1For several decades now, percussion groups marching to Brazilian rhythms have become a fixture of parades in France where they add a distinctively festive tone to public events. My first research into these practices, conducted in the 2000s as part of a PhD dissertation (2005-2013), focused on the musical exchanges involved: both the circulation of musical objects from Brazil to Europe and the circulation of people, mainly Europeans who were admirers of these practices and wished to “go back to the sources”. Among the different social and cultural issues raised by musical transmission in this context between Brazilians and foreigners, the idea of cultural appropriation discretely appeared here and there within idealized representations of Brazilian “soft power”, music and carnivals. The accusatory logic that underlies today’s use of the term was already noticeable. The purpose of this article is to revisit my ethnographic data and examine in the context of musical exchanges how the notion of cultural appropriation, marked by a binary logic with a strong essentialist tone, can shed light on complex cultural issues.
2In 2004, far from imagining the debates about the notion of cultural appropriation, that would later spread in the media and around the world, I went to Brazil to explore street percussion practices as performed during the carnivals of Salvador (Bahia) and Olinda (Pernambuco). Traveling with me was a group of a dozen French musicians who had been members with me in Nice of a batucada, an amateur Brazilian street percussion group. My fields of inquiry had previously been limited to self-managed and alternative community experiences in urban squats and cultural wastelands. In these spaces, I had discovered the instrumental practice of Brazilian repertoires favored at the time by militant and activist collectives because of their effectiveness in the public space due to their both offensive and festive sound. Our group’s references to Brazil were limited to musical vocabulary used during rehearsals, and they remained implicit during musical performances: we did not wave the Brazilian flag or sing in Portuguese. Listeners on the street, however, recognized the familiar rhythms of samba, a musical genre internationally identified as Brazilian. Although our batucada did not necessarily seek to define itself as a Brazilian musical group, after about ten years of practice, its members felt the desire to go to Brazil, following the path of many other batucadas who have developed throughout France since the late 1990s and today represent a new type of popular musical society along the model of previous orphéons, harmonies and fanfares (Vaillant 2005).
- 1 Generally used by South Americans to designate North Americans, the term is now extended to all for (...)
3I had come to Brazil with the desire to observe the local musical scene, but I was struck by the abundance of foreign amateur bands. Like me, they had come to expand their knowledge of Brazilian culture and music. By engaging in intuitive participant observation and musical immersion, their more specific aim was to refine their repertoire, correct musical errors, witness the social contexts in which this percussion music had emerged, meet musicians, and establish relationships with them (musical and/or friendly). Once back in France, they were hoping to gain in legitimacy by capitalizing on the experience of a return to the music’s sources. The benefits were expected to be even greater considering that the trip was taking place off the beaten tourist track. However, I was clearly dealing with a basic situation of cultural tourism, and all of us –foreign tourists, musicians, or anthropologists– involuntarily and uncomfortably formed a “white” delegation belonging to the dominant class: the gringo1 class.
4Within the batucada I had joined, the idea of cultural appropriation floated through conversations in the form of self-deprecating humor, poking fun at the clumsy, ignorant gringos we were, engaged in an impossible quest for legitimacy. The first trip of the Nice batucada marked a milestone in the group’s life: the relatively low-income members had been able to finance what I call their “return to the sources” by playing at various events. The trip therefore followed the group’s more intense activity and, in a way, confirmed its success and access to a higher level of musical performance achieved notably during a period of training with Brazilian musicians from Salvador, pioneers of batucada formations across France. This meeting was precisely the motivation for the trip to Salvador de Bahia. Thus, my work on the Brazilian field was carried out alongside a French amateur group daily engaged in percussion workshops. Our teachers shared with us the musical repertoire of their original bloco, Ilê Aiyê, that belonged to an important Afro-Brazilian social and political movement in the city of Salvador, already described at the time by Michel Agier (2000). The Black demands at the origin of this bloco, somewhere between négritude and pan-Africanism, led its representatives at one time to refuse whites or “mulattos” in their percussion group (Agier 2000: 108, Vianna 2008: 140). Because of previous ties, my French comrades and I managed in 2004 to obtain percussion lessons from Ilê Aiyê students and musicians, albeit completely unofficially, in a poor outlying neighborhood of Salvador where Afro-Brazilian militancy was far from predominant. This experience of transmission proved to be potentially conflictual between our teachers and the more legitimate representatives of Ilê Aiyê, since our teachers were sharing Ilê Aiyê music with a batucada of white Frenchmen, in exchange for money, and this without the approval of the group’s leadership and against certain of its principles. This led me to define the contours of my topic of study: tensions between, on the one hand, universalist claims to free access to culture combined with a consumerist, “free exchange” position, which expects this access to be negotiable and paid, and on the other hand, a position of cultural protection of forms and content, exclusive use, and affective and political attachment to these cultural objects, themselves inseparable from their social context.
