Search

In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario retitled a painting by Emily Carr which contained an offensive word. Controversy ensued, with some arguing that unsanctioned changes to a work’s title infringe upon artists’ moral and free speech rights. Others argued that such a change serves to whitewash legacies of racism and cultural genocide. In this paper, I show that these concerns are unfounded. The first concern is not supported by law or the history of our titling practices; and the second concern misses the mark by ignoring the gallery’s substantial efforts to avoid just such an outcome. Picking up on a suggestion from Loretta Todd, I argue that we can use Aboriginal Title as a model for thinking about the harms perpetuated by cultural appropriation, and the practices we should adopt to mitigate them.

Perhaps the most difficult assignments in architecture are those requiring that tradition be brought into the design. This wish might be included in the assignment by the client or it may be a goal set by the designers themselves. This article takes up the topic of cultural borrowings as well as the relationship between the designer and the features of the local culture – specifically, the Sámi lavvu theme. In this article, some attempts will be presented to make Sámi culture visible in architecture at different times. Architecture follows the same kinds of stereotypical representations that are now criticized in museums when presenting Indigenous peoples. The Sámi are often presented in national museums as a separate theme, and, in architecture, certain themes are highlighted as “Sámi” features. Architecture has remained a discipline that celebrates the mixing of elements and motifs, while many art practices are tightening the boundaries around cultural license. However, this article does not focus on cultural appropriation in architecture or on the imbalance of power in planning; rather, it presents a contribution of how architects have interpreted the lavvu theme in their design between the 1940s and the 1990s. It also highlights the process of change that has taken place over a few decades; strengthening respect for Indigenous cultures and criticizing cultural exploitation have also had an influence on planning.

In three studies we examined lay definitions of cultural appropriation in U.S. community and college student samples. In a fourth study we examined correlates of perceptions of cultural appropriation. Using community and undergraduate student samples (Studies 1-2), and popular media articles (Study 3) we examined definitions of cultural appropriation following Rogers’ (2006) typology of cultural exchange, dominance, and subordination. The results across three studies revealed that cultural appropriation was defined predominantly as cultural exploitation. In Study 4 we examined political correctness (emotion and activism), social justice, empathy (perspective taking and empathic concern), and political orientation as correlates of cultural appropriation perceptions. Using canonical correlations, we found that cultural exploitation was the primary contributor to the synthetic predictor, and political orientation, emotion political correctness, activism political correctness, and social justice made significant contributions to the criterion variable, but not empathy. Implication and further research directions are discussed.

This article analyses the opposition of the Council of Pilgrim Nations of Lord Quyllurit’i to the appropriation of the pablito/ukuku dancer by the Kausachun Cusco Political Movement during the 2014...

Culinary borrowings are so common as to seem trivial, and yet they are consequential for many of the actors concerned. People’s livelihoods, professional status, and social identity may be tied to ...

Kalevalaic runosinging is a Baltic-Finnic tradition of metered oral poetry. In Finland, runo singing and the national epic Kalevala based on this tradition are often seen − especially in public speech − as nationally significant symbols of Finnishness. In this article, I examine how the idea of the Finnishness of traditional runo songs has been constructed in the changing paradigms of studying and performing folk music and oral poetry in Finland across the last hundred years, and how the concept of cultural appropriation relates to this. I will concentrate on early Finnish folk music studies as well as on the contemporary Finnish folk music scene; I tie these fields together by following the circulation of an Ingrian runosong theme called Oi daiafter it became part of archived folklore collections in Finland in 1906.

Insight meditation (vipassanā) originated in Theravāda Buddhism. However, participants in a “Jewish Vipassanā” meditation retreat – held at a Jewish settlement in the West Bank region controlled by...

This article explores the cultural appropriation of the term avatar by Western tech culture and what this implies for scholarship of digital games, virtual worlds, social media, and digital cultures. The term has roots in the religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent and was subsequently imported into video game terminology during a period of widespread appropriation of Eastern culture by Californian tech industries. We argue that the use of the term was not a case of happenstance but a signaling of the potential for computing to offer a mystical or enchanted perspective within an otherwise secular world. This suggests that the concept is useful in game cultures precisely because it plays with the “otherness” of the term's original meaning. We argue that this indicates a fundamental hybridity to gaming cultures that highlight the need to add postcolonial perspectives to how issues of diversity and power in gaming cultures are understood.

