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ABSTRACT: 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 conceptualization of cultural appropriation is offered, one that situates it as one among a range of modes of cultural change. For cultural appropriation, the key neighboring modes are diffusion, acculturation, and assimilation. The article also briefly addresses cultural appropriation as it is often situated vis-à-vis conceptions of, and processes related to, cultural property and cultural heritage. This heuristic emphasizes the metacultural discourse that marks instances of cultural appropriation as well as the inequality often characterizing the parties to such episodes.
Folklorists and ethnologists speak regularly about issues of cultural appropriation. I have been party to numerous serious, thoughtful discussions of the theme with fellow scholars in my fields and, because most of my adult life has been twined with the lives of Indigenous friends and colleagues, I have had rich access to the ways that the issue is a catalyst for pain, reflection, and activism. Even without direct contacts with aggrieved or impacted communities or individuals, cultural appropriation debates frequently appear in media reports and across social media feeds. In the English-speaking world at least, cultural appropriation stories pass in front of us in a steady flow, even if we choose not to attend to them. There are sophisticated writings on the subject too, but even when written by journalists, activists, or scholars with direct experience or knowledge germane to the topic, these tend to be authored from near the frontlines of specific cultural contests. This is logical and good, of course, and I have followed both news and analysis of cultural appropriation throughout my career, but folklorists and ethnologists still lack general models and heuristics with which to assess this steady flow. Here I attempt to work on this general, conceptual level. My goal in this article is to provide a framework within which folklorists can...