandering into countries. So just saying, I’ll have that thank you very much. And then there’s sort of the profiteering aspect, which we heard about in the in the rubbing philosophical report, then there’s something like disrespect. So you think about, for example, the Atlanta Braves and their fan base and the some of the some of the things that cheers that they do. And then there’s something like misrepresentation. So you think about blackface shows, which is a seriously disrespectful, demeaning misrepresentation? Are those the kinds of things you’d have in mind? When you say, look, there are different kinds of values being served and, and therefore different kinds of ways of getting it wrong?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Yeah, so maybe we can articulate the values in a second. But let me just say something about property permission on the one hand, and disrespect on the other. So we know this, that theft is worse when what stolen means a lot to the owner. And we don’t tend to pay enough attention to that when we’re thinking about cultural appropriation so that theft of the Benin bronzes from Nigeria, is extremely serious, because of their great value. It’s not enough to say It’s theft, we’ve got to say, you know, they are extremely important works of art. And international law just stops with its cultural property and doesn’t talk about how some property means matters more than other property. And the same goes for disrespect. So I think of disrespect, the kind of disrespect that we should be focusing on is when somebody is cavalier about the values of somebody else. So there’s been some press recently about people at music festivals, who were indigenous headdresses. So they’re a little intoxicated, and they’re shirtless, and they’re rowdy, and in wearing a headdress or not paying any attention at all to what the headdress signifies, for members of the home culture, you know that the headdress is a great honor and worn only on solemn occasions. And the folks at the Music Festival, don’t care about that. That’s disrespectful, and people from the home culture have a right to be offended there. But notice how here again, we need to be open to the idea that the values can be great value, so they can be small values. And how bad the cultural appropriation is depends on how big those values are, how meaningful the item or the idea is for the people in the home culture.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question actually about disrespect. So the indigenous headdress example seems like one word like clearly people getting drunk and putting on this headdress or doing something wrong. But I kind of wonder about the general principle that we should respect sort of everybody else’s ideas like it seems to me that like Some of the religious ideas that I grew up with were deserving of respect. And some of them really weren’t like, is it okay to criticize ideas and disrespect them? As long as they’re from my own culture? Like how much cross cultural dialogue should there be? And like, how much respect do ideas deserve by default?

Dominic McIver Lopes
I love your question. I’m so happy you asked that. There’s a big difference between aesthetic and artistic culture and other forms of culture. We can easily see that other peoples are, it’s great for them, we don’t need to criticize it. I mean, for insiders enough, we learn enough, we might be able to say to an artist, sometimes in another culture, you’re trying to pull this thing off, and you’re not quite getting there. Here, I have some advice for you. So that might be criticism, taking the culture on its own terms. But we don’t need to be down on other people’s art or down on other people’s aesthetic practices. We can just say, you know, it’s all great isn’t isn’t a world a wonderful place that we have all this good stuff at it. It’s not like that with religion. So that that like that with politics. Isn’t it wonderful that it’s like that, for some areas of culture, like art and the aesthetic?