El carnaval porteño del último tercio del siglo XIX fue una arena para la negociación de las diferencias étnico-raciales en la que era una de las urbes más multiétnicas y de población cambiante del planeta. Durante el carnaval se realizaban diversas performances de apropiación cultural, una de las más notables de las cuales fue la de los blancos que se disfrazaban de negros. Este trabajo apunta a emprender una indagación sobre el fenómeno de las comparsas de falsos negros, comenzando por la primera y más conocida, Los Negros. Sobre la base de un trabajo exhaustivo de fuentes primarias, revisaré sus rasgos principales y sus conexiones posibles con la cultura transnacional y avanzaré en un análisis de las performances que pusieron en juego en los carnavales.

This article highlights cultural appropriation in the literary representation of the Sámi (the indigenous people of the European Arctic) in two Swedish YA series: theSopperoquartet by the Sámi author Ann-Helén Laestadius, and theIdijärvitrilogy by Charlotte Cederlund, a non-Sámi writer. Despite their different origins, the series are more similar than different in their portrayal of most aspects of Sámi-Swedish relations. The discussion of cultural appropriations in the production and marketing of the series is contextualized within broader concerns, especially in relation to Sámi and Arctic pedagogies. We begin by noting that both protagonists are initially marginalized in both the Swedish and the Sámi contexts, but their ways of gaining agency are markedly different. Connecting these points to the authors’ ethnic affiliation does not produce useful knowledge or knowledge that can be shared, two hallmarks of Sámi and Arctic pedagogies. We argue that Sámi and Arctic pedagogies provide more relevant tools for discussing cultural appropriation in relation to literature from the region than the currently dominant models derived from Anglophone contexts. Through our pedagogically inspired analyses of voice and agency in the two series, we endeavour to create a Nordic ethics of appropriation.

While historically sharing the characteristics of a universalistic religion and a modernist grand narrative, global Buddhism is mainly the product of a late modern development. Centripetal forces with circulating ideas, practices, and institutions have been part of a liberal market in an open exchange society with ‘open hermeneutics’ and an accessible universal grammar. Its global focus has triggered de-ethnification, de-culturalization, and de-territorialization, claiming transnational universality as a central paradigm fit for a global world beyond isolationalist particularism. However, such seemingly universalist versions of a global Buddhism in recent years, mainly in North America, have been criticized for actually being representations of particular cultures (e.g. ‘white Buddhism’) with benefits for only particular segments. This article investigates the discourses of this new turn, involving questions of authority, authenticity, identity, cultural appropriation, and representation. It is suggested that criticism of global Buddhism should be seen as typical of what could be called ‘post-global Buddhism’, in which identity politics is a frame of reference serving as a centrifugal force, signaling a new phase in ‘Western Buddhism’. The relevance for the study of religion is further discussed with reflections on how to respond to post-global religious identity politics without being consumed by neither stark objectivism nor subjectivist go-nativism. While historically sharing the characteristics of a universalistic religion and a modernist grand narrative, global Buddhism is mainly the product of a late modern development. Centripetal forces with circulating ideas, practices, and institutions have been part of a liberal market in an open exchange society with “open hermeneutics” and an accessible universal grammar. Its global focus has triggered de-ethnification, de-culturalization, and de-territorialization, claiming transnational universality as a central paradigm fit for a global world beyond isolationalist particularism. However, such seemingly universalist versions of a global Buddhism in recent years, mainly in North America, have been criticized for actually being representations of particular cultures (e.g., “white Buddhism”) with benefits for only particular segments. This article investigates the discourses of this new turn, involving questions of authority, authenticity, identity, cultural appropriation, and representation. It is suggested that criticism of global Buddhism should be seen as typical of what could be called “postglobal Buddhism,” in which identity politics is a frame of reference serving as a centrifugal force, signaling a new phase in “Western Buddhism.” The relevance for the study of religion is further discussed with reflections on how to respond to post-global religious identity politics without being consumed by either stark objectivism or subjectivist go-nativism.

