Indian Cultural Appropriation

Indian culture has been used as an aesthetic in music videos and concert performances by many celebrities. Some trends on social media were using henna (cultural form of art) to make freckles on their face as a makeup look. Most people in the Indian Community would find this offensive towards the culture because henna is normally used as a body art for religious celebrations and wedding ceremonies and is now used to accentuate Eurocentric beauty without any recognition of the cultures who use henna. The primary goal of this project is to emphasize the line between cultural appropriation and appreciation through examples and a personal definition of cultural appropriation.

S: We have been working on a semester long project for our honors class about identity conflicts and we decided to cover Indian Cultural Appropriation. Indian culture has been used as an aesthetic in music videos and concert performances by many celebrities. Some trends on social media were using henna (cultural form of art) to make freckles on their face as a makeup look. Most people in the Indian Community would find this offensive towards the culture because henna is normally used as a body art for religious celebrations and wedding ceremonies and is now used to accentuate Eurocentric beauty without any recognition of the cultures who use henna. Another way Indian cultural is culturally appropriated is using “Bindis” as a costume in music videos to show an Indian theme. In Indian culture, a Bindi is worn by women as a beauty mark as a tradition. This shows that a Bindi cannot be worn as just a fashion statement.

B: Although cultural appropriation is unfortunately common in many countries, we have narrowed our scope to north America so we can relate more to the conflict. In terms of the positions and interests, the parties are the Indian Community and the United States. The two subgroups of the Indian community are the nationalists and globalists. The Nationalists are those who want to limit the cultural spread and the globalists are those who are open to the spreading of the culture.

S: The basic needs have been met for both the Indian community and the United States party however, both parties partake in different social environments which cause them to have different values. The Indian community needs other people to understand their culture and respect it. The Indian community has the rights to educate others on their culture and show the significance of certain cultural beauty marks. The United States needs freedom to express their interests and value following their interests. The United States party has the right to explore other cultures and participate in cultural events.

B: The Indian Community and the United States have specific components that result in a social boundary. In this conflict, it is the sharing of different ethnicities, cultures, and traditions. In the Indian community, the in-group favoritism is sharing the same cultural views, the out-group derogation is the difference of opinion when it comes to the definition of cultural appropriation and the limit to the exchange. In the United States, the in-group favoritism is valuing those who act or speak out against those who are culturally appropriate. The outgroup derogation is the ingroup offensively calling out the outgroup.

S: In this conflict, the Indian community is positioned as the victim and persecutor because they can shape the definition of cultural appropriation and boundaries on what part of the culture can be used by others based on their experience and point of view. The United States party is a victim because they are forced to constantly think before displaying signs of interest in one’s culture. People in the Indian community have different opinions on how much of the culture one can use before it results to appropriation. This creates different standards in how a person can respect a culture.

B: Cognitive Bias is common in such conflicts. It means that an individual’s experience results in opinions and viewpoints on the world. In this case, experiences, whether it is negative or positive, can result in a varied definition of cultural appropriation. Some with a positive view might believe that sharing the culture is not equivalent to cultural appropriation, whereas others might have a unique perspective. Dehumanization is the treatment of a person as a sub-person. Immigrants have experienced being called “exotic” and while it might be intended as a compliment, it makes it sound like the individual is so different that they aren’t considered human. This also applies to the language barrier, with the many languages around the world, it is not likely that everyone would know the same language. It is possible that people may automatically scale them as lower status because they do not know how to communicate in English.

B: This is our conflict map; we have covered most of the items on this map but here is how we thought it would be organized. Since some elements are shared between the two parties, we thought it would be ideal to frame this conflict map, so the parties are on the outside and the events, needs, wants, values are positioned closer to the middle to gauge the importance of the events between the ingroup and outgroup of each party.

S: In order to raise awareness on cultural appropriation on Indian culture, we created a website to include information about the Indian culture and how to appreciate the culture. We published a blog post about how the Indian culture influenced beauty trends and gave alternate ideas on how to appreciate the culture. In our website, we included a survey to take at the end to gauge if the blogs are effective and show signs of interests.

B: Our main challenge was to attract the audience with a heavy topic like cultural appropriation. Our questions were about how their opinions of cultural appropriation changed and whether they thought it was important to address the line between appropriation vs appreciation. Out of our survey, we concluded that our blog was 43 percent effective in showing cultural appropriation in another light and all our responders strongly agreed that there needed to be a line between cultural appropriation vs appreciation.