CULTURAL ANALYSIS ESSAY: Cultural Appropriation

Cultural Appropriation
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Subject and Section
October 22, 2018
Due to the ever-increasing connectivity between the world these days, traditions, ideas, and beliefs that were once isolated to a single culture has become used in another. During the earlier days before the existence of globalization and mass media, culture has remained almost within the territories or the members of a particular group, in spite of the presence of colonialism. This is because most of the people those days think more highly of their own culture (especially the colonizers), which serves as a reason for them to the ignore the others. These days, however, the number of people who aims to imitate other cultures have increased. Through the dominance of globalization and mass media, ideas and culture are slowly becoming homogenized as different people assume the cultures of traditions of other. This sharing of ideas, culture, and people among others are what Appadurai call as ‘scapes’ CITATION App961 \l 13321 (Appadurai, 1996). However, this raises the question, does the assumption of culture from other societies considered as harmful? Personally, the author of this article believes that these days, cultural appropriation is not harmful anymore since globalization and the presence of mass-media, has made cultural exchange equal, as compared before. Thus, it is due to these phenomena that the exchange of cultures between societies is more characteristic of acculturation and not appropriation. In the following sections, this phenomenon called “cultural appropriation” would be discussed in further detail.
Cultural appropriation, or the use of other society’s culture outside of context, has had its own share of debate as to whether it is bad or good. On the one hand, its proponents believe that cultural appropriation is just fine since it helps promote the culture that they are trying to portray, which makes it more dominant. On the other hand, however, those who are against this believe that since cultural appropriation is “one-sided”, for the fact that it becomes ...