Kultuuriline omastamine kultuurimuutusena / Modeling cultural appropriation as a kind of cultural change

Abstract

The current article is an abridged and adapted version of Jason B. Jackson’s 2021 article On Cultural Appropriation, published in Journal of Folklore Research 58 (1), translated into Estonian by Elo-Hanna Seljamaa with the author’s permission. This article starts from the premise that cultural appropriation is a key concern for folklorists and ethnologists, as well as for many of the communities with which they engage and partner, but that it is also one that has received relatively little attention of a general conceptual sort. This is true despite the ubiquity of cultural appropriation discussions in popular media, public culture, and informal scholarly conversation. Drawing on the work of these fields, an ideal-type conceptualisation of cultural appropriation is offered, one that situates it as one among a range of modes of cultural change. For cultural appropriation, the key neighbouring modes are diffusion, acculturation, and assimilation (as shown in figure 1). This heuristic emphasises the metacultural discourse that marks instances of cultural appropriation as well as the inequality often characterising the parties to such episodes.

Keywords: cultural appropriation, ideal-type conceptualisation, inequality, cultural exchange