Book Review: Susan Scafidi - Who Owns Culture?

"Cultural appropriation" is a hot topic these days, a great example of how frustrating debate in the 21st century can be. An emotionally-charged subject with unclear boundaries and varying definitions that has deep implications for capital-letter topics like Authenticity, Identity, Ownership, and Power is an ideal engine for producing negative-sum arguments that leave everyone more angry and less enlightened than they were before. For my own edification I thought it would be helpful to read something about cultural appropriation that fit the concept into a more analytical framework. Scafidi's central ideas - group cultural property as an analogue of individual intellectual property, and cultural appropriation as an analogue of copyright infringement - are a much more useful way of thinking about the latest controversies over food, fashions, music, and so on than what you usually read. In addition to providing lots of interesting examples of cultural exchange, both good and bad, and across many types of cultures, Scafidi offers proposals to both protect sensitive aspects of culture as well as promote cultural innovation, which is an exceptionally difficult balance to strike even within a single culture. Like with many things in life, familiar concepts like respect, openness, and dignity are perhaps more important tools for this debate than any particular abstract theory of property rights, but I wish everyone who's tempted to write or read yet another clickbait article about cultural appropriation in the era of ubiquitous memes, remixes, and adaptations would read this immediately.

Cultural appropriation has never had a clear definition. This is perhaps unavoidable, given the incredible sociological complexities of cultural identity, but it would be really useful to have a straightforward way to distinguish the undisputedly unfair cases of Western countries refusing to return plundered Egyptian artifacts from the vastly more numerous but far less harmful and even amusing instances of infamously lame suburban white kids using black slang they heard on a hip hop album to seem cool to their friends, if only for the sake of our collective blood pressure. Is it worth caring about appropriation at all, or is not caring just a sign of privilege, itself an extremely controversial subject? What if cultural appropriation is actually good and necessary for both individual and cultural growth, and complaints are merely illegitimate demands for power? What if it all depends on filling in every single one of the blanks every time Person A uses Element B from Culture C to make Artwork D which appeals to Group E? Even if cultural appropriation is real, and bad, does anyone win if art is not created?

Scafidi's main contribution to this debate, for me, was in starting from the comparatively clear perspective of property rights. "Why can a country-music writer demand royalties from performers she has never met, while an Appalachian folk musician cannot?" We have had legal regimes, in one form or another, that have handled instances of one person ripping another off for hundreds of years. Concepts like real property, personal property, and intellectual property (the clearest precedent for a notion of cultural property) have long traditions in every legal system around, and we generally know where we stand when it comes to purposeful individual creations. There are of course shades of complexity - a standup comedian who copies a joke hasn't committed a crime but can expect career repercussions due to informal norms about craftsmanship - but a news story about one musician accusing another of plagiarism rarely rises to the level of major public debate unless, paradoxically, the alleged offender has stolen something that no one person owns. Steal an individual riff or melody and you'll simply end up in court; steal a broader musical idiom or genre and you'll end up in an ocean of vitriol (my personal favorite example was when Iggy Azalea was accused of "vocal blackface", a hilarious phrase no matter your opinion of her music).

Protections for purposeful individual creations are fairly well-understood, but as Scafidi shows, the often-accidental, usually-anonymous creations of a culture come with all kinds of amorphous obligations and encumbrances that can in fact reverse the logic we normally use for deciding what's okay and what's not. Think about overly restrictive copyright law, which is rightly seen as a tool of control by large corporations that unfairly discourages innovation and nets them money by keeping things out of the public domain long after they should have been released. How many jokes about the absurd copyright status of "Happy Birthday" have been made before the song was finally, mercifully, freed to the world? It's at the boundaries of cultures where this gets more fraught: a white American doing another take on the Cinderella folktale is legally fine as long as they don't use Disney-specific imagery, and in moral terms, perhaps they're even heroic as an individual creator proudly defying a greedy megacorporation. But, if that same person were to do a similar take on Ye Xian, the Chinese equivalent of Cinderella, that would strike many people (of many cultures) as different in some vague but important way.

