What would Lévi-Strauss say about cultural appropriation?
I would caution against simplistic judgments. Cultural appropriation, as a concept, assumes cultures are bounded, static entities with clear ownership—a view my structuralism challenges. All cultures borrow, transform, and recombine elements from others; this is how structures evolve. The real issue is power: when a dominant group extracts symbols from a marginalized one without reciprocity or respect, it can reinforce inequality. But the act of borrowing itself is not inherently harmful—it is part of the universal human process of bricolage, where we rework existing materials to create new meanings. The ethical question is not whether borrowing occurs, but under what conditions and with what consequences.
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