Josh Landy
I really liked what you’re talking about. So picking up on the kinds of thing that Anthony Appiah and Sadie Smith have been saying about, you know, thinking about this whole question in terms of ownership, that’s probably not the right way to start. Right? Appiah says, you know, to you, if you think in terms of ownership, you’ve accepted a commercial system that’s alien to the very traditions you’re talking about. And Sadie Smith says that, you know, the idea of cultural ownership shares some DNA with the late capitalist concept of brand integrity. So you’re saying, okay, look, let’s not go there. Let’s think about impact. Let’s think about the actual negative effects of, for example, wearing certain kinds of clothing to, to a rave. But what happens when we get into these difficult cases like so one of the most famous ones in recent years was painting by Dana Schutz open casket, which was a painting based on the other photograph of Emmett Till, after his death, after his murder, I should say. And this became controversial, somebody, you know, Hannah black, attacked this painting and print and said that it should be destroyed. Because this is a work by a white artist, depicting black suffering. And that yeah, this is very, it’s very controversial. You could sort of see arguments on both sides. But, you know, what should we say there? Because you could say, as some people did, damage is being done. Because I don’t know. I mean, I suppose it’s something maybe it trivializes or something like that. But, you know, a lot of folks on the other side said, why on earth wouldn’t as many people as possible shine a light on to the the complicated and painful, disruptive racial history of the United States. So what should we say about that?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Good. So I’ve been pushing back on the framing of the conversation around property. And I’ve been pushing back on the framing of the conversation around this respect, I’m not saying property and disrespect don’t matter, I’m just saying that they kick the can down the road, we really need to see what the values behind them. I also want to push back on a third element of the framing, which is the ethical framing, I am not saying ethical doesn’t matter. But it obscures what I think really does matter. So here’s what I mean. We are nowadays worried about making mistakes. So you Google cultural appropriation, and you immediately get guidance and advice on how not to be a bad person. Right, and so get permission. And don’t be disrespectful. And that’s good. That’s nothing wrong with that. But the harms are not really are they’re rarely generated. But it’s single instances of appropriation, their patterns of appropriate of practices, especially on behalf of dominant or powerful cultures, those patterns are harmful. It’s not the individual instances that we should be focusing on. It’s the patterns that we should be focusing on. And so it doesn’t really help to focus too much on the case of shirts, which is a definitely a gray area. But it’s also a single case, we need to be looking for the patterns. Of course, how patterns of behavior are made up of a lot of individual behaviors. So we should think about how we should act as individuals if we wish to change the pattern. But when we’re thinking about what the harms are, the harms are generated by patterns of behavior, not individual behaviors.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about cultural appropriation, with Dominic McIver Lopezsfrom the University of British Columbia, and we have an email from Andreas in Germany. Andreas says the one thing I don’t understand about cultural appropriation is that Why is it okay for people from other cultures to appropriate our quote unquote white culture, wear clothes in the style we do sing Western songs play piano or orchestral music, whiten their faces, which is a large, large industry in Asia to me, says undress. This suggests that there’s nothing wrong with a cultural appropriation per se. It’s always the contexts which determines if it’s right or wrong. So what do you think, Dom?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Yeah, I think there’s a symmetries. So let me give you an example. I’m going to give you a shout out to the work of Elizabeth Coleman here. She writes about cultural appropriation in Australia, from Aboriginal people. And she makes a really interesting point. So we have highly sophisticated societies that are made up of institutions. And those institutions are created, they’re shaped and they’re formed through various methods. For us, it’s legal contracts and legislation, legal contracts, and legislation, create our society. And she says, when we look at Aboriginal art, and we see it as just something to be listened to, looked at, tap your foot, take some drawing, we’re missing something very important. She thinks that Aboriginal songs and drawings are like our legal documents, they create Aboriginal society. So here’s how this answers the emailers question. eights are obvious to everybody, the value of of the contracts and the legislation to create our society, where the dominant culture and nobody’s going to miss that. Whereas Aboriginal people in Australia are not a dominant culture. And we consistently misunderstand the significance of what they do for themselves. And so we, we Bumble, and we, and we take their songs, and it’s we say, it’s just like when they take our songs. But it’s not because we don’t really understand what their songs are all about. We don’t understand their social function. very differently social function and music plays for us.

