Abstract
This paper begins with a sketch of a few themes in the philosophy of property insofar as they relate to the concept of cultural appropriation. It then offers a survey of Edmund Husserl’s account of culture. These reflections put us in a better position to ask whether property ownership provides a suitable interpretative framework for acts of intercultural copying and influence. On the contrary, Husserl’s account of culture leads us away from the claim that members of a cultural group should be understood to have property in cultural formations arising within their group. By putting meaning, rather than ownership, at the center of our understanding of culture, the paper offers an alternative account of what might be wrong, when there is something wrong, with events typically labeled culturally appropriative. The paper concludes by connecting concerns for cultural appropriation with conceptions of cultural authenticity, distinguishing between an autochthonal sense of authenticity, focused on internal origins and protection from outside forces, and a Husserlian sense of authenticity, connected to reason, responsibility, and truth.
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Notes
The focus of this essay will be on the repeatable, or type-level cultural formations, as they are not as easily assimilated to the property paradigm. Singular token-level objects raise many interesting legal and moral questions about ownership and transferability, but are more easily made property.
For example, “there is general agreement that if cultural appropriation is morally objectionable, it is only objectionable when a member of a dominant cultural group appropriates from a member of a marginalized group” (Matthes 2016, p. 347).
Honoré (1961, p. 370).
See “Of Property” in Locke (1960).
See “Alienated Labor” and “Private Property and Communism” in Marx (1994).
Conventionalism need not deny that property has some foundation in nature. It is, of course, by nature rather than convention that human beings need to use things in order to live and live well. The question dividing the conventionalist and the naturalist regards the origin of the prerogatives of owners (and the correlative duties of non-owners) regarding this or that particular thing.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
We must add “from one’s parents or demographic group.” We might, instead, want to think that new generations of a cultural community are defined, not biologically or demographically, but as those who receive the influences. However, if we inherit the cultural property by being influenced (i.e., by the very fact of receiving the cultural formations), then no one could be excluded as outsiders, as not owners. The cultural appropriation issue arises at all only because some people are within a culture’s sphere of influence while being seen as not legitimate heirs.
See Flynn (2009).
Husserl (1989a, p. 252). Husserl’s use of “soul” here is metaphorical. As Robert Sokolowski explains the distinction between soul and spirit, in the Husserlian tradition, “Let us look at more familiar worldly things where traces of spirit without soul can also be found, in bodily things that show the effect of human rational activity. Consider something like furniture. Furniture shows the effect of human reason, and therefore it has something spiritual about it; it has a residue of spirit, but it does not have soul because the life of reason that generates furniture does not dwell in the wood itself; it dwells in the human beings who make the furniture” (Sokolowski 2002, p. 53).
Husserl (1998, pp. 77–78).
Husserl (1977a, p. 84).
See especially Husserl (1977a, pp. 83–90). “Culture is,” Husserl comments, “a psyche in objects of the surrounding world” (1977a, p. 176). Again, this description is metaphorical: “The cultural object itself or its cultural sense is accordingly not, for instance, something psychically real in the manner of real psychic states or real psychic properties making themselves known in them” (1977a, p. 88). Rather, culture is a “derivative form” of the mental or spiritual (1977a, p. 40), but such that the spirit expressed penetrates and animates the object. In its spiritual sense, the object has “as it were, an inner life,” and we experience the thing’s sense analogously to how we experience the intentional lives of other people (1989a, p. 251n). Sandra Harding likewise speaks of the “ensoulment of objects”: “Cultural property takes on a life and meaning of its own; it acquires something like a soul” (1997, p. 760).
Husserl (1989a, p. 248 − 50).
See especially Husserl (1977a, pp. 83–90).
Husserl (1977a, p. 85).
Husserl (1989a, p. 333).
Husserl (1977a, p. 85–86).
Husserl (1989a, p. 281).
On these forms of influence and their results on structures within cultural communities, see Flynn (2012).
Husserl (2001, p. 270).
This is not to say that a positive science cannot study normativity at all. Consider, for example, the way Max Weber claims the social sciences must study normative aspects of social phenomena: “When the normatively valid is the object of empirical investigation, its normative validity is disregarded. Its ‘existence’ and not its ‘validity’ is what concerns the investigator,” and this coheres with Weber’s view that reason cannot adjudicate between values (Weber 1949, p. 98). In contrast, for Husserl normative validity and not only existence is subject to reason.
Husserl (2001, p. 18).
“Everything constituted in the spontaneous acts of the Ego becomes, as constituted, a ‘possession’ of the Ego and a pregivenness for new acts of the Ego” (Husserl 1989a, p. 226).
“Others’ thoughts penetrate my soul; they can exercise various influences, either enormous or small, under changing circumstances, according to my psychic situation, the stage of my development, the formation of my dispositions, etc.” (Husserl 1989a, p. 281).
For an excellent exploration of the dueling claims for the epistemic superiority of ingroup members or outgroup members, see Merton (1972).
Husserl (1970, p. 370).
Husserl (1977b, p. 111).
“As Ego I have my environment and take that which I and my companion have intentionally in common precisely as common. That is what I do in the case of all people who I find in the compass of my environment; I empathize with each one and participate in his doing and suffering and share in his surrounding world, positing it in relation to mine, precisely as long as they are concordant” (Husserl 1989a, p. 362).
Husserl (1973, p. 194; translation by the author).
Husserl (1989b, p. 21).
Husserl (1977a, p. 86).
Husserl (1977a, p. 88).
Husserl (1970, pp. 354 − 55).