This is where one major weakness of most debates on cultural appropriation becomes unignorable: most examples you read about are too parochial and America-centric to be very useful for thinking about the broader logic of cultural exchange. As Scafidi puts it: "Assimilation to American life has traditionally involved the loss of non-Anglo cultural characteristics in order to conform to a mainstream norm, which is perceived as the absence of ethnic culture. White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, educated, healthy, straight males from reasonably affluent Mid-Atlantic or Midwestern backgrounds allegedly have "no" accents, eat "normal" food, wear "regular" clothes, play "popular" music, engage in the "usual" pastimes, share "common" opinions, and have "ordinary" tastes." There are countless articles that implicitly or explicitly use this framework to treat white Americans as all-powerful active appropriators and other groups or cultures as passive appropriatees, watching helplessly as their hard-won cultural products like music/food/slang/mannerisms are absorbed and retransmitted without any acknowledgement of the source, let alone remuneration. It's tough to argue with those pieces because they're often true, and they happen all the time. Scafidi's introduces the idea of the "identity tax" that members of a non-WASP group have to pay to be accepted in America (think gabagool and Mafia imagery for Italians, sombreros and tequila for Mexicans, etc). However, outright cultural theft - in that important legal sense of one person taking something that belongs to another person away from them - is such a minuscule proportion of all cultural exchange that reducing the billions of interactions between different people that occur every day all over the planet to the moral equivalence of an actual crime is neither accurate nor useful.

To return to the Cinderella/Ye Xian example, organizations like the World Intellectual Property Organization have had great difficulty implementing protocols like the "National Laws on the Protection of Expressions of Folklore Against Illicit Exploitation and Other Prejudicial Actions" because everything is difficult to measure. How much harm is inflicted by a white American using another country's folktale as creative inspiration? Who is harmed, current Chinese people, or the nameless Chinese storytellers of the past who collectively developed Ye Xian one detail and plot twist at a time? If the harm is current, are Chinese people in China and Chinese-Americans harmed equally, or in some other proportion? What would restitution look like, and how would it be distributed? What if the white American used some elements from Cinderella, some from Ye Xian, and also some from Tấm Cám, the Vietnamese equivalent? What if it was a religious text and not a folktale, or if it was contemporary food, or music, or dress? What if this person were half-Chinese themselves, or Chinese-American, or black American? And so on.

Breaking the issue down in such a calculated fashion might seem flip, but given the attention that Disney movies and their like receive in the broader culture, examples like that neatly illustrate the potentially unbounded complexity of the concept of cultural appropriation, and why so many people decide that the easiest, safest, and fairest way to handle these complicated questions is to avoid them entirely by declaring that cultural appropriation doesn't really exist, and that everything not adequately covered under the existing copyright regime is fair game for everyone. Problem solved! This is one reason why cultural appropriation debates get stuck so quickly: if you think that any aspect of any culture belongs to everyone, then arguments to restrict its use of some cultural element, or even require acknowledgement that it's being used, can feel like lawyering on someone else's behalf, with no remedy readily available or even possible. Especially because a "culture" can be basically anything, in sociological terms, and it's often difficult for someone to know when they're treading on sensitive ground. Of course, this does not apply to people knowingly mocking another culture, but it's precisely because there aren't clear boundaries between what's public and what's private - or what "private" even means - that discussion becomes so fraught.

Scafidi's proposal to make all this easier is to recognize cultural property as a new type of intellectual property. Three things are needed to make this work:

1. The idea of individual ownership should be extended to groups (cultures), who would then have group ownership of cultural products, though with more fair use exceptions than is traditionally allowed. "Intellectual property at common law is a protected category of intangible ideas embodied and reproduced in tangible form, while cultural products are the frequently unprotected expressions of shared values or experiences that are created and reproduced by a source community in either tangible or intangible form."
2. Time limits on protections should be altered, perhaps extended to the life of the source community, or made renewable periodically. "In order to preserve the flow of creations and inventions into the public domain, especially in light of the longevity of source communities, the exclusiveness of ownership should be established in rough inverse proportion to the duration of protection, taking into account the relative cultural significance of particular artifacts or rituals."
3. Since many of the most cherished aspects of culture are not tangible, the requirement for cultural products to have a tangible form should be removed. "While individual or defined groups of authors and inventors generally anticipate embodiment or reduction of their work to tangible form prior to its legal recognition, cultural groups may have longstanding preferences and practices regarding intangibility and orality."