Josh Landy
I really liked that answer. I mean, partly because it thinks about dominance, not just in terms of political power, but in terms of aesthetic powers, so to speak. Right. But you still might worry that, that I think a lot of folks do think in terms of political power. And I think a lot of the intuitions circling around these questions of who is allowed to borrow from whom do seem to take the form of well, you know, it’s sort of you can, you can punch up, right, you can borrow up, but you can’t borrow down. But I’ve always wondered, are these vectors these up and down vectors as simple this is almost a foo Codea? In question, right? Are they like, so, you know, the wonderful music director of San Francisco Opera right now is Johansson Kim. She grew up in South Korea, South Korea was not colonized by the United States. In fact, it was colonized by Japan. So So what should we think about that, you know, Japan itself has been a colonial power. China is a colonial power. And yet we have these these intuitions that it’s not appropriate for Westerners to, to borrow certain cultural forms from Japan and from China. So it may be Amis your answer is something like, Yeah, let’s stop thinking in terms of geopolitical power. And thinking said in terms of understanding, right, so cultural dominance, because the culturally dominant form is well understood by many people, whereas the culturally non dominant form, it’s just not well understood. So don’t borrow it, if you’re not in a position to understand is that am I getting that right?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Yeah. So the dominant folk are dominant in every respect. And the non dominant folk that disadvantaged folk are not disadvantaged in every respect. If they are there, they can have power. And so life is messy. It’s wonderful that it’s messy. We wouldn’t want it any other way. But makes us work hard, right? And so we look for rules of thumb, we want to take a shortcut. And so we want to say, if it’s about property, and it’s taking from a disadvantage folk, then don’t do it. But that actually cuts them off, right, because you might lose opportunities for interaction and interchange. They might welcome that use of their culture. They might think that it’s a wonderful thing and it might, it might float their boats, it might be good for them and they buy. So this goes back to what I said at the beginning. The real problem here is not to let our legitimate concerns about cultural appropriation have a chilling Fact, on the Rushdie point about how many large hodgepodge a bit of this in a bit of that is how newness comes into the world.

Ray Briggs
Dominic, I want to ask about like a thread that came up in your discussion of like Aboriginal songs, which is like failure to understand what something is about. So it seems like one of the things that like makes me cringe most about stuff that I think is like appropriative, in a way that I aesthetically really don’t like, is that it misses something about the source material that it’s trying to draw from or imitate, and it misses something important. Like, even if the person’s heart is in the right place, it’s still kind of unpleasant to watch, like, so that’s a problem. Like To what extent is it a moral problem? And how do I think about that?

Dominic McIver Lopes
I’d like to, you know, maybe we should distinguish two cases here. So context matters. So you’re, you’re you’re reading a novel and you’re struggling with it, you go to Josh, and Josh will tell you the context. And that will frame it for you and you get it you get more from it than you would otherwise that context matters. Sometimes decontextualized, and can be a great thing, you take something out of context, and you see it in a new way with fresh eyes. And that might be inspiring and might inspire a kind of creativity are inspired new readings, new performances, so decontextualized and can be a good thing. That’s that’s not always bad. So that’s one case. The other cases where there it goes back to disrespect, where your Deacon texts realizing just as a result of not caring, like not giving a hoot about the home, the home context. And that’s a different matter. That’s something that we should worry about. And again, maybe not so much on an individual case by case basis, but when the not caring is implemented over a whole society. That’s that that can be very harmful.

Ray Briggs
So I guess I was also curious about a third case where there’s not just or there’s there might be caring, but there’s not competence to understand what’s going on. And so I feel like a lot of like, Oh, these people are so noble, let me depict them kinds of cultural appropriation. Like the person cares. In some sense. They just messed it up.

Dominic McIver Lopes
Oh, I’m not sure. So I’m teaching logic. And I’m imagining a student saying, I really care about logic, but I’m not going to do the homework. I’m not going to acquire the competence. It just seems to me that proves that they don’t care.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re asking who owns culture with Dominic McIver Lopes, author of Aesthetic Injustice.”

Ray Briggs
Do you think museums should return artifacts to their original countries? Should we be policing each other’s aesthetic choices? Or should we think of culture as something that belongs to everybody?

Josh Landy
Making a mix without making a mess—plus commentary from Ian ShoalestThe Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Macklemore
Hip-hop started off on a block that I’ve never been to / To counteract a struggle that I’ve never even been through / If I think I understand just because I flow too / That means I’m not keeping it true, I’m not keeping it true.

Josh Landy
If Hip Hop started on a block you’ve never been to, is it okay to make that kind of music yourself? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, our guest is Dominic McIver Lopes from the University of British Columbia. And we’re asking who owns culture?