“Humanity (or a closed community such as a nation, tribe, etc.), in its historical situation, always lives under some attitude or other. Its life always has its norm-style and, in reference to this, a constant historicity or development” (Husserl 1970, p. 280).
See Pensées #301.
For this reason, Kwame Anthony Appiah dismisses the worry that intercultural influence will destroy difference: describing the Ghanaian town where he grew up, he comments “whatever loss of difference there has been [from globalization], they are constantly inventing new forms of difference: new hairstyles, new slang, even, from time to time, new religions. No one could say that the world’s villages are becoming anything like the same” (Appiah 2006).
“As far as empathy—existence for each other, existence in a common life-horizon—extends, that far it is valid to say that no personal deed is actually isolated, that it is always at least disposed to motivate other subjects” (Husserl 1973, p. 206; translation by the author).
Husserl distinguishes between communities of influence and communities organized with a will: “Personalities of a higher order, authentic personal connections, and mere communicative communities, effect-communities [Wirkunsgemeinschaften], must be distinguished; a language does not originate as a constitution does in a parliamentary state” (Husserl 1973, p. 201; translation by the author). Likewise, Husserl points out that there are “forms of community which are not full personalities and which are not societies of will and action” and offers as examples “linguistic communities [and] national communities without a national ‘will’” (Husserl 1989, p. 329). A community of influence can form a cooperative community founded on it; for example, a people can take on a national will. Indeed, Husserl speaks of the ideal possibility of a people achieving an “ethical synthesis”: By each living ethically while also supporting each other ethically, people might form a community of influence [Wirkungsgemeinschaft] in which “the connected subjectivities become a ‘synthetic pole’ of community actions” (Husserl 2014, p. 315; translation by the author). Still, a community of influence remains and does not simply become a cooperative community when its members form a higher-level community of will. Husserl comments, for example, “If the people is a civil nation [Staatsvolk], then the unity of the state and the unity of the community constituting forms of custom, etc., are nevertheless separate” (Husserl 1973, pp. 182–83; translation by the author). For analysis of this issue, see Flynn (2012).
For a more detailed account of Husserl’s notion of expression and expressive activity, see Flynn (2009).
Husserl (1977a, pp. 86, 89–90).
Searle (1995, p. 118).
Mezey (2007, p. 2005).
Lyndel Prott and Patrick O’Keefe lament from a conservationist point of view that the property framework “looks for an owner and assesses everything from that standpoint, rather than looking to the preservation of the cultural heritage itself” such that property “is inadequate and inappropriate for the range of matters covered by ‘cultural heritage’” (Prott and O’Keefe 1992, pp. 314, 319).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this point.
On the differences between communities of will and Wirkungsgemeinschaften, see footnote 40 above.
As Mezey comments, “The problem with certifying authentic Indian stuff is that it requires certifying authentic Indians.” She continues, “By placing a cultural property right in a particular embodiment of a group or community, the law tends to empower the version of the group to which it gives the right at the same time that it reifies a specific understanding of culture” (Mezey 2007, pp. 2015, 2020).
As James O. Young and Susan Haley note, “Insiders have the right to represent themselves, but this is not taken from them when others represent them” (2012, p. 270).
Consider the claim, from Conrad Brunk and James Young, that “from a moral point of view, it is clear that outsiders ought not to profit by representing their teachings as conveying the religious belief and practices of a culture to which they do not belong” (2012b, p. 112). A lot hinges here on what it means to not belong.
See, e.g., Scafidi (2005, p. 4).
Emerson sacralizes the authentic, inner, uninfluenced self: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”; “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature”; “I appeal from your customs. I must be myself”; and “What is deep is holy.” See Emerson (2018, pp. 19–38).
For example, Harding calls cultural formations “sanctifying objects” and suggests that cultural property be treated reverently, like human remains: “Not unlike human remains, cultural property is inextricably tied to our reverence for human experience and the past; we treasure cultural property because it represents human achievement and human advancement. It is the embodiment of all that is wonderful, mysterious, sacred, and enduring about a culture” (Harding 1997, p. 768). In contrast, Mezey complains of some cultural appropriation literature and law reflecting “the desire and nostalgia (…) for pure and comprehensive cultures” (Mezey 2007, p. 2017).
According to the cultural appropriation literature, one threat of appropriation is that “the authentic expressions of a culture could become tainted with inauthentic elements” (Brunk and Young 2012a, p. 9). On the other hand, Harding admits “the notion that identity, whether individual or group, must forever remain attached to a particular object is unsettling. An immutable, intrinsic connection between identity and property may unduly limit, at least in theory, an ongoing process of cultural redefinition” (Harding 1997, p. 752). Taking this concern further, Mezey worries that the cultural appropriation framework allows “stereotypes, guilt, and nostalgia [to] create museum pieces out of indigenous cultures in the name of cultural property and collective identity” and “perpetuates potentially harmful notions about cultures and groups in the name of trying to protect and preserve them” (Mezey 2007, pp. 2009, 2026). Likewise, Appiah claims that, once ingroup members have sufficient resources to decide for themselves, “talk of authenticity now just amounts to telling other people what they ought to value in their own traditions” (Appiah 2006).
As John J. Drummond puts it, “the phenomenological account (…) connects authenticity to truthfulness, to having the proper sense of things” (Drummond 2010, p. 453).
Husserl (1977, pp. 162 − 63).
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McGrath, M.B. Cultural appropriation: an Husserlian account. Cont Philos Rev 56, 483–504 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09605-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09605-3