Last weekend, the world was exposed to one of the biggest music festivals of the year in Los Angeles: Coachella. The festival exploits celebrity culture and has become known to host cultural appropriation as a result of the people in attentendence wanting to look 'cool'.
By definition, cultural appropriation is the use of practices from one culture by someone of another culture. In basic terms, it means using another cultures language, clothing, symbols and ideals as a fashion statement, without paying the respect due to the origins. This becomes problematic when the more dominant group recieves praise for 'creating' trends which already existed or when they are glamorized for traits that were previously alienated in society.
On the surface, 'borrowing' from other cultures can appear to be a positive step in a globalized world where everything is shared and accepted. However, it goes deeper than that. By using elements of a culture that don't belong to you, without a proper understanding of the background, one can perpetrate harmful stereotypes of a group of people. It shares a limited insight into a culture which many would then ignorantly assume as the only aspect of said culture. Stereotypes are used in order to imitate a group of people, and proof of this is common around Halloween time, where cultures are made into costumes.
It also makes it socially acceptable for people enjoy the positive aspects of a culture whilst remaining ignorant to the plights of those who they originally belong. For example, tattoos written in Arabic were a trend whilst a lot of people who had them were not of Arabic ethnicity and ignored the injust situacion in the Middle East. It shows that one doesn't have to respect a person to take things from them.
Popular trends from Coachella inlude the bindi. This is traditionally a red dot between the eyebrows, which has religious representations for those practising Hinduism. Not so long ago, for a South Asian women to wear a bindi out of the house in Western countries, she would most likely experience a great deal of discrimination. But in the modern day, it has been turned into a fashion accessory, acceptable for people of another culture to wear without feeling the same alienation.
In a time of such political unrest and instability all over the world,it's more iportant than ever that there is an upstanding respect between the general public for each other and our traditions.