Josh Landy
So Dom we’ve got a comment from Mel in central California mill says, there’s no culture that is itself not a product of prior appropriations, the cultures we see today, and not somehow rooted in some God created moment, but are the product of a swirling chaos of physical movements and edge effects? Do you think that’s right, done?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Yeah, I think it’s basically like, the only qualification I put on that is there have been relatively isolated cultures in the world. Alas, I think they’re all extinct. But there have been isolated cultures who haven’t had contact with other cultures. And we shouldn’t forget that. But generally, that’s true. I completely agree.

Ray Briggs
So we’ve talked a bit about how we want cultural exchange and to foster like communication among cultures, but we don’t want people doing this, this sort of dodgy appropriation stuff. How do we strike that balance?

Dominic McIver Lopes
I’d like to hit two reset buttons. I want the whole conversation about cultural appropriation to be reset. So button number one is, it’s not really about you. It’s about us. It’s not about how you act. It’s about how we collectively act and how we collectively treat members of other cultures. That does come down to individual behavior, but we shouldn’t focus on ourselves. We should be thinking about policy now the US there? Is it lots of different scales? So there’s the national scale. So we might think about how we as a country should be organizing ourselves to treat other cultures better or to make sure that Your interests are promoted as we engage with them and do that little bit and a little bit of act boring. But there are other institutions, there are universities, and there are galleries, and there are orchestras. There are clubs, there are cities and communities, neighborhoods. There are even really large communities like all the people who are tourists. So I want to make the point that it’s not, ultimately about individuals. It’s about groups. And those groups exist in all kinds of levels. So we have lots of opportunities for thinking about how we should change our collective behaviors at those various levels. And the other reset button I’d like to hit is there’s no silver bullet. It can’t just be about oh, cultural appropriation is, is taking property without permission. Therefore, if I have permission, it’s okay, that doesn’t follow. Because it’s not ultimately about property, it’s about the interest the property is supposed to protect. It can’t just be about not wanting to give offence by being disrespectful, because disrespect is being cavalier about the values for the home culture. So we’ve got to understand and look at their values and try to get what they mean, what their culture means for those folks. This is hard work. I know that we want silver bullets, we want simple solutions. But I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. So I think we need a more nuanced conversation around cultural appropriation.

Josh Landy
I really liked that. And, you know, I wanted to propose, I don’t know if this is a third button. But it goes along with what you were just saying about how difficult it is there is no silver bullet. So my proposal is, you know, I want to borrow a baseball way of talking tie goes to the runner, tie goes to the runner, there are a lot of gray area cases, a lot of difficult cases, like we mentioned, the Danish shirts, cases, a lot of controversy about that. I personally think this is a very well intentioned artists who said she wouldn’t take any money for this painting. I think her heart was in the right place. She just really she cared about a horrible thing that had happened in American history. Tie goes to the run. That’s my proposal. In cases where it’s not obvious what to think maybe we don’t demonize the person who was ultimately trying to do a good thing, then it doesn’t have the chilling effect, right? So culture is allowed to evolve. It’s good for art. So Native American writer, Sterling holy White Mountain said, the appropriations critique is anti art, maybe strong, but you know, so you know, tigers, the runner, it’s good for culture, it’s good for art. Maybe it’s even good in general for this very conversation, because the weak case is risk bringing the whole idea into disrepute, right? We want to keep this notion of critique alive by strength and keeping the strong cases as strong as possible. I actually think it’s also good for social justice. Because, you know, as ad Smith says, the notion of staying in your lane, that’s not a great way of bringing people together. So what about that tie goes to the runner? Third button? Yeah,

Dominic McIver Lopes
it’s I think that’s exactly right. It’s a flip side of recognizing that this is a hard issue. When we’re dealing with a heart issue, we cut each other slack. And a side effect of, of our wanting it to be simple is that we get on each other’s cases too much. Right? And we should we should, we should ease up a little bit. Now. I don’t want to downplay how serious this is. I’m just trying to situate where the seriousness is and how we should deal with it effectively.