- 2 About reindigenization, I also studied Occitan-Brazilian compositions and groups (Vaillant 2013).
- 3 La batucada des gringos: appropriations européennes de pratiques musicales brésiliennes (The gringo (...)
- 4 Using the vocabulary of the digital economy, philosopher Norman Ajari points out the distinction be (...)
5It was my first concrete encounter with the notion of cultural appropriation, which, in the field, was not yet given that name. I observed voluntarist and reflexive “appropriationist” positions regarding the musical process which included learning, absorbing, reinterpreting and even re-indigenizing exogenous cultural forms.2 Thus, cultural appropriation did not always have a pejorative connotation. Nicia Ribas d’Avila, a Brazilian musician particularly active in introducing batucada music in France in the 1980s, reacted strongly when she read the title of my dissertation in 2013.3 In her opinion, the term “appropriation” was ill-suited to the musical context in general: when French bands learn a Brazilian tune and then play it back in France, they are not preventing any Brazilian band from continuing to play that music. The distinction between tangible and intangible goods4 was obvious to Nicia, herself a musician and music teacher who was sharing her knowledge without restraint.
- 5 “Abuso das tradições” according to a witness in Recife in 2008.
6But the reality of cultural appropriation phenomena was already no longer a matter of debate in Salvador de Bahia in the early 2000s: militant Afro-Brazilian groups already considered these processes offensive or at the least toxic for their communities. Barriers to musical transmission to whites and foreigners had already been set up explicitly. In Recife, where cultural and musical tourism was at the start of an expansion associated with the growing worldwide appeal of Pernambuco music, I observed and recorded the debates that arose between musicians, cultural stakeholders, and politicians around issues of appropriation: its identification, its naming, and the implementation of defensive or opportunistic strategies depending on whether it was considered dangerous or a source of development. Witnesses, exclusively Brazilian, shared with me the feelings they sometimes had of being robbed when interacting with musical tourists, and specific cases of “abuse”5 by the latter in the consumption of local traditions. Without intention of making intellectual excuses for ordinary appropriation practices, I found it relevant to study what for me remained unexplored: what might motivate members of the dominant group to engage in these practices, and how they attempt to justify, criticize, or deny them. My field of inquiry was filled with an infinite number of distinctions, albeit initially binary (Brazilians/French, Blacks/Whites, Americans/Europeans, natives/tourists, teachers/consumers), that accumulated and intersected with class, race, gender, nationality, migration, aesthetic, and political position, and so on. From a perspective that could be described as intersectional, I sought to highlight the specific characteristics of appropriation situations depending on whether the individuals belonged to the dominant or the dominated group. In several case studies of the appropriation of Brazilian music in Europe (mainly in France and Finland), I identified national and regional characteristics of these musical appropriations. And more or less unexpectedly, this led me to observe the fragile cultural condition of Europeans for whom the appropriation of exotic cultures coincides with the stifling of popular cultures discredited by institutions (in France) or, on the contrary, institutionalized as part of local folklore (in Finland), but also with attempts to reappropriate these cultures (Vaillant 2013).
- 6 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are original.
- 7 In the same way, although races do not exist from a biological point of view, racism is no less rea (...)
7When the notion of cultural appropriation took on an accusatory tone, it caused an uproar, including in the French social sciences. In her very concise article, Monique Jeudy-Ballini claimed that it was an accusation without an object, because “culture does not own anything”, thus “it cannot be appropriated”.6 This should have closed the debate: if culture is not clearly and originally identifiable and reifiable, which many anthropologists are constantly working to demonstrate, cultural appropriation cannot be a reality.7 However, following the cultural turn of the 1970s, the political and social value of culture has been growing steadily on the local scale, and its commodification on the global scale has increased its economic value. The trend to re-emphasize traditional, indigenous cultures, identified as ethnic, communitarian and political, has resulted in their growing visibility and has given them an attractive, desirable “authenticity” that seems to meet a renewed demand for cultural consumption. The controversy surrounding the notion of appropriation belongs to this historical context of greater visibility of minorities, and greater presence in the public and media of inferiorized people and words.
- 8 Thomas Conti in William (2021: 37).
- 9 “Cultural appropriation as a process of displacing peoples and history” in The Canadian Journal of (...)
- 10 Religious dignitary of the Afro-Brazilian candomblé religion.
