Culture and Commodity: Understanding Appropriation

Most of us are content to blame racism for the prevalence of appropriation in our midst. And we should by no means downplay its significance in this matter; its existence is one of the reasons cultural appropriation is so dangerous. Racially motivated cultural appropriation perpetuates stereotypes and instils hate and misunderstanding - blackface is the prime example. But, if most appropriation that happened was explicitly racially motivated, there would not nearly be as much appropriation as we see. After all, wearing feather headdresses or sexy qipao halloween costumes has been thoroughly cracked down upon in comparison to the appropriation we still see. It's simply not that acceptable anymore. Most appropriation that occurs isn't explicitly racially motivated, or indeed, motivated at all. From what we see among our peers, most cultural appropriation is accidental, unintentional. So how does that happen?

Turns out, there is a fouler enemy using racism to deflect blame. In her essay, Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks famously wrote:

Within current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference. The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.

What I would like to draw special attention to here is this phrase: the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.

Most of us know white supremacy as the explicit belief that white people are better than other races, based in the idea that "races" exist at all (racial theory). But in reality, it goes quite a lot deeper than that. WS has created, and aims to perpetuate, a worldwide social system that regards whiteness as the 'default', and racial features as deviating from that default. This is the 'Otherness' Hooks describes in the above quote. This system is so thoroughly integrated into every aspect of our world, that nobody is free from this bias. You, reader, and me, and everybody we both know, have been conditioned from birth to be able to perceive whiteness, assess it, assimilate into it, and view it as the default way of existing. In order to accomplish this, white supremacy aims to destroy the existing cultures that various white peoples have, to homogenize them under the banner of 'white'. This is why so many white people truly believe that white people have no culture, and also why every time someone says that you should loudly protest.

But keen readers may think back to instances where white supremacists have stolen aspects of certain "white" cultures to justify their actions, like for example the fake Germanic spirituality of historic and contemporary Nazis. And if that was you, I applaud you! You have discovered exactly how this relates to the modern spiritual community.

Desire and Resistance: the History of Modern Witchcraft What we now know as the modern pagan or witchy community was built on the back of the very first community who were willing to call themselves pagans and witches: Wiccans. I have a longer form post detailing the origins of Wicca and its contribution to white supremacy, but in short, here is what you need to know.

Wicca was created in the 1950s by a con artist named Gerald Gardner. He based this new religion partially off of things he learned from various Western Esotericist groups, and partially off of the pseudoscientific Witch-cult hypothesis. This hypothesis claimed that, rather than it being already marginalized groups who were being persecuted during the European witch trials, it was actually a pan-European pagan religion oriented around fertility magic that had gone underground. Gardner claimed to have met some modern descendants and practitioners of this witch-cult religion, and to have been initiated into their tradition, which he called The Wica. This new movement was supposed to be an ancient, traditionally European religion. Later evolutions of Wicca furthered this agenda, using the Lord/Lady model as a soft-polytheistic way to combine all European paganisms into one, ready-made religion. Homogenization, anyone?

At the time of its creation, Wicca was an almost direct result of the growing resentment toward industrialism and Christianity in colonial Britain. The Victorians yearned for a deviation from what they perceived as the boring, straight-laced Christian culture, their default-ness, their bland means of existing. They craved indigeneity, ethnicity, the perceived 'ancient wisdom' of a fake pagan past - so they sought it by using culture, real or imagined, as a tool for personal satisfaction. And that sense of need, along with the commodification that it causes, has persisted into the modern day. It got more severe in with the advent of the counter-culture movements in the 60s and 70s, which is where we can trace some of the appropriation of Native American spirituality that we can still see today. And then came the internet, and what was originally a fairly structured community of Wiccan and New Age practitioners unintentionally started to mix and mistake ideas and ideologies, as well as import new ones. Today, the modern community of spiritual practitioners is deeply diverse, but conventional witchcraft maintains most of its core features from those early days. Indeed, the very act of calling yourself a witch at all, comes from Wicca. But more importantly, what was once a fringe new-religious movement has turned into one of the west's leading expressions of spirituality. Why? Because the desire for ethnicity has not faded, but only gotten stronger.

