Page 128 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Cultural Appropr at on | 10

Doing so, they take a material resource and cultural symbol of middle-class
abundance—the metal shopping cart—and transform it ironically into something
they feel they need for sheer survival. In the process, a new cultural meaning of the
shopping cart is created. During the Vietnam and Iraq wars, some soldiers used
military gas masks as inhaling devices to heighten the effect of marijuana smoke,
certainly not the reason the troops were issued the masks in the first place. The gas
mask, a symbol of war, was used for a purpose that stood in direct contradiction to
the fighting, although communicating that alternative meaning was not intended.
These are acts of cultural re-signification, but not of cultural appropriation. To ap-
propriate a cultural resource requires some degree of conscious awareness of the
action being taken on the part of the responsible individual or persons.
Even when cultural materials are consciously repackaged to create new mean-
ings and send new messages, those actions don’t change the original meaning or
meanings of the cultural object for everyone. Culture is not a finite concept;
there is plenty of room for many possible meanings of all cultural goods and
representations. Safety pins are still understood and used for their original pur-
poses, for example. The traditional Catholic Church still maintains a strong
presence in global culture. Shopping baskets and gas masks continue to function
for the practical reasons they were invented.

ThE CuLTuraL hyBriD

As we’ve seen, acts of cultural appropriation often create cultural hybrids—
the fusing of cultural forms. Rap music and hip-hop culture, for instance, have
been appropriated by individuals and groups around the world in ways that
suit their own purposes. Rap began as a cultural expression of stressful Amer-
ican inner-city culture. But consider what happens when rap is exported to
a place like Hong Kong, Indonesia, or Spain. The cadence, sound, and style
of rap are appropriated by local musicians in these places, where it is sung in
local languages with lyrics that refer to local personalities, conditions, and sit-
uations. The resulting musical hybrid is an amalgam of American inner-city
black culture and Hong Kong, Indonesian, and Spanish youth culture. Cultural
resources—rap music and all the attendant features of hip-hop culture—have
been appropriated and the result is a variety of cultural hybrids.

CuLTuraL aPProPriaTion is CrEaTivE work
Individuals and groups who attempt to alter or expand the meanings of the
cultural institutions and resources around them participate in highly creative
work. The ability to interact imaginatively with the endless array of material
and symbolic cultural resources in our world represents a crucial part of what
separates humans from other animals. We are active agents of our cultural lives.
We don’t just passively inherit our cultural surroundings; we engage, modify,
and transform them. The symbolic consequences of cultural appropriation can
be enormous—at times even leading to revolutionary cultural developments
like the punk rock phenomenon or the creation of alternative religions.