This article attempts to describe the Polish-American Friends Movement (PAIFM) in the context of cultural appropriation. It first describes the history of the movement by linking it to the phenomenon of playing Indian, which started in the United States in the colonial period and then was transplanted to Europe in the late 19th century. Subsequently, it briefly presents the history of the Polish hobbyism movement in Poland, pointing out the historical, social, and psychological circumstances of its development. In the next part it defines the concept of cultural appropriation and its main types according to James Young (2010). The last part is devoted to a detailed analysis of different forms of activities of the PAIFM, especially the annual week gathering, as observed by the author during the 40th gathering of Polish Indian enthusiasts in 2016. Different types of cultural appropriation and an array of consequences resulting from such a positioning are discussed. In this paper it is argued that the negative undertones of the concept obscure the complexity of the movement as a cultural phenomenon and its multiple links with Native American cultures and their present political and cultural situation.

This article examines embodied representation of race, ethnicity, and gender, questioning ideas of cultural appropriation. Using the London-based Congolese transnational fashion brand Kiyan...

This article addresses an ongoing controversy in Noway around designing and naming Sámi (indigenous) objects. The authors argue that controversies in many academic debates have been framed in essentializing ways that stress identity politics and believe this framing to be analytically and politically unfruitful. There are ways of thinking about or narrating tensions that are not essentialist and that do not close down productive ways of recognizing difference. They are concerned with the tension raised in the Scandinavian/Sámi public on respectful use, and ownership, of Sámi traditional costumes and traditional objects. The contested Sámi objects come with different stories and the aim of this research is to answer the following questions: What stories are told in moments of tension and conflict regarding the use of traditional objects? How are differences articulated? Can recognition be enacted in these encounters and political controversies? The authors take two specific debates as starting points for exploring how the objects are enacted.

In this article So-Rim Lee closely investigates the Mahābhārata in relation to – but quite distinct from – The Mahabharata: a Play (1985) by Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière. Since the ancient text of the Mahābhārata does not have a definitive author, version, or form, So-Rim Lee argues that Brook and Carrière's framing of their modern reading as an adaptation of the ancient text poses a series of questions regarding the politics of recontextualizing a South Asian text in Western terms, the methodological process involved in doing this, and the ethical stance espoused by the transcultural adapters. She then questions whether the audience actually finds Brook and Carrière's international, multi - racial production as cosmopolitan and multicultural as the authors claim it to be. If The Mahabharata: a Play is a matter of cultural appropriation rather than adaptation, what transgressions are involved in reframing the source text and how does it produce what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence’? Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. She has previously reviewed for Theatre Survey and Performance Research.

In 2014, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B site-specific installation created a media storm and protests throughout Europe. One such protest was in London, leading to the cancellation of his show at...

This article analyses the role of material culture in the enforcing of a colonial order in early modern Sápmi (Land of the Sámi, the indigenous people in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia). In addition, the article focuses on the unequal power relations created through the collecting and cultural appropriation of Sámi objects. The 17th century saw a rapid growth of interest in the Sámi and their material culture. Clothing, sledges, ceremonial drums and other objects were collected for royal and noble courts of Europe, as well as for scholars and other collectors. This Eurocentric process of constructing Sáminess was concurrent with colonial attitudes towards non-European peoples. Empirically, the article explores the collecting of Sámi objects, clothes and religious/sacred material culture such as ceremonial drums and sieidis, as well as models and mannequins, and their role in the colonial rule and imperial representations of Sápmi. Collecting Sápmi: Early Modern Globalization of Sámi Material Culture and Sámi Cultural Heritage Today

This paper argues that during the French colonization of Vietnam the emergence of Les Miserables as a transnational work and Victor Hugo as a global figure can be traced back to their successful and seamless integration into local literature and religion. Based on the concept of appropriation, a process in which the target text “takes over” the source text, subjecting it to different forms of transformation, a rereading of Hugo and his masterpiece will be proposed through three of these forms: a translation of Les Miserables by Nguyen-Van-Vĩnh, an adaptation of the same novel by Hồ-Biểu-Chanh, and an indigenization of Spirit Hugo in Caodaism by Phạm-Cong-Tắc. In the light of anticolonial resistance, this study investigates the extent to which the subversive act of literary and cultural appropriation carried out by these three Vietnamese authors in the 1920s can be seen as a reversed assimilation that transgresses the boundaries between dominant and dominated, colonizer and the colonized.

While the national monuments have long been considered the product of federal preservation efforts, this article explores the dynamic relationship between pothunters, boosters, and preservationists on the local stage. It argues that local and regional communities like Flagstaff, Arizona, played an important role in early efforts to promote and protect many western cultural resources. Adopting an imagined heritage and sense of history, Flagstaff’s residents powerfully and effectively advocated for the preservation of the Walnut Canyon cliff dwellings. Yet this imagined heritage was also a form of cultural appropriation, setting the stage for the decades-long exclusion of Native voices from the conversation.

Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic plant mixture used in a ceremonial context throughout western Amazonia, and its use has expanded globally in recent decades. As part of this expansion, ayahuasca has become popular among westerners who travel to the Peruvian Amazon in increasing numbers to experience its reportedly healing and transformative effects. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in and around the area of Iquitos, Peru, the epicenter of ayahuasca tourism, this paper focuses on some of the problematic aspects of western engagement with indigenous spiritual traditions. This engagement is usually based on idealized and romanticized notions of indigenous shamanism and an inability to digest its less palatable aspects, such as sorcery. Through ethnographic examples and ethnohistorical evidence, I show that the romanticization indigenous peoples is not benign. In fact, this one-sided romantic image hides the complexity of indigenous peoples’ situations by erasing the injustices that they have experienced and continue to experience. I propose a more holistic approach to ayahuasca shamanism that views indigenous peoples not living in a fictitious harmony with nature but as people embedded in larger struggles and facing important challenges not the least of which is the recent commercialization of indigenous spirituality.

In this essay, the “Arctic” to which I refer is the Canadian Arctic. My focus is my recent novel, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel (2014, published by Pedlar Press in English Canada, Tin House in t...

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia and will raise questions about the meaning that cultures ascribe to potentially dangerous natural spaces. By tracing the mythological and ritual life of the local clans of the Lamaholot and Ngada people, one can note that the entire cosmology and belief system of the people of Flores is tightly interwoven with the religious perception of space and place. Volcanoes play a key role in this belief system because the different clans see volcanoes as places of origin, though they also have a practical social function This article emphasizes the importance of volcanoes for individual and clan identity, and their function in the ideology of association and spiritual linkage between people, ancestors, and natural features. It furthermore examines the phenomenon of public confessions of guilt. These coincide with local interpretations of natural catastrophes as a result of the failure to respect local social values and norms and to fulfil religious duties. Consequently, the article argues, the idea of a dualism between humans and nature becomes irrelevant. Within this context, their reciprocal relationship with volcanoes enables clan groups in Flores to reconcile the unpredictability of nature with the dangerous and sometimes violent aspects of society.

The use of American Indian imagery, material culture, and cultural traditions by non-Native peoples has received much recent attention by scholars, activists, and the media. However, most of the attention has been focused on sports teams and mascots. One area that has received little attention is the appropriation of Indian imagery and traditions by non-sports related organizations. This article details a recent meeting between members of the American Indian Health Research and Education Alliance (AIHREA) and leaders from the Tribe of the Mic-O-Say. The Tribe of the Mic-O-Say is a Boy Scouts of America™ honor society for Scouts in eastern Kansas and western Missouri who want to "play Indian." The Mic-O-Say have a long history of misappropriating and misrepresenting Indian culture and traditions as well as engaging in cultural imperialism. This alienates Native people from their traditions, undermines self-determination, and creates further animosity and distrust between Natives and non-Natives.

This chapter draws questions of race into food ethics. Appropriating a conception of race articulated by Alain Locke (1885‒1954), it is suggested that racial imperialism and the attending drive to claim proprietary ownership of racialized cultural products is responsible for much of the intercultural strife and race-based injustice in the modern world. Foods and foodways, understood as cultural products, are then discussed against the backdrop of racial partisanship in the exchange and consumption of foods and cuisine. Notions of authenticity and cultural appropriation are discussed in this light. It is argued that there is a place for race in the discussion of food ethics and that racial imperialism and racial partisanship in the exchange and consumption of foods should be repudiated.