So thus armed with information, we return to bell hooks. "Mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference." Mass culture, in this context, is conventional witchcraft. Uncomfortable as it is for us to admit, over the last decades but especially since COVID, "witchcraft" has become a trend. The desire Hooks describes made this ready-made religion an easy way to deviate from the white mainstream, and a lack of resistance meant that those perpetuating this cycle couldn't and wouldn't be held accountable. The process of adopting magic into the mainstream could thus be boosted by extreme commodification, like the new idea that 'intention is everything', or the notion of 'universal substitutes', as well as quick and easy identity labels. All designed to make it as easy to swallow, practice, and make part of your identity as possible.

By being a "witch," by buying into the habit of setting yourself apart as those among the oppressed, the unconventional, the ancient or subversively traditional, one is acknowledging and enjoying the pleasure of racial difference, and perpetuating that idea. The desire to be a witch at all, is the desire to be racial. The desire to shed whiteness and embrace ethnicity. The desire to use Otherness as a spice, to season the dull dish that is what people perceive to be mainstream white culture.

And that is where we find the heart of appropriation in contemporary spiritual spaces. The appropriation we see is not that which is driven by hate or contempt, but ethnic envy. The compulsive draw towards all that which appears, to many, to deviate from what they perceive to be plain whiteness. Modern, conventional witchcraft, is often nothing but the perpetuation of a long-lived imperial tradition of cultural consumption, exoticization, and commodification that finds its roots in white supremacy. The appropriation that we see is not meant to mock, but to use culture and defiance as an escapist tool to satisfy a personal malcontent with the entrapment of a post-industrial, post-colonial world. White people's sense of self, sense of own, inherent culture, has been whipped to shreds by the vice of Christian imperialism and white supremacy. All that is left now for them is to take indigeneity from others and wear it as a costume. Right?

Race, Racialization, and the Cycle of Consumption

Wrong. Perhaps the most dangerous misconception of all, in this discussion, is that cultural appropriation only affects non-white people. It is that implicit notion - that white people have no culture, and therefore cannot be appropriated from, or alternatively that white people do not deserve their cultures to be preserved and therefore cannot be appropriated from - that has allowed this harm and envy to live so long in the first place. Appropriation itself has been racialized, perpetuating the cycle of desperate envy directed at anyone perceived as ethnic. It is no longer just racist ideals of mystique, freedom, and exoticism contained in indigeneity, it is also the fervent envy of the associated sense of home and its protection.

In actuality, the appropriation of various "white" cultures is a massive contributor to the problem. Wicca itself is the main perpetrator in our modern community, it's a case in point when it comes to homogenization. It viciously appropriated from various European (and non-European) cultures, misrepresenting them and stripping them of their identity, to create a false narrative of universal European indigeneity for people to subscribe to. It popularized this idea that European pagan religions are all more or less the same, that you can mix and match deities from various cultures and countries and worship them all the same according to a basic religious framework. It strips these cultures of their identity, their differences, their own inherent ethnicity - instead turning them into an easily commodified identity label. It thus turns the wheel of the cycle: Wicca itself became just another 'white people thing', a bland, mainstream piece of white culture that lacked seasoning and interest. We are seeing the effects currently: Wicca has fallen out of fashion, nobody is willing to self-identify as a Wiccan anymore, instead opting for such things as 'eclectic pagan' which in everything but name is the same thing.

The same thing will eventually happen to eclectic paganism, to witchcraft, to 'paganism' in general, and on and on it will go. The snake will continue to slowly devour its way up its tail for as long as we allow it to. Until we start cracking down on real, actual appropriation and homogenization hard, including when it happens to cultures you deem less ethnic, these "white" cultures will continue to phase out of the limelight as they lose their flavoring and are assimilated into mainstream, white supremacist culture - necessitating replacements, necessitating absorbing more cultures into the mainstream. Anything so the consumption at mach speed can continue.

Knowing that exoticism and the desire to participate in it is often a driving factor in people's unconscious motivation when it comes to magic and spirituality, explains why people keep unintentionally finding new ways to appropriate. Understanding that commodification is how this habit is perpetuated, explains why we want to simplify matters of appropriation down to false dichotomies like "closed" and "open" practices. It's all about how to maintain the appearance of cultural sensitivity, while taking the path of absolute least resistance. Symbolic change is easier than real ones. Staring at a list is easier than considering your personal motives.

Per bell hooks again:

Certainly from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the “primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.

