he explained: “I’m all about stealing everything. Steal everything from every culture. It’s all about what is tasteful. If it’s real and I found it—found objects are fine. That’s fine—if it’s not a performance like cosplay then I’m not into it because then you’re pretending to be something that you’re not. If it’s a real expression—like, fashion is real because fashion is an expression. But if it’s not and you just got it from some costume place, then it’s not cool. Then you’re just trying to dress up and become something you aren’t.” He explained that initially he had the idea to have a headdress burn barrel in front of the Appropriated Dragon targeting fashion models wearing headdresses on the playa—those who would strike a pose for Instagram in their warrior bonnet and declare, “I’m so free!”47
The Appropriated Dragon aims to be a “cultural exchange zone,” but the founders thought that educational materials asserting ethical standards on cultural appropriation would be too “heavy-handed.” Instead, Burners enter a Chinese pagoda space with a Chinese Buddhist altar and a placard above the broad staircase to the second floor that boasts the flags of multiple countries and mocks the idea of cultural appropriation with the tag line “From your culture to ours” (see figure 7). Like many performance pieces at Burning Man, the Appropriated Dragon is playing with and parodying a current cultural issue without indoctrinating participants into a specific moral code. It raises a question, provides an experience, and then leaves participants to have independent reactions.
However, there is a fundamental critique at the heart of Bacchus’s vision of the Appropriated Dragon. When I spoke with him, he was concerned with the end result of moralistic claims of cultural appropriation. He saw the debate as an authoritarianism of the Left, wherein the liberal Left circles back and conflates with the ideology of the conservative Right. He explained: “The Far Right is obsessed with purity, that we should only fuck white people, eat white food, restore white culture. It’s the same idea on the Far Left, with the debates on cultural appropriation. Both have a conviction of ethnic purity, that we should stay within the confines of our own culture—only fuck white people, not eat phố, not cross cultural boundaries. Fuck that. The Appropriated Dragon is a project challenging both of those discourses—attempting to challenge us to think differently.”48
7. “From Your Culture to Ours” sign, Appropriated Dragon Camp, Burning Man, 2017 (photo by author).
In contemporary American identity politics, the policers of cultural appropriation seem to maintain the ideal of authentic cultural essences that can be distilled, represented, and stolen. The notion of cultural appropriation reifies the boundaries of cultural insiders and outsiders and depends on the notion of cultural autonomy and even ethnic purity. As such, it risks causing harms of a similar kind of fascist essentialism to which critics are objecting.49
However, in society, there are some groups that are bounded, exclusive entities that forbid appropriation of their practices by outsiders. For example, impersonating a police officer, using a service animal if able-bodied, and taking on gay affect if straight are all understood to be cultural “wrongs” that violate boundaries of group membership. Violations have varying implications and consequences. For example, taking on a gay affect may be viewed as in poor taste, but impersonating a police officer is illegal. In Erich Matthes’s work, the perceived harm of cultural appropriation is that it “interacts with dominating systems so as to silence and speak for individuals who are already socially marginalized.”50 When whites adopt the religious and cultural forms of marginalized peoples, they occupy spaces of representation that people of color might otherwise hold. They also identify within the historical legacy of the looting of the global South that was justified by imperialism. Those who make a profession from such forms of representation also siphon away financial rewards that people of color might otherwise have earned. Socially, the move toward mimesis performs an impotent form of alliance that obfuscates other means of direct political action that would express solidarity with the forms of injustice and discrimination that racialized others suffer. In cases wherein people of color are discriminated against for representing their cultural forms while whites do so with impunity, religious exoticism becomes an embodied performance of white privilege.
WHITE BHAKTAS AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
In 2016, Carrie Grossman (Dayashila) was disrupted during her kīrtan performance at Brown University by protesters claiming that as a white woman singing kīrtans, she was wrongly appropriating elements of Hinduism.51 The protesters were mostly white and African American students who employed the moral policing strategies of the liberal Left to confront the kīrtan artist for her expression of white privilege and her exploitation of Indian Hindu religious forms. Similarly, in 2018, the Bhakti Yoga Club at American University was disbanded after a South Asian student levied an accusation of cultural appropriation. The club had invited a troupe of white Hare Krishnas to host an “India Day” festival and perform the Indian epic the Rāmāyana. The student who levied the accusation wrote: “The sponsors of this show and the artists acted as if their actions were acceptable because they have converted to the Hare Krishna sect of Hinduism. The reality of this is that white European dancers will never know my intersectional experience as a Hindu woman, being a brown bodied person and the other aspects of systematic racism that I, as well as other South Asian people, have experienced.”52 This is not the first time that the whiteness of the Hare Krishnas has been critiqued, particularly because the traditional branches of the religion encourage devotees to adopt Indic cultural dress and to proselytize in public spaces.53
Importantly, the critique of cultural appropriation is deeply informed by the context of multiculturalism, wherein identity depends on the performance of ethnic and cultural authenticity. Multiculturalism may be an important valorization of diversity, but it also problematically imagines cultures as coherent and uniform wholes to be presented and represented by their members, in what political theorist James Tully has explained as “a desire for cultural uniformity” and “a ‘billiard ball’ model of cultural diversity.”54 Along these same lines, Charles Taylor has famously argued that the politics of recognition inherent within multiculturalism “acquiesces in a stifling model of the nature of agency and its relationship to culture, or to ‘identity’ more generally.”55 Multiculturalism demands that minority groups perform authenticity and adhere to fixed standards of cultural, religious, and ethnic identity to be recognized as full subjects. This imagined fixity of autonomous, sovereign, and authentic identities demands culturally specific performances, and essentializes and even solidifies extant cultural stereotypes. In Prema Kurien’s phrasing, it is “a multiculturalism that demands a performance of authenticity.”56 This performance confines people of color to localized representations of cultural specificity, whereas whites are free to imagine themselves as universal, global citizens, with rights of property to all cultural and religious forms.
In contrast, in India, where Indian Hindus are the majority, whites performing and adopting Hindu beliefs and practices does not usually pose a significant problem for Indians.57 In popular Indian tourist centers, whites are sometimes disparaged by locals for their negative environmental impact, criminality, sexual lasciviousness, or participation in black markets, but their religiosity is rarely at the center of popular critique. In India, where Hindu religiosity is valued highly, even white bhaktas, if they are serious and devout, command respect from the general populace. One can see this in the veneration given to many of the swamīs and brahmacārīs of ISKCON—for example, Radhanath Swami, born Richard Slavin in Chicago, Illinois. Many Indian Hindus even take particular pride in their religion when they see foreigners attracted to it. In response to the protests against Dayashila at Brown University, Rajan Zed, the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, reflected such a view, arguing that the “color of the person should not matter in devotional singing and anybody should be able [to] pay respectful homage to Hindu deities through kīrtan or other forms.”58