Reconstruction of relatedness and ancestry from ancient DNA from Medieval burial provides new insights into kinship behavior., From historical and archeological records, it is posited that the European medieval household was a combination of close relatives and recruits. However, this kinship structure has not yet been directly tested at a genomic level on medieval burials. The early 7th century CE burial at Niederstotzingen, discovered in 1962, is the most complete and richest example of Alemannic funerary practice in Germany. Excavations found 13 individuals who were buried with an array of inscribed bridle gear, jewelry, armor, and swords. These artifacts support the view that the individuals had contact with France, northern Italy, and Byzantium. This study analyzed genome-wide sequences recovered from the remains, in tandem with analysis of the archeological context, to reconstruct kinship and the extent of outside contact. Eleven individuals had sufficient DNA preservation to genetically sex them as male and identify nine unique mitochondrial haplotypes and two distinct Y chromosome lineages. Genome-wide analyses were performed on eight individuals to estimate genetic affiliation to modern west Eurasians and genetic kinship at the burial. Five individuals were direct relatives. Three other individuals were not detectably related; two of these showed genomic affinity to southern Europeans. The genetic makeup of the individuals shares no observable pattern with their orientation in the burial or the cultural association of their grave goods, with the five related individuals buried with grave goods associated with three diverse cultural origins. These findings support the idea that not only were kinship and fellowship held in equal regard: Diverse cultural appropriation was practiced among closely related individuals as well.

Drawing on poststructuralist discourse analysis and Hall's (1990) notion of diaspora cultural identities, this article explores the discontinuation and maintenance of Yoruba identity options by students at three Western Cape Province universities. Interviews and observations data are used to consider how different forms of representations and cultural practices associated with Yoruba in Nigeria lead to equally fragmented and hybrid lifestyles and identity options in the Diaspora due to the changed socio-cultural conditions. The argument shows the ruptures and fragmentation of Yoruba cultural elements as students try to fit into the South African socio-cultural contexts while trying to live ‘home’ life away from home. It also shows cultural appropriation by local South Africans who claim Nigerian [Yoruba] affiliation through wearing Yoruba attire and partaking in Nigerian [Yoruba] cuisine. The authors argue that identities are produced across national and ethnic boundaries not only through language...

Face au danger d’une perte définitive du corpus musical accessible en ligne, les auteurs proposent une méthode de recherche qui tienne compte du caractère inconstant du classement et du stockage pratiqués par l’usage des nouveaux supports numériques sonores. Le geste du nouveau collectionneur qui échange, transmet ou met en ligne de la musique est ici considéré comme source à part entière. En d’autres termes, il s’agit d’un changement de paradigme dans la pratique de la recherche qui tend à se déplacer vers le questionnement de départ défini par un/des expert/s et qui rend la source heuristique. L’objectif principal est de revenir à l’étude des représentations, non seulement comme des reflets plus ou moins fidèles d’un réel social (à l’état de traces ou du réel matériel), mais aussi comme des figures construites qui rendent le monde intelligible et qui apportent une jouissance esthétique., Faced with the danger of irremediable loss of non-archived materials, the authors of this article propose a method of research which consists of proposing a thoughtful analysis instead of simply stocking large data in the first place. The changing nature of classification of digital sources and storage of them led researchers to look not only at the digital recordings themselves but to also consider the gesture of a collector who uploads, publishes and shares online music as a source. The proposed way to study such data is to represent their scale by mapping links between singular digital objects. In other words, a paradigm shift occurs in the research practice that tends to move to the importance of the questioning. The study of shared musical memory that results from this approach becomes a source for understanding social representations, not only as a more or less faithful reflection of a reality (its traces or material residua), but also as constructions that make the world more intelligible and that provides an aesthetic pleasure., Interfaces numériques, 4(3), 2015

Plesch examines changing attitudes towards the gaucho as a musician in nineteenth-century Argentina through literary, musical and iconographic sources. She proposes the existence of a discursive formation gaucho, whose archive comprises travellers' writings, official reports, memoirs, visual arts, literature and music. Despised and persecuted throughout most of the nineteenth century, the gaucho was considered by Argentine elites as the epitome of ‘barbarism’, and his music was consistently described in derogatory terms. This attitude would be dramatically reversed towards the end of the century, when he was promoted to the role of national character and his cultural universe used as a source for the construction of a distinctive Argentine high culture that included the visual arts, literature and music. Plesch analyses the dominant discourse on the gaucho from colonial times to the publication of Martin Fierro (1872) and identifies four strategies of Othering at work: debasement, homogeneity, tim...

Research on Bollywood cinema's increasingly global presence identifies the genre as a significant cultural domain for the articulation of diasporic Indian identity and its constitution. Focusing on the appropriation of Bollywood cinema and its filmi song and dance, regarded as a multi-sensual media, the article investigates Bollywood's popularity among Bene Israel immigrants in Israel and explores the aesthetics of diaspora, understood as a politics of consumption, embodied performance of identity and claims to ownership of tradition shaped by commercialized popular culture imported into Israeli society. I suggest that a sentient anthropology may provide insights into cultural identity as emerging out of material, social and aesthetic practices. The participatory culture and multi-sensual milieus inspired by Bollywood's sensorium are constitutive, the paper argues, of diasporic identity and community through their potential to evoke shared emotions and a sense of place and subjectivity, mediated by the qu...