False Hopes and Good Intentions

I certainly appreciate and acknowledge that people in the community have the very best of intentions. They truly believe, in most cases, that the approach they are taking by heeding lists of "closed practices" and policing other people is how they help, and that accidentally appropriating is all but par for the course when it comes to practicing magic. But we are not fighting an invisible enemy. Like many marginalized communities whose cultures are frequently appropriated have been saying for at least a decade now: "I didn't know" doesn't cut it anymore.

Our community is built on appropriation. Indeed it could be said that our entire community is fundamentally appropriative. Our founding fathers, as well as the very foundations our basic principles and common beliefs rest on, exist because of the appropriation of suffering that was never ours to claim, and cultures that we could not possibly belong to - either because they never existed, or because they did... only a thousand or more years ago. Our community is not about expressing a kind of spirituality that those who join already felt prior to their discovery of the community. If that were the case, theology, cosmology, philosophy and actual real life practice would take center stage. Magic is a trend, religion a token for identity politics. It is for that reason that people struggle to maintain a practice, that people fight for their lives to feel a connection to their supposed beliefs, that people spend more money on books by other practitioners than minutes considering the beliefs of those whose cultures they are invading into. And, indeed, it is for that reason that we simply can't help ourselves when it comes to appropriation.

We are constantly drawn to that which looks exotic to us, because all sense of novelty and individualism has been stripped from "white" cultures. To actually practice paganism, rather than a hyper-individualistic appropriation of it, you have to read archaeology books, historic accounts of folklore, ethnobotany. But nobody does that - including those who write the infotainment books geared toward practitioners. Instead, we appropriate from cultures we perceive as exotic, and when caught, we reframe our appropriations. They're not "chakras," they're energy centers. It's not "smudging," it's saining. Nevermind that "energy" as a modern concept is borrowed from Theosophy, which has its own racist and appropriative roots, and saining is a culturally distinct practice unique to Scotland - but that doesn't matter, because they're white people things. Or to take the example of masked appropriation even further: we may have started mocking the "we are the daughters of the witches you couldn't burn" nonsense, but the victim complex never left our midst: the "broom closet" as a way to co-opt the suffering of queer people who get no choice in their identity, when the physical expression of individualistic spirituality is absolutely a choice; the undying lie that pagans and witches are a monolith severely oppressed under Christianity, when in reality pagans and witches everywhere are not just free from systemic oppression, but actively contributing to it.

Some grow so hopeless with the entire notion of needing to respect culture that they reject culture altogether, or at least they think they do. Some take the route of trying to create their own traditions altogether, with no pre-established framework to operate off of. They are not free from the draw toward exoticism, quite the contrary: they are more likely to end up appropriating by cherrypicking features of spirituality they see others practice or from their foggy memory. Others attempt to combat appropriation by engaging in homogenization and sanitization. They strip their practice of words that have meaning altogether, thinking that just because they call it a "smoke cleanse" or "deity work" it cannot be cultural and thus cannot be appropriation. They live their lives woefully unaware of the fact that everything people do exists within the sphere of culture.

The point of all of these examples being: good intentions aren't good enough. We may not be able to undo the damage done by the commodification of ancient and indigenous spirituality, but we can shift the tides of social expectation and accountability. It is time to stop mistaking tolerance for progress, and by that token, it is time to stop tolerating the commodification of spirituality. It may have become one, but it should not be a trend. It should not be a way to soothe one's white guilt.

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In the next chapters in this series, I aim to discuss more ways the community perpetuates appropriation, cultural imperialism and racism, such as the closed/open culture dichotomy and other disinformation, as well as how to decolonize your own practice and motivations, how to recognize appropriation and combat it, and the value and role of culture in our lives and our community. When those parts are completed, they will be linked here, as well as in each individual chapter, and eventually a masterpost. I hope to see you in the next one.

Further Reading:

Climenhaga, L. (2012). Imagining the Witch: A Comparison between Fifteenth-Century Witches within Medieval Christian Thought and the Persecution of Jews and Heretics in the Middle Ages.

“The Dehumanization and Demonization of the Medieval Jews.” Medieval Antisemitism?, by François Soyer, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, 2019, pp. 45–66.

Simpson, Jacqueline (1994). Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why? Folklore, 105:1-2: 89-96.

Heselton, Philip (2003). Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration: An Investigation Into the Sources of Gardnerian Witchcraft. Capall Bann.

“From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualisation of Cultural Appropriation”. Communication Theory. Richard A. Rogers.