Furthermore, once those definitions are established, the protections given to cultural products should be broken into four categories, with distinctions between commodified and noncommodified, and public and private, depending on what sort of cultural product is under discussion:

1. Noncommodified + private (example: Native American ceremonial dances): Enhanced trade secret-style protection
2. Noncommodified + public (example: open source software): Copyright/patent-style protection
3. Commodified + private (example: objects used in religious practice, like menorahs/rosaries): Copyright/patent-style protection
4. Commodified + public (example: most cultural food/dress/music): Registered mark-style "Authenticity mark" protection

All of this should immediately prompt many questions and arguments, but I think at the abstract level of a proposed solution, it's a fairly sensible extension of a system which has worked, more or less, for a long time. It makes the dilemma for those who would restrict cultural appropriation explicit: it's possible to set up a system to punish unauthorized cultural exchange, but at the cost of bringing all of this into the Western legal system, with the attendant explosion in legal activity and costs, not to mention vast numbers of new gatekeepers and authorities and the almost-certain reduction in useful cultural exchange to come. It's not quite as simple as setting up a big dial to turn the level of cultural exchange from "high" to "low", but it's obvious that the more layers of lawyers you add to something, the more difficult it will then be. Scafidi cites Ronald Coase's theorem, a staple of law school classes, that given a neutral system to bargain in without excessive transaction costs, individuals will generally reach the most productive and Pareto-efficient equilibrium of property regardless of initial distribution. We don't live in that neat frictionless theoretical world, but would we actually prefer to live in a world where it would be possible to sue someone for inventing a fusion cuisine, or a musician would owe royalties to an entire nation for their folk songs, or take an actor to court if they played someone of the wrong sexual orientation/ethnicity/background? You could prevent Scarlett Johansson from starring in Ghost In the Shell, but Lin-Manuel's Hamilton might not even be written. Black hip hop artists could benefit at the expense of Eminem, but norteño musicians might depend on the whims of polka enthusiasts. An "inauthentic" hot chicken joint could be trapped in the same legal thicket as a humble Korean taco vendor. And so on.

Scafidi herself is scrupulous throughout the book in her choices of examples to illustrate how cultural appropriation can harm vulnerable groups, but she also discusses how some level of cultural exchange, even if intended as appropriation, is essential for tolerance and indeed progress at all. The "melting pot" cliché, as tiresome as it is, endures because it captures both the notion of separateness and incorporation, and while it's very easy to dismiss the calls from someone at the top of the pyramid to members of more vulnerable groups to surrender ownership of the very aspects of their culture that define their identity, at some point, as much as it rankles, loosening the grips of exclusivity helps everyone in much the same manner that putting the "Happy Birthday" song in the public domain helps everyone. And while there will always be those who misuse cultural exchange to highlight divisions, it's vastly more common to see people using what's in front of them to create something new. Besides, let's keep in mind that it's hardly a given that the current power structure will last forever, and it's entirely possible in 200 years that we'll have a completely different cultural hierarchy where white Americans are not on top; any proposed new system of rules for cultural exchange should account for this to avoid burdening future artists, musicians, and creators with the hangups of the past. I don't support Scafidi's proposals - to put it crudely, you have to accept that when the concept of pizza is given out to the world, someone is going to put pineapple on top of it - but others might, and she should be commended for so clearly laying out the options in front of us.