In 2013, Derry~Londonderry became the inaugural UK City of Culture. Given tensions between national and unionist versions of history, the title generated considerable debate on the location of Derry~Londonderry's culture within a UK and/or Irish context. All this had implications for the character of Columba/Colmcille, who had been appropriated by competing secular and religious versions of history in the past and who featured prominently in the year-long celebrations. This essay explores the layering and cultural appropriation of the narrative of Columba/Colmcille over the centuries and the reshaping of this narrative in anticipation of the year of UK City of Culture. It contextualises the emergence of a fresh narrative in the new political context which seeks to redefine the city as a common heritage space for a previously divided people.

This article intervenes in contemporary debates on the nature of cosmopolitanism and the production of hybrid cultural forms by drawing on first and second hand ethnographic materials on tambor de crioula an Afro- Brazilian play form. Alternatively emphasizing local, global, and diasporic connections, I chronicle the travels of tambor from peasant villages to a first world metropolis, considering the practice's engagement in ethno- racial struggle, spiritual actualization, improvisational pedagogy, and "exotic" performance as markers of cosmopolitan city life. I argue that while postcolonial desire for Otherness shapes Western consumption of trans- national cultural goods, tambor offers resistant and rearticulatory forms of embodied emplacement and sociability that defy unidirectional interpretations.- [Keywords: Afro-Brazilian music and dance, play, roda, cosmopolitanism ,hybridity, postcolonial desire](ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.).. .To do justice to the perpetuation of difference and disjunction within affinity [intercultures], without, however, losing sight of the fact that the bonds which are created in these contexts can and often do have real force.- Jason Stanyek (2004:193)IntroductionAlmost two decades ago, Martin Stokes (1994:99) noted that the theme of cultural purity loomed large in scholarly assessments of music "out- of-place," reinforcing binarisms between folklore and "fakelore," real and "invented" traditions, and alienation and musical authenticity. Ten years later, the same author witnessed a dramatic shift in academic sensibilities vis-a-vis the place of the local and the global in the context of music pro- duction, distribution, and consumption. In the wake of ever-accelerating transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas, including the world mu- sic phenomenon, scholars seeking to understand contemporary changes in musical practices have attempted to mediate earlier, opposing views, particularly those of a materialist bent on the one hand, and an idealist nature on the other (Stokes 2004:48-51). Interestingly, Stokes (2004:60) claims, one of the results of new intellectual developments has been the reification of the trope of "hybridity" as a new form of authenticity within the context of some ethnomusicological writing. The author convincingly argues that this problematic view reinscribes simplistic oppositions at the same time that it erodes important distinctions, particularly between the hybridizing practices of the elites and those of the subaltern.In this article, I explore the specificities of this distinction and the ways in which it may point to similarities in strange places. I do so by exam- ining the processes of disarticulation and rearticulation (Stanyek 2004) embedded in a little studied Brazilian play-form known as tambor de cri- oula, or Black woman's drum, as it travels from South to North America. As I have discussed elsewhere (see, for example, Pravaz 2002, 2008a, 2008b), Afro-Brazilian performance art forms have been progressively appropriated by racialized discourses on Brazilianness that reify, carni- valize, and showcase Black "Others" while simultaneously placing them at the symbolic center of a mestica (racially and culturally mixed) iden- tity. Tambor de crioula is no exception in this regard, and certainly, the sociability enabled by tambor performances has been greatly affected by existing commodification processes that have transformed its cen- tripetal, community-oriented tendency. Nonetheless, by emphasizing politically and culturally resistant aspects of tambor both in Brazil and abroad, my central argument here is that popular musicians and danc- ers creatively resignify their practices in ways that challenge received understandings of cultural appropriation by ideological, market, and/or governmental forces alike, as well as by the transnational consumption of "exotic" performance art. The aim is to show how amateur and pro- fessional dancers and musicians who perform tambor de crioula both in Brazil and abroad engage in processes that resist the univocal meanings imposed upon their practices by broader, external powers. …