8According to Thomas Conti (2017),8 the expression was officially theorized in 1990 by Hartmut Lutz9 as a type of appropriation quite distinct from voluntary forms of cultural interaction and exchange: cultural appropriation is produced within a colonial structure, a system of political and economic domination, where “one culture governs and exploits another culture.” Norman Ajari (2022), for his part, identifies English artist and art historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith as the first to theorize the concept in the 1960s, defining “cultural colonialism” as the monopolization of culture by the dominant classes. Placing the phenomenon of cultural appropriation in a context of colonial domination and tracing a history of the notion among Black anti-colonial thinkers, Ajari describes it as the “conscious attempt to incorporate and appropriate within European culture all the diversity of world cultures and history.” According to him, cultural appropriation lies at the very foundation of Europe’s formation and dominant position, or it is at least the cornerstone of its colonial culture. For Rodney William, Brazilian anthropologist and Babalorixa,10 cultural appropriation “reflects a racist structure that denies access and visibility to inferiorized groups, encourages the silencing or erasure of their cultural manifestations by devaluing and draining the meaning from important elements of their traditions and finally, most seriously, compromises the existence and life of minority social groups” (2021: 75).
9As for myself, I define cultural appropriation as the attribution of new properties to a cultural object, that include its transformation, redefinition, and re-introduction in a new socio-cultural context. The racist dimension of the colonial system is indeed an ideal breeding ground for cultural appropriation. The colonial relationship of domination justifies one group’s arrogance in gaining access to a cultural object belonging to an inferior group with the aim of subjugating it for its specific needs. An anthropology of cultural appropriation must not only define the historical and sociological context of this relationship of domination, but also study the history of the object itself –identified as stemming from cultural traditions– and the formal manifestation of its displacement from its original social universe, i.e. how the object has been transformed. An ethnographic study then allows us to record, through interviews, how this displacement and transformation is experienced, felt, and interpreted. Is it considered a detachment or a dispossession? An alteration or deviation? An adaptation or a loss of meaning? What William describes as the silencing or erasure of cultural manifestations seems paradoxically to give rise to a new, exogenous visibility and a new value based on monetary criteria. Appropriated cultural objects become desirable outside the community considered to be the legitimate owners, while the latter remain assigned to a disparaged, inferior social group. This pragmatic dissociation between the cultural object and its social context does not directly lead to the destruction or marginalization of the object (even though these phenomena have also occurred in the colonial context and have sometimes been at the origin of the appropriation we are dealing with here) but rather prolongs the subordination of this object to the dominant group, as if it could only exist with dignity through this new redistribution of value. The notion of cultural appropriation is therefore not limited to the phenomenon of displacement from one cultural space to another and of detachment from its social environment, but it extends to the alienation of the cultural object itself. It raises questions about the alienability of culture, or its supposed inalienability, and what would represent the integrity of a cultural manifestation in its original context.
- 11 Without, however, seeking an extension of the scope of cultural property in the form of exclusive r (...)
10Finally, the debate seems to center on the underlying question of cultural ownership that opposes universalist and accusatory positions. For Monique Jeudy-Ballini, “the expression ‘cultural appropriation’ assimilates a culture to property whose members hold exclusive rights over elements denied free access to outsiders” (2022: 16). For Norman Ajari, cultural appropriation itself transforms non-marketed, non-competitive cultural goods into property that is transferable, profitable, negotiable, consumable, i.e., property that can be appropriated: appropriation itself therefore grants these criteria that define “ownership” to objects that initially did not have them. The universalist position defends freedom of access to culture, without condition or exclusivity, while the accusatory stance defends cultural integrity, the possibility of existence outside globalized free-market transactions, and denounces the profits gained from appropriation, from which the legitimate owners are largely excluded.11
11As a musical practice that draws references from Brazilian music, batucada is part of a Western trend of ostentatious openness to diversity (Fridman and Ollivier 2004). This cultural demand, as expressed notably by many European batucadas, reflects what is perceived in Europe as openness to the world. As part of a global attraction for cosmopolitanism, exoticism, and cultural primitivism, French batucadas have multiplied in response to an eclectic public’s desire for otherness, and their music has joined the nebula of “world music”. As a musical and commercial category that divides the West from the rest of the world, “world music” in the 2000s became a showcase for discourses on cultural diversity, métissage (approximate English translation: miscegenation) and even “democracy”, which was expected to be partly guaranteed by acquiring this cultural diversity. Métissage was for a time the hallmark of the globalized world and a ubiquitous reference in the French culture industry. Built on biological and racial foundations, the notion of métissage, by spreading to the cultural field came to be valued as a fusion of cultures and an infinite, inescapable mixture that arises from globalization. Despite the intention to express a form of anti-essentialism, the “métis” logic retains references to borders and maintains the implicit idea of reified differences, while at the same time denying these differences (Bonniol 2011). The ambivalence of the notion of métissage can be seen in the cultural promotion of cultural diversity, always under the guarantee of universalism.