Book Review: Nick Harkaway - Gnomon

Man, this is a lot of book. It starts off as a straightforward dystopian sci-fi story, with an agent of the standard Sinister Comprehensive Societal Monitoring System attempting to determine why a person of interest died during an investigation, before the characters multiply and the timelines expand and the novel transforms into a cosmic detective story that includes a priapic Greek banker during the 2008 financial crisis, an Ethiopian artist during the Selassie period, and the mistress-turned-alchemist-haruspex of St. Augustine, working in musings on art, religion, high finance, and freedom, before it neatly folds back into itself several hundred pages later. Astute readers will note and enjoy the many literary references; Harkaway is able to allude to and draw upon works like 1984, Cloud Atlas, Foucault's Pendulum, Illuminatus!, Greek mythology, Borges' short stories like "Death and the Compass", and so on without ever being excessively derivative. Indeed, he has so much fun creating this world of nested realities and universe-eating sharks that you never think you're reading something else.

I was a bit unfulfilled when it ended, however. My main complaint is that while the pace is engrossing, and there's always plenty of stuff going on, you the reader aren't asked to do much but sit and watch Harkaway display his erudition, so while he has clearly intended for this to be more than the standard thriller (most thrillers wouldn't throw in high-concept literary thematic allusions like apocatastasis or catabasis), there's not much for you to chew on afterwards and it ends up feeling closer to a "this author spent a lot of time on this" novel like House of Leaves than "this author packed a lot of life lessons in" novel like Cryptonomicon. I did have fun looking up his British references to things like Lubetkin's postwar architecture, Hawksmoor's churches, Jackie Morris' paintings, and so on, and also exploring neat historical connections like that the repeated phrase "Quaerendo invenietis" is Latin for "Seek and ye shall find" from the Sermon On the Mount in Matthew 7:7, which also references Bach's Musical Offering (BWV 1079). Does it mean anything? Maybe not, besides familiar warnings that universal surveillance systems are bad news, but it was still a blast to read.

Book Review: Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies

This short story collection was Lahiri's very first publication and she won an armful of awards for it, which is logical because if you were to try and imagine the Platonic archetype of a "New Yorker short story" any one of these would do just fine, and indeed several of them were first published there. They're flawlessly written, with complex characterization, engrossing narratives, and emotional nuances in that literary fiction way where at the end of each one you're satisfied but thoughtful, not exactly happy but spiritually enriched somehow - "stories that make you go hmm". Most of them are set in the US, with the remainder taking place in India, and they all deal with some aspect of "the Bengali Indian/Indian-American experience", which generally seems to mean either dealing with culture shock or relationship issues or both. Not a perfect set of stories, since there is a total absence of joy here, but I came away respecting Lahiri's decision to concentrate on the melancholy aspects of the seam between cultures and the gap between expectations and reality, even if some more humor would have improved several of them. Often when I didn't enjoy some aspects of the stories I revised my understanding on rereading, because for the most part they're deeply written, and the restraint and economy of her style is key to the concepts she's trying to convey even if they come off as strange or unpleasurable at first.

