From Appropriation to Subversion: Aboriginal Cultural Production in the Age of Postmodernism

Abstract

In the coming century, cultural products such as images, "authentic" artifacts, and perhaps even ceremonies and spiritual events, will likely be very widely circulated commodities. So-called "authentic" cultural products, which may only identify those that stem from a different cultural source than the dominant, established order, will likely be among the most valuable commodities. In this context, a strategic reassessment of Aboriginal cultural production has already begun in the intense arguments over cultural appropriation. In what follows I propose to reassess the issue of cultural appropriation through a discussion of the concept of "culture" itself. Since "culture" can be characterized as one of the most useful intellectual tools of the twentieth century slowly coming to replace the nineteenth century concept of "race" as a way of differentiating peoples it has come to be taken for granted and, to an extraordinary extent, vacated of focus or precision. Indeed, in its broadest sense culture can be and often is deployed as all that is not nature; the culture/nature divide has been the critical analytical tool of many anthropologists, notably Claude Levi-Strauss. In this sense culture is economy, is (almost) everything that people do, say, mean, or are. The "(almost)" here refers to the residual elements of nature we can't seem to shrug off: our fingernails and hair grow, we eat and shit, and, the sad truth is, sooner or later we die. All of these "natural facts" are, of course, culturally contained. Different cultures treat hair and fingernails, eating and shitting, and death itself quite differently; these events have very different meanings across cultural boundaries. This has led in part to the recent philosophically inspired distrust of the concept "nature," which paradoxically has expired not at the expense of but to the revalorization of the other on which it might have thought to have codepended: "culture."