12From the 1980s onwards, participation in a batucada group in Europe became an ordinary pastime that belonged to this globalized musical culture marked by universalism and attracted by exoticism. It was practiced in a non-communitarian spirit and was therefore not exclusive to Brazilians. Although many Brazilians have contributed to the expansion of the European batucada phenomenon, most batucada members are not Brazilian. When considering the practice itself, social hierarchies can be established between the proponents of an approximate form rather than a “purist” form, an imitative batucada or a creative batucada, a batucada with Brazilians or a batucada without Brazilians, and so on. Variations in classification and distinction can therefore be found between “groups” mainly based on their musical and aesthetic orientations. When considering the individuals involved, the batucadas bring together many “dissonant” cultural profiles (Lahire 2006), and the nature of these dissonances can also be different within the same group because of their relative social diversity.
13Both the individuals and their batucada groups hold discourses that legitimize appropriation. One form of legitimization that is highly visible in the world of batucadas is the assumption that music in general is a universal language. The globalized batucada has become a musical genre with its own rules, independent of its Brazilian origins. The formal appropriation of batucada music in France, for example, was part of the more global trend followed by amateur musical societies, community associations and militant initiatives of playing music within the public and political space of demonstrations.
14This universalist approach created a dissociation from the original Brazilian music and its appropriated form, and even the negation of a direct link between the two, as seen here in the words of a leader:
In fact, for me, batuc isn’t a Brazilian thing; it’s percussion. There’s nothing Brazilian about it for me. It turns out that the instruments come from Brazil but… no, not even, they don’t come from Brazil; it’s a disassembled drum kit, that’s all. It’s a human drum kit. That’s how I see batuc. Obviously, we play Sergio Mendes music; we play afoxê, all these pieces of music that come from a distant culture, that are festive, effective pieces of music. (Toulouse, 2009)
15The musical references cited here are standards of the appropriated repertoire of European batucadas. The witness seems to give batucada practice a primarily functional role and to grant a universal character to this musical object, detached from its Brazilian origins.
16According to another perspective, these rhythms are recognized as belonging to Brazilian culture, but they can precisely become one’s own and be “appropriated” through an ordinary process of learning and practice:
What interests me is that the music should circulate […] so we don’t just do anything we want with other people’s culture either, because it’s really a form of respect that you should have when you take hold of something that doesn’t belong to you in the first place. […] I look at it from the public’s point of view. If there are Brazilians who say “hey, I recognize my music; it’s well played; it makes me happy; it’s an honor” or else […] “oh boy, they’ve butchered my culture.” That’s the only reason. Afterwards, of course […] this music really belongs to us […].” (Female Batucada leader, Marseilles, 2008)
17This perspective shared by many groups, nurtures a contradictory imaginary, as Denis-Constant Martin expresses it, in which the Other is the owner of his or her culture, but mediatized access to the Other’s music and the development of its distribution seem to justify its foreign appropriation. By ascribing a “traditional” status to borrowed rhythms, it becomes possible to consider that they are not the work of any one individual (which is not necessarily the case) and can therefore more easily be appropriated. Reference to tradition also erases the stylistic differences developed by the models and produces a canonical conception of cultural authority: culture itself seems to be the author of the music, and the music becomes a cultural metonymy.
18In contrast, some batucadas have chosen to devote themselves to specific styles, identified and claimed to be Brazilian. This position of reproduction is based on a close relationship with the models, a relationship experienced by a few members of the group –sometimes even by only one of them who becomes the authority– and is appropriated by the rest of the group. The aim in this case is to produce a cultural expression that is as close as possible to the models, through the collective, often orthodox, reproduction of a genre, style, and form. The groups involved in this approach are Brazilianist, in the sense that they claim affiliation with the Brazilian model and strive to play “like they play it there.” Band members may also engage in a process of voluntary acculturation that can be observed in an extensive accumulation (Bromberger 1998), in addition to musical instruments, of decorative elements featuring Brazilian flags, carnival costumes, and an abundant discography (CDs, hard disks, LPs) ranging from international Brazilian hits to small regional productions, both general (all genres of Brazilian music) and specialized (samba schools, afro blocos, maracatu, etc.). Accumulation of encyclopedic knowledge is also one of the aspects of this position. The approach of faithful reproduction of the model requires in-depth knowledge of the musical phenomenon: ownership of a generalist, bilingual library on Brazil and its music, technical knowledge of the instruments played (construction, tuning), and precise musicological knowledge of the appropriated genre. This approach requires choosing a genre and fully devoting one’s musical practice to it, at least for a few years. Amateurs become passionate. Learning Portuguese can be part of the process, or at least enough of the language needed to play the music and participate in activities shared with the group, including regular trips to Brazil, which have become an essential feature of the orthodox position. The players here are not interested in simply replicating a new musical and choreographic behavior that they have observed and learned, but in paying homage to the model, showing unwavering respect for the model, and sometimes engaging in a rhetoric of authenticity.
