introduction 17and intellectual property (Boon 2010; Coombe 1998), and also features
prominently in debates about the restitution and protection of “cultural
property” (Coombe 2009; Noyes 2010). In their introduction to Borrowed
Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, Bruce Ziff and Pratima Rao (1997:
3) point out that even though the meaning of the term appropriation is
somewhat open-ended, it generally connotes “some form of taking” and
therefore indicates a “relationship between persons or groups.” Ziff and
Rao further explain that appropriation is primarily regarded as an act of
taking “from a subordinate into a dominant culture,” and while they ac-
knowledge that the “subordinate” may also appropriate, they view this as
a “complementary opposite” and call it “cultural assimilation” (5). I take
issue with this viewpoint for two reasons: First, it calls a single practice
(taking something out of one context and putting it into another) by two
different names; and second, one of these names, cultural assimilation,
evokes the holistic conception of “culture” as a bounded and homogeneous
entity to which “intruding” alien elements need to be assimilated—that
is, st r ipped of t hei r a lter it y so a s not to enda nger c u lt u ra l homeosta sis.^4 In
Ziff and Rao’s terminology, cultural appropriation, which is practiced only
by hegemonic groups, values alterity, and the appropriated object retains
part of its difference (even though much of it is imagined), whereas cultural
assimilation, practiced by “subaltern” groups, supposedly aims at effacing
the alterity of the object that is taken into the “culture.” Second, this con-
cept ua l i z at ion g ra nt s t hose who “a ssi m i late” considerably less agenc y t ha n
those who “appropriate.” If appropriation is defi ned a s “t he ac t of cla i m i ng
the right to use, make, or own something that someone else claims in
the same way” (Boon 2010: 204), why should members of marginalized
societies—that is, in terms of global politics and economy—appropriate
things from elsewhere differently than members of hegemonic societies?
And why should they not also thrive on the “borrowing of power” through
their acts of appropriation?^5
W hile I think it is important to discuss the politics of appropriation and
the power relationships at stake, we should not lose sight of the manifold
forms of re-signification involved in appropriation. Appropriation means
taking a cultural form, a symbolic representation, for example, out of one
context and putting it into another, whereby shifts of meaning most likely
occur. And it is such shifts in meaning and their social and cultural con-