• "A Temporary Matter". A couple has been failing to properly deal with the emotional fallout of the stillbirth of their child, until utility work on their house forces them to confront each other. There's an infamous adage that dealing with death is what separates a true "serious writer" from the amateur; by that criterion this story is as serious as it gets, but it's so sad in both its subject and its ending that you understand why most people treat reading as an escape and not a serious matter. I get that both staying in and leaving from a dead relationship are depressing, but man.
• "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine". A young Bengali Indian-American girl's family takes a Bangladeshi man under their wing while his family back home is threatened by the Bangladeshi war of independence. This is a solid commentary on how how remote and irrelevant affairs in the home country can seem to second-generation immigrants, neatly illustrated in reverse as well via the Bangladeshi man's puzzlement over Americanisms like Halloween customs.
• "Interpreter of Maladies". An Indian tour guide fields the questions and life experiences of a particularly ill-matched Indian-American couple and their children. Having just returned from a trip to Bangladesh myself I really sympathize with the poor tour guide's discomfort at the haplessness of tourists, but the unredeemed and unleavened contemptibility of the family in this story doesn't leave you with a good feeling about humanity. There's a whiff of commentary on how debauched Indian-Americans can be when they've lost touch with their heritage, but on further reflection I don't think Lahiri was trying to make a statement in that way, it seems more likely that these are just individually miserable people and not culturally miserable people. To interpret is also to translate, and so the tour guide's unease with these people is in the end perfectly relatable, as is his refusal to absolve the wife of her willful sins.
• "A Real Durwan". An old woman who was possibly once rich acts as a janitor/guardian for a Calcutta housing estate, as new wealth threatens to change the relationship between her and the rest of the building's residents. This is one of those "writing as formal justification for itself" stories that I find hard to criticize but also hard to respond to emotionally. The protagonist's plot arc is unhappy but not really sad, since the fact that the other residents don't believe her stories is the only bit of characterization she's given, so when she's used as the scapegoat for the building's misfortune it comes off as more of as writerly effort - the cycle of her personal falls from grace recapitulated in the community - than a genuinely moving narrative.
• "Sexy". A woman becomes a mistress to a rich banker, which is fun until it isn't, as the real ambivalence of being a side chick sinks in. Despite this story using some heavy-handed tricks - the parallels in the romantic travails of the protagonist's coworker's cousin are a bit too unsubtle, the whole scene with the cousin's overly precocious son she's babysitting is just bizarre - I liked how well it illustrated the paradoxically irresistible appeal of unsustainable affairs, how liberating making mistakes can be, and even though the arcs of passion inevitably return back down to earth, that descent doesn't have to be wrenching or awful but part of life.
• "Mrs. Sen's". A homesick elderly Indian woman who is having major issues adjusting to certain aspects of American life babysits a young white American boy whose single mother is trying to get her life in order. I guess you could say the theme of this story is "maturity", as all the main characters have some adjustment to do, but for some reason I found the title character's frustration with staples of the American experience like driving a car poignant, even if it's objectively pretty childish to refuse to learn how to drive. Assimilation has costs as well as benefits, and at a certain age I think you have the right to take a pass on certain ways of fitting in. I did mourn somewhat that the slapstick potential of some scenes were unrealized, but perhaps that would have undermined the characters.
• "This Blessed House". An uptight traditionalist man newly married to a free-spirited Americanized woman is really not happy with her delighted irony about the Christian religious paraphernalia they keep finding left over from the previous owners in the house they've just bought. Odd couples are a classic sitcom premise, and the New World vs Old World elements give this story the promise of a pilot episode, even if Lahiri scrupulously avoids any hint of comedy in the husband's attempts to cope with the wacky Manic Pixie Dream Girl aspects of the woman he's married after only 4 months of knowing her. Of course in real life this sort of marriage is almost instantly doomed, so as the story ends with the husband staring into the future thinking "oh boy, this is my life now", you're not exactly pulling for them to stay together.
• "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar". An epileptic Indian peasant girl deals with the bafflement and scorn of her community as she attempts to find love despite her condition. Yet another one of these stories that is formally flawless but emotionally unengaging because there's not a lot of dramatic action around the central problem. It actually feels like an over-literal interpretation or bad translation of a fairy tale with all of the magic and wonder stripped out, so instead of wicked stepsisters and helpful talking animal friends you just have this poor girl living in a shack desperately trying to get laid, waiting for a prince and having seizures once in a while. Disney is unlikely to option this one though.
• "The Third and Final Continent". An Indian immigrant to the US via London boards in the room of an incredibly old woman's house and deals with her being incredibly old until he can move out and bring his wife, who he barely knows, to America to begin their life together. That sounds really boring, but this was my favorite story. It's written as a first-person journal, so the stiff diction matches the stiffness of the main character's personality and therefore the lack of emotion in his life complements Lahiri's disengaged style rather than reveals it. Plus this story focuses on beginnings instead the sadness that permeates most of the other ones, so you're really pulling for the main character as he calmly deals with the loneliness of being isolated in a strange country without much money.