What is (the wrong of) cultural appropriation?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social media is full of accusations and counter-accusations of a wrong called ‘cultural appropriation’. Our goal in this article is to sift through these deliberations and identify what cultural appropriation is, what it is not, and what, if anything might be wrong with it. We begin by explaining why public discourse about cultural appropriation should matter to political theorists of multiculturalism, especially in the anti-immigrant mood that has engulfed many immigrant-receiving countries. We then place cultural appropriation under the umbrella of cultural engagement, before identifying two forms of problematic cultural engagement – cultural offence and cultural misrepresentation – that are often conflated with cultural appropriation. In the next section, we define cultural appropriation as the appropriation of something of cultural value, usually a symbol or a practice, to others. We go on to explain that two additional conditions must be present to define an act of cultural appropriation: the presence of significant contestation around the act of appropriation, and the presence of knowledge (or negligent culpability) in the act of appropriation. Although this account of cultural appropriation is normative, cultural appropriation is often wrong only in a trivial sense. One of the ways it can become more serious is through the presence of what we term ‘amplifiers’. The contextual conditions that can render acts of cultural appropriation more egregious include: the existence of a power imbalance between the cultural appropriator and those from whom the practice or symbol is appropriated; the absence of consent; and the presence of profit that accrues to the appropriator. Ultimately, we find that there are very few instances of seriously wrongful cultural appropriation, and that many of the actions decried as cultural appropriation may be wrongful, but not because they appropriate.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it