CULTURAL CONTENT WITHOUT CONTEXT- Appropriation and Appreciation

She delicately laid out her handmade offerings for her market stall, gracefully hanging up her elegant robes for her new fashion label; a mashup of the most exploitative cultural theft that would have made even the curators at the British Museums head spin. I locked eyes with her and didn’t lie. She looked away in a disturbingly performative way as if she had expected this reaction from some locals..

She wore a muslim scarf loosely, still showing her hair, an Indian bindi, feather earrings, and had a faded henna tattoo on her pale right hand; a flurried mish mash of many different spiritual traditions all blended together on this woman's body. Sure. syncretism is a thing these days and yeah of course you can dress however the fuck you please, though for the people of those cultures and religions to 1.) Take you seriously and 2) Feel safe around you, you best provide some context to how you become a clothes horse for 5 major religions all in one day.

From afar, to the purely aesthetic or superficial eye, she looked fantastic, glowing under all that Exoticism, but to a weary eye who has seen a lot, she was a copy paste template of the new age wellness world colonisers, who are storming Bali buying up land while modern day Balinese turn into their underpaid workers. They are the digital nomads who Instagram their stunning wild and remote locations, often omitting local brown people.

So lets dive into Cultural Appropriation versus Cultural Appreciation, which is the theme here. You cannot have Content that sticks if its without a wider Context of where it has all come from.

Cultural Appreciation is when a dominant culture respect and acknowledges the minority cultures that have influenced their designs, work, cooking, your fashion not just taken elements and ingredients as their own. Cultural appreciation involves respectful learning, honouring, and engaging with another culture, often with permission and support for creators, to create bridges of understanding and being seen. Appropriation is when the dominant culture doesn’t care at all about context of where or which tribes or languages or people they have taken the culture from, thus losing or diluting the deeper cultural meaning and relevance.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re resourced enough, you can and should travel the world to get a taste of other cultures, to grow and develop yourself beyond your homeland and culture .It’s so necessary. I have done a lot of travelling in the past, both Brazil and Japan have left a significant dent on my psyche, I deeply appreciate those cultures and the people. I definitely went mad over sushi, manga, ikigai and for a good year after Japan, I was still obsessed with the harajuki districts fashion. I adore both those cultures and still have links to people in both countries, I however would not then go about stealing their crazy cool style, making it into my own brand and capitalising on it, which is all too common with westerners who seem unable to understand the difference between Appropriation versus Appreciation.

One of the reasons that cultural appropriation is a hard concept to grasp for so many is that Westerners are used to unsolicited pushing of their own values and culture onto others, so that they can feel free to take what they want in return.

Westerners wrongly assume that this is a fair cultural exchange when really, it’s no more of an exchange than pressuring your neighbours to adopt your loose ideals while stealing their family’s heritage.

True cultural exchange is not the process of “Here’s my culture, I’ll have some of yours” that we sometimes think it is. It’s not something that should be assumed to be mutual.

Most people for eg Like the Palestinians who’s culture and population is being erased in real time, just want to be left alone; they do not want, need or asked for a mutual exchange of cultures. Especially if the ones demanding the mutual exchange -or outright theft in a lot of cases- is one of the dominant culture, then this becomes a power play rooted in colonial legacy from a place of privilege. Most of the Appropriators (a very mild word in this case) do so purely because they can, while the ones whose culture is being borrowed or appropriated often comes from a marginalized culture thats been historically ignored or silenced.

So as free as people should be to wear or make whatever eclectic mix of Indigenous clothing they enjoy. Using someone else’s cultural symbols for profit or a personal need for self-expression is pure privilege in action. The saddest thing that these people truly miss out when they come in with those fashion is that there automatically arises distrust when one sees that their own culture has been appropriated on their own land with no benefit to them. A wall of distrust arises that keeps us from ever wanting to move closer to those neo-colonialists, who are still just extracting from the mamaland, in 2025. It’s exhausting and rather old news.

Make it a response-ability to Appreciate cultures more by listening to people of those marginalised cultures, to understand as much as possible the obvious and subtle ways in which their cultures and countries have been colonised, appropriated and exploited; as in Egypt these do leave deep wounds and scare on the psyches of the people. Please make it a joyful habit to educate yourselves enough to make informed choices when it comes to engaging with people of other cultures, that don’t leave them untrusting, suspicious and scarred.

The world could be a better place if the wider context of your influences are included and seen, so that your content is not empty and meaningless, another trend that will come and go from the mainstream gaze, while scarring the people a little more.