MUSEUM-QUALITY Cambodian Buddhist antiquities decorating a New York penthouse. A Chinese man in a monk costume begging for alms on the streets of Phnom Penh. Garden-variety Buddha statues sitting on the floor of a California yoga studio. Canadian college students cavorting in monastic garb at a Halloween party in Ontario.
What do these four situationally and geographically disparate phenomena have in common?
All of them might be censured as examples of cultural appropriation, a term that was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2018 and defined as “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the practices, customs, or aesthetics of one social or ethnic group by members of another (typically dominant) community or society.” The OED traces the first citation to a 1945 essay by Arthur E. Christy that discusses “European cultural appropriation from the Orient.”
The term began to enter widespread usage in the 1980s. Through the myopic lens of Google search, this might come as a surprise. Enter “cultural appropriation” into Google Trends and you’ll see a spike in queries beginning in 2015, as if the term was tracking with the rising pitch of American culture wars around issues of race, representation, and identity. Since then, hardly a month has passed without the two of us—a writer trained in Buddhist chaplaincy (Chenxing) and a scholar of Southeast Asian Buddhism (Trent)—discussing a fresh controversy about cultural appropriation in the news. We’re surely not the only couple who has spent many an evening debating the ins and outs of these headlines, though the time might have been more enjoyably (and age-appropriately) spent binge-watching Netflix (we are, after all, millennials).
And yet we find ourselves drawn back, again and again, to these labyrinthine conversations, even if they feel more like going down a rabbit hole than getting out of the woods. Conflicts over cultural appropriation erupt on social media and college campuses with geyser-like regularity, in realms as varied as fashion, food, film, literature, sports, and politics. Disagreement is practically assured, as Jia Tolentino observes in the acerbic opening to her essay “Lionel Shriver Puts on a Sombrero”: “No matter your opinion on cultural appropriation, you can be certain that many people think you are wrong.”