- 12 Samba style based on a theme, performed by samba schools during carnival.
- 13 For example, the last samba-enredo I collected, in July 2012, was written for a gathering of batuca (...)
- 14 La Java bleue is a song produced in 1938 with lyrics by Géo Koger and Noël Renard, and music by Vin (...)
- 15 This group from Lyon shared the song and waltz rhythm variation with musicians of the Vila Isabel s (...)
- 16 A pagode is a subgenre of samba that is informally sung and shared around a table.
- 17 In 2012, the group Viagem Samba based in Arles experimented with batucada as accompaniment for a ba (...)
19The rhetoric of authenticity is also part of a position that can be described as “localist”, which was particularly manifest with the introduction of singing which had been absent in the early days of the batucada phenomenon in France. The appropriation of Brazilian songs, for example, corresponds to the appropriation of a style of writing in Brazilianist groups. Most of them, organized as samba schools, nowadays compose samba-enredos12 on a regular basis and sometimes establish a link between the authenticity of Brazilian music and the authenticity of local European music: while the songs express their love of Brazil and samba, they usually also make reference to their own country, region, town or neighborhood.13 Less frequently, batucada music can serve as the basis for new versions of French songs considered by the performers to be representative of France. One example is Cri de la Bat’, a group from Lyon who in 2006 arranged the song La Java Bleue14 on a waltz rhythm with orchestration by the bateria.15 Other groups known for their subversive parodies and imitations have developed their repertoire by drawing on the French tradition of exoticism. This is the case for the Parisian group ENS Batucada that decided to recreate a pagode16 from exoticizing French songs of the 50s and 60s, and the Montpellier-based Petites Frappes that gathered attempts to imitate or evoke sambas in French popular music. This localist position can go as far as finding inspiration in regional repertoires, showing a passion for “traditions”, and considering as valuable anything typical, different, authentic, and unique (Bromberger and Chevallier 2004: 11). The groups Grail’Oli in Languedoc and the Compagnie X in Provence are good examples. In the 2010s, they confirmed their taste for “domestic exoticism” by appropriating popular repertoires in the Oc language. This type of adaptation by localist groups can allow them to distinguish themselves from the “basic” imitation of Brazilianists: by giving the music a fresh face, the appropriation seems to escape from its relationship to the model. In this case, the borrowed, imitated, and appropriated cultural object is re-shaped with new criteria of authenticity derived from the new cultural expression. Finally, other groups have developed original adaptations with the postmodern perspective of mixing genres (Lahire 2006).17
20Music remains an area where the tension remains strong between faithfulness to the original and individual or collective interpretation. This opposition is very much in evidence within batucada groups: “We’ll never play like Brazilians” is a statement frequently heard in amateur and even professional circles. The dialectical tension is even more intense when the artistic object is associated with the national tradition of samba (“being Brazilian”), for example, or with the political tradition of samba reggae (“being Black”), or with the religious tradition of maracatu (“being part of the community”) and is performed in public.
21Postures of appropriation can thus range from strict imitation (in extremely rare cases) to total creation, always inspired by a Brazilian instrumental and rhythmic base. In each case, the process of cultural appropriation and artistic creation go hand in hand. The main challenge for those involved in this appropriation process remains the endless, if not impossible, quest for legitimacy. The relationship of domination implicit in cultural appropriation paradoxically generates an acute feeling of lacking cultural legitimacy when handling these Brazilian musical objects.
22Musical appropriation by batucada amateurs goes through several stages before taking the form of a concrete experience of interaction with Brazilians. In addition to the percussion lessons regularly taken in their home region, the batucadas share a discography that circulates within the associations and helps amateurs to gradually become “masters in the aesthetics” of Brazilian music in the broadest sense. In addition to these ordinary and repeated modes of appropriation, amateurs attend workshops, usually in groups, led by professional percussionists from Brazil, France, or other countries. The instructor may be hired by a network of associations or may be the organizer of the workshop (sometimes working through a producer). These instructors then travel within France and other European countries and disseminate a repertoire shared by all the groups. The result is the appearance of batucada standards, new pieces of music and new influences, sometimes from Brazil. Musical influences develop within each style (for example, funk in Rio de Janeiro samba, ternary rhythms in Salvador samba-reggae or the mango beat in Recife maracatu). Some groups specialize in a particular musical style, while others adapt to public demand and follow trends while striving to distinguish themselves from other batucadas. Standardized patterns spread throughout France, causing amateurs from the 1990s onwards to strive for greater musical excellence.