Ray Briggs
So one thing that you said earlier was that you are comparing a sort of cultural appropriation to logic and the sense that somebody who doesn’t do their homework doesn’t really care, or they do their homework. But I wonder if there’s also a kind of nice comparison with how we treat errors. So if I’m doing a hard task, I should not expect to do it perfectly every time I attempt it. And like trying to have like artistic dialogue with people who are meaningfully different from me. Like that’s not a task that I’m going to do perfectly. I’m going to screw it up. Like do you have thoughts on how to respond to each other’s errors in a way that’s kind of it doesn’t let anybody off the hook?

Dominic McIver Lopes
Yeah, I do. Now you guys are shaping my thinking about this sticking in some way. Which is wonderful. I’m so happy I’m doing the show. Once we recognize that a task is difficult, we should be okay with making errors. And once we recognize that the task is a collective task, and it’s not all on me and my short own shoulders, then it’s not doesn’t matter so much if I sometimes mess up. And in addition to that, if I’m not sure I can look around at what other people are trying to do. had there tried to nudge our practices in a better direction. So I’m not on my own and trying to figure it out, I can turn to people of goodwill, who are wrestling with the issue and are doing their homework. I don’t have maybe you don’t have to do the homework, I can ask somebody who’s done it already.

Josh Landy
It seems like that’s a recipe for a future of greater collaboration and a little bit, a little bit more slack that we cut each other, which I think is lovely, while at the same time being willing to, you know, die on the Hill of look, wearing these traditional headgear to a rave. That’s just not okay, I’m sorry, that’s just not so you can hold the line on the cases that are clearly egregious while saying, Well, you don’t come to this middle space, think about it systemically and also cut each other those sec, but I wanted to get back to something Ray was saying earlier, which isn’t perhaps an even more utopian future possibility thinking from the array was saying, for the Marxist standpoint, all property is theft anyway. Even if we don’t go to that extreme, there are spaces within our culture like Creative Commons, we’ve talked about jokes, memes, where people aren’t really insisting on their intellectual property rights. In fact, if you create a meme, you’ve kind of very much want other people to take it up and variant and permute it and forget who you were you forget the originator? Can you imagine something similar for cultural forms writ large, where we just kind of have that ethos of Look, don’t steal my song. But if you get inspired by this style, that’s great.

Dominic McIver Lopes
Interesting, let’s suppose that we continue to walk too far with communities. It’s not adequate, that we see ourselves simply as human. It’s important to us that we have narrow identities of various kinds that could be sexual identities, they could be ethnic identities and racial identities, various kinds of identities. Suppose that matters to us. Then how do we form those identities? It seems to me that aesthetic, and artistic activity, they have traditionally functioned as mechanisms of identity formation. They’re really good at that. Partly because of what I said earlier on having my artistic culture does not get in the way of you have in your so it doesn’t immediately put my identity in conflict with yours. That’s good. That leaves me room to maneuver. So I find it hard to imagine, us being the kind of people who form community have identity communities, without marking those identity with hairstyles, dress, food, styles of imaging styles of writing, the things that human beings have always done to shape identity.

Ray Briggs
This kind of makes me wonder if you can have identity without policing, which is always something I want. And never something I’m sure how to get. But it seems like one way to realize the utopia that Josh is talking about is to just imagine that, like people will be drawn to whatever artistic forms they’re drawn to. And that will that will be related to their identity formation, but there won’t be rules about who is allowed to do which thing. They’ll they’ll just kind of make choices that have centers of gravity.

Dominic McIver Lopes
Right? That’s good. I think the identities are far more fluid than they used to be. And that, again, gives us room for maneuver that seems to serve us really well. I know that there’s anxiety in some parts of the world around the fluidity of identity, we don’t necessarily inherit the identity of our parents, right. It’s kind of up to us. And we, it’s cultural. It’s always what we make of it. Right? Culture is not a fixed thing, a changes. And so the culture that we use to shape our identity that changes to its it’s in our control, and that’s why we’re having this conversation. We want to keep it within our control, which means we do need other people not to use our culture, that in a way, that means we’re no longer authors of our own destiny. That’s cultural appropriation.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s a lovely place to stop a conversation that I would love to keep having all day. It has been fantastic to have you with us. Thank you so much for joining us.

Dominic McIver Lopes
Thank you for having me. And thank you to all the listeners out there for tuning in.

