Until recently, we would not have even understood the meaning of these kinds of questions. But today, when the unstoppable globalization that homogenizes everything has sparked as a reaction the vindication of aggrieved indigenisms, no cultural debate is hotter and more delicate than that of cultural appropriation. This is understood as the assimilation and reinterpretation by a privileged culture of signifiers typical of discriminated cultures. But culture itself is appropriation and reinterpretation, whether of nature or other cultures. In this pertinent essay, Jens Balzer raises this complex debate, illustrating it with generational experiences and the contemporary history of light music, which will be familiar to any reader. If culture is essentially appropriation, the question is not whether the assimilation of foreign cultural motives is licit or not, but rather what forms of cultural appropriation are admissible because they are respectful and which are not because they are exploitative.