23The search for a distinctive style and musical excellence then leads musicians to travel to the Brazilian sources of batucada music. After the first “explorations” by international professionals of Brazilian music in the early 20th century (Fléchet 2013) and then by the pioneers of music tourism in the 1960s (Raout 2009), amateur groups also began to organize group trips in the 1980s for musical training in Brazil. For many of my witnesses, the project of going to the sources even though they already had a certain proficiency in music and technique, was considered the best way of “understanding”, rather than learning, what they were playing, as a German informant in Recife explained to me. The visitors deliberately sought to avoid the environments tailored to tourists and the places or even neighborhoods where they would be confined to their social status, i.e., their gringo identity. Many of the witnesses we met locally refused to be considered “rich” on the pretext of their French nationality, or even their white skin. The musicians engaged in music tourism, both amateurs and professionals, clearly did not come from particularly wealthy social classes. Nevertheless, most could afford to buy a plane ticket, some every year, others after saving up for two or three years. A musician from Bordeaux who regularly travels to Brazil mainly for musical reasons and then shares with his French bands the musical models he has collected there, wondered how to reconcile the authenticity of his approach with his status as a tourist:
We come here to take things and sometimes I feel really bad about it. I come here and a beggar asks me for a coin. I refuse as a rule because otherwise I know I wouldn’t make it. […] I don’t even know where I stand on this. […] In the end, I take information that’s here, I bring it over there and I sell it, and there’s a guy who asks me for 50 centavos and I don’t give it to him. Right now, for me, I feel caught in a trap; I don’t know how to deal with it; it’s a philosophical question but I don’t know how… I tell myself that my condition isn’t as bad as some tourists who show up and behave horribly. In the end, being an average tourist here is like saying “we come, we pay, we take advantage of what the Brazilians give us, and we leave, and we don’t do anything with it over there” except fill our heads with tales of our travel; maybe it’s easier. (Olinda, 2008)
24This musician was not the only one to ask ethical questions about “taking” and importing Brazilian music to France. All the witnesses we met in Brazil could not, even back then, ignore the impact of the huge attraction for Brazilian popular music: touristification, commodification and extension of the phenomenon of appropriation of cultural expressions increasingly marked by their identity and locality. In line with the modes of appropriation in foreign countries described above, the paths of Brazilian music tourism are now well-trodden despite endless attempts to differentiate styles and search for new workshops, new “masters”, and new rhythmic territories. After Carioca samba-enredo, foreign dissemination and appropriation gradually followed the paths of authenticity (Vaillant 2009) extending to Afro-Bahian samba and then Pernambuco maracatu.
25José Jorge de Carvalho was one of the first Brazilian researchers to study the appropriation of traditional Afro-Brazilian music by both the “West” and Brazil’s urban middle classes. He uses the term “fetishization” (Carvalho, 2002a) –in reference to Tagg (1989)– of cultural goods and defines it as the commodification of cultural objects precisely because of their intangible value and their capacity to adapt to middle-class demands for exoticism. Thus, they are shaped in such a way as to become more easily appropriated, notably through processes of depoliticization or desacralization, in line with Norman Ajari’s idea of a “disintegration” of cultures. Carvalho denounces the appropriation of other people’s folk traditions as cannibalization (Carvalho 2003), in which the cultural object is consumed by the dominant ideology while fully integrating this ideology. For him, it is obvious that the phenomenon of cannibalization is caused by a lack of diversity in the West (Carvalho 2002(a): 10) and that it encourages the production of fetishized cultural objects, reduced to a stereotypical demand for exoticism. He mentions as an example the Western dissemination of Afro-Brazilian music, which when appropriated is mainly associated with ideas of celebration, of the body, and of spontaneity, and which evacuates the historical, political, and social force previously communicated by these forms of music. Thus, he claims, once appropriated by Europeans, the music forms of America’s poorest peoples (slaves and indigenous peoples) logically lose their function as a counter-power or resistance to colonization, Christianization, and capitalism. For him, cannibalization is unable to fully compensate for this lack of diversity because it maintains the illusion of communication and cross-cultural encounters between “natives” and “gringos”. According to Carvalho, communication between classes and races in this type of cultural contact is only an illusion, because the relationship remains fundamentally unfair. For him, the cannibalization of Brazilian popular cultures is a self-serving, unequal encounter between the circulation of a traditional, post-slavery oral music and the circulation of a Western urban music, marked by a social, geographical, and symbolic distance between sender and receiver. The depoliticization or desacralization of music means that the community loses the power it has over its music, and the music loses the power it has over the community. For example, the circulation and appropriation of a sacred song outside the society that produces it would in fact prove that there is nothing sacred about it, insofar as no sacred property survives outside a frame of reference, rules and what defines the contours of the sacred. The quilombos are another example. These spaces of resistance and expression of negritude are starting to be included in tourist circuits and may thereby lose their memorial function of survival and resistance. The question is how and to what extent the musical heritage of the Afro-Brazilian world, born of the slaves’ ongoing strategy of cultural survival between resistance and assimilation (Fryer 2000), can be appropriated and lose its political content. Carvalho considers the contemporary process of cannibalization “a perverse synchronization between the commercialization of exotic performance and decolonization or cultural resistance” (Carvalho 2003: 6).