Josh Landy
Our guests is being Dominic McIver Lopes, professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and author of aesthetic injustice. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking that like one big piece of this puzzle that I’d like to see get more airtime is just paying attention to more authors and artistic creators who are different from you. Like being an audience member is a great way to appreciate some art without appropriating it because you’re listening, rather than speaking.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and I liked your earlier point about homework. And it’s such a fascinating sometimes vexed beautiful and very complicated domain. And I gotta say hats off to dumb for an incredibly nuanced and careful patient and I think ultimately incredibly helpful effort to reset the conversation I hope, I hope he is successful. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 550 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now a man who might take your culture but he won’t take your time—it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. Where would civilization be without cultural appropriation? We conquer people, take their stuff, then put it in a museum to let the world know we took it from people who couldn’t appreciate it. Or we make it our own and next thing you know white people are playing the banjo. It can work the other way- black people saw Hawaiian slack guitar players at the Chicago World’s Fair, and before you know it bottle neck slide guitar, Ry Cooder’s got a shelf of Grammys. The harmonica, developed by Hohner for German folk music, in the 20th Century became a powerful tool for the blues that you could carry in your pocket. Get an optical illusion, add some immigrants with a gift for marketing, and next thing you know you got a movie industry. Still around! Just the other day, the Internet was up in arms, because James Franco might play Fidel Castro in some movie. I sympathize with these arguments, because I think Shakespeare’s OTHELLO is racist, thoughts not diminished when I saw Olivier don blackface for the role. Nobody objected too much when HAMILTON employed black actors to play white founding fathers. Conservatives were even thrilled, because it seemed semi-reverent, with hip hop for the young people. You could perform it in high school! Even parents might like it! But there are limits! That’s why we have culture wars! I get a little peeved at cisgen white guys for liking football way too much. It brings down the curve. But also white guys who buy season tickets to the opera. I have nothing against opera! But you don’t have to go to every damn opera that comes down the pike. Cable channel A&E once stood for arts and entertainment. They would show operas. Nobody watched them! So now? True crime and reality television. Duck Dynasty. The hidden life of a family grown rich making duck calls. Luring waterfowl to their doom. Making Vegans weep, some of whom are performatively ethical white guys. All of this, more or less mainstream culture, is surprisingly fragile, and constantly under siege. We love our cars. But did we have to become the kind of people who love cars before we could have them? Will we fall out of love? Maybe. Once we go electric we probably won’t see humvees on the road any more. And are cars truly ours, or do they belong to the world? The rule of thumb regarding cultural appropriation is this. Pizzas belong to the world. But you don’t have to feel guilty if you pick up some hummus from the cheese aisle. Your grocery store has a cheese aisle doesn’t it? Tacos are okay, but tapas require a license. Racism is slowly but surely disappearing which makes some white people crazy. There is a belief, that immigration is some kind of plot to replace white people with minorities. I don’t know how that would even work. Would I have to leave if somebody from Bolivia suddenly showed up at my door? I also wonder about the habit on the news of saying so and so is the nth number black person to do a thing. I mean if it’s the first black woman to walk on the moon, yeah, milestone. Third black woman, same. Fifteenth, though? Hundredth? At some point, seems to be the theory, whites will be in the minority, and a white person walking on the moon will once again be big news. Is walking on the moon culture appropriation? Cultural appropriation seems based on outrage. A thing happens. Somebody on a chat show responds. Somebody tweets about the chat show response. And the next thing you know, politicians and their ilk mainly, also influencers, commentators, are swarming all over twitter and youtube. They used to issue press releases, but now they make their own videos, Tik Tok dances, angry in a way not entirely convincing. Recently they’re all angry about trans, who are apparently ruining culture with non binary antics. Trans is filling the outsider bill right now, but that can’t last. Trans are just way too harmless. The worst fears seem to be drag queens reading fairy tales to toddlers and trans women wanting to play basketball. Really? Everything is a product, even outrage. And it belongs to us all. I gotta go

Josh Landy
whilst we talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Yiqi Shi, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk dot ORG, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library and more than 550 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.