26Brazilian transmitters pass on their musical knowledge and technical skills to foreigners, as well as the meaning of their music. They do not all have the same attitude toward foreign demand or the content transmitted. These musicians, whether amateur or professional, are sometimes regarded by their peers as defectors, and find themselves at the heart of conflicts. They contribute to the existence of contact zones, described by Mary Louise Pratt (1992) as “spaces where peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992: 6). Some act as cultural intermediaries between tourists on musical trips and Brazil’s poor communities, who rarely meet. They sometimes take on the role of protecting communities and preserving their traditions, while developing their career by means of this intermediary position. Others see tourism as a multi-faceted resource and find an interest in disseminating Brazilian music, of which they see themselves as the rightful owners.
27Claudinho is a Carioca. He has played in several prestigious samba schools, directed instrumental sections and, at the time of the interview, was leading the bateria of the Paraìso Do Tuiti samba school in the São Cristovão district. A few weeks before Carnaval, in 2007, I observed him holding a samba-enredo workshop with a group from the Paris region. Samba, now a type of music that belongs to the “globalized world”, combines universal properties with specific Black and African features. Claudinho, who is familiar with performances by foreigners in Rio de Janeiro, compares Brazilian and French musical performances:
Brazilians who go to France and hear a samba batucada there, will recognize samba except that it’s French samba, not typically Brazilian samba. That’s the difference. A Brazilian playing is one thing; a Frenchman playing is something else. […] Just because the guy isn’t Brazilian doesn’t mean he can’t play samba. He can play it. Only, he’s not a legitimate sambist. The difference must be this legitimacy. That’s French samba, and this is legitimate Brazilian samba. Anyway, samba is samba, and anyone can play it. (Rio, 2007)
28His universalist position –anyone can play samba– closely follows a fundamentally culturalist discourse. There is no doubt in his mind that French groups are copies of the Carioca model. The quality of the copy does not change the fact that, for Claudinho, the Brazilian samba schools are unquestionably the best musically. In principle, foreigners are welcome to discover, learn and enjoy samba in Rio, but they will not become legitimate sambists. To play well, a musician would necessarily have to be Brazilian. In his case, feelings of usurpation and pride do not seem to be in conflict, but rather to coexist when faced with the phenomenon of foreign demand for music. Samba, both a national pride and an internationally recognized style, can be passed on to foreigners “without any problem” since in any case “they will never play it as well as we do, who have it in our blood,” Claudinho tells me.
29The Pernambuco transmitters are no strangers to the paradoxes of cultural appropriation, which can be both galvanizing and alienating. The musicians we spoke to were enthusiastic about the maracatu’s recent international success, while claiming in the same breath that musicality is strongly determined by the social and cultural environment. As in Rio, discourses that essentialized musical competence were frequent in situations of transmission to foreigners. When hearing the performance of a French batucada, a Brazilian witness confided: “It’s a gringo sound; it’s not the same as ours; it’s bad,” using the word gringo as a disparaging term characteristic of a certain way of playing Brazilian music. Apparently not everything can be transmitted. For reasons tied to their “blood”, “native culture”, “skin”, etc., but also because of a conscious choice. Placing limits on the transmission of a cultural expression can also be the means of preserving it or negotiating one’s role as a transmitter without betraying one’s community. Some transmitters make the most of the situation by posing as official and legitimate intermediaries of cultural appropriation. While criticizing the global phenomenon, they try to define the modalities locally in a power struggle with tourists. Jorge grew up near a candomblé terreiro in Recife, and says he was exposed early on to the sound of atabaques, samba school surdos and maracatu drums. In the 1990s, he became a music teacher and has held musical workshops for foreigners in several European and American countries, but also in Brazil during the tourist season. He received a formal music education, while remaining connected to the musical traditions he was seeped in from his childhood. Jorge criticizes the fact that some musicians pass on their knowledge without any financial compensation for themselves or their maracatus. He explicitly refers to the need to establish a balance of power by raising the awareness of Recife’s musicians and imposing the principle that transmission to “first-world” populations should not be free of charge. Yet at the same time, Jorge speaks of the authenticity that underpins foreign demand and considers his students and trainees privileged individuals: “Knowledge can be transmitted. To those who deserve it” … and to those who pay a fair price for the service and are fully aware of the quality and value of the content transmitted.
30Younger, more disadvantaged transmitters see this influx of tourists as a potential “way out” of their social condition and their country. It also gives them a new way of looking at their own popular culture.
31In these situations of transmission between legitimate owners and tourists in search of authenticity, an essentialist conception of identity can also be found on the European side (Poutignat and Streiff-Fenart 1995): Brazilian musicians are seen as representatives of their culture and not as artists in their own right (Décoret-Ahiha 2004: 159). Some cultural tourists also develop racialist discourses to reinforce their own musical legitimacy. This sometimes leads them to reduce the Brazilian transmitter’s obvious musical skills to a “musical nature” which according to them cannot be shared. This discourse is fairly representative of the spaces of music appropriation characterized by power relations between musical culture and musical nature. The symbolic violence of the situation lies in the power struggle between two forms of cultural capital: one that is objectified and acquired (technique), and the other that is incorporated or even innate (musicality). The transmission situation is paradoxical: the transmitter considers that “not everything can be learned,” while French musicians want to learn what they consider to be a skill not consciously acquired but assimilated through a process of socialization.
32The balance of power with respect to musical skills and the relations of domination it reveals, are fully interwoven with a survival of the racist and colonial imaginary as already observed by Timothée Jobert in the context of athletic performance, in his book Champions Noirs, racisme blanc. La métropole et les sportifs noirs en contexte colonial (1901-1944) (2006) (Black champions, white racism: Metropolitan France and black athletes in a colonial context (1901-1944)). Even though in our situation no explicit reference is made to Black and White or to irreducible skills linked to “race” or genetics, the pattern of opposition remains the same. The same mechanism of symbolic reversal is applied to Brazilian music, and by extension “Black” music. Here, cultural appropriation takes the form of pedagogical interference presented as a situation of give-and-take. The Europeans come to “take”, but they also position themselves as those who come to “give”. The relationship of domination was evident in the words of a Frenchman who claimed with no qualms to have found the solution for dealing with musicians from different social classes who refused to collaborate: money. When colonial domination cannot measure up to the cultural legitimacy and symbolic power of those who “belong”, money remains the ultimate recourse, even against the gods who cannot resist it. The “cross-cultural” pedagogical project can then be experienced as follows:
- 18 Lifestyle of the malandro. Malandragem evokes both the cunning of the low-class thug and the elegan (...)
We had “the one-who-plays-like-no-one-else-will-ever-play” and next to him, the bridge between him and us. The one who plays only plays or repeats these little sequences, these little things, this malandragem,18 this little trick, and the other is there to say, the left hand is there, on this fourth double etc. […] So when you leave the room, you don’t play like the other guy, that’s not true, but when you leave the room, you’ve understood. We add the scores; we add the possibility I asked for right away, the authorization to film. You go home with the actual material to improve, the actual material. The experience, the score, the image, and the exercise filmed like this on the fingers. For me, that’s a learning experience. (Recife, 2008)
33Learning becomes a means of legitimizing the practice of appropriation, and an advantage over the legitimate owner. As analyzed by Julie Boukobza in the field of foreign professional Oriental dancers in Cairo (2009), it is a legitimate European attribute “superior” to the supposedly “natural legitimacy of natives” (Boukobza 2009: 213-213). A process of musical acculturation of popular music seems to be involved, against a backdrop of power relations between cultural legitimacy and natural –even supernatural– legitimacy, which is nonetheless corruptible due to the social condition of Brazilian musicians. Relationships of domination can therefore be openly revealed through situations of cultural appropriation. In Recife, for example, several members of the cultural scene told me at the time that they felt their culture was being plundered by foreigners, a category that can include non-Brazilians, southern Brazilians, and also middle-class whites from downtown Recife. They do not feel “plundered” in a strict sense but feel that recordings should be paid services in addition to the lessons. One transmitter told me of several situations where “thieves” insidiously recorded or wrote down the music, without asking permission, by hiding or concealing the recording devices. Dishonesty is experienced as deliberate domination:
They have an interest in learning about the other person's culture. And as soon as they know the other person's culture, which is very rich, they already see this knowledge as something to capitalize on. […] They know where they come from; they know it very well. They know how first world they are, how much training they have, and they use that awareness to manipulate the third world. […] There are people who use that awareness to get into less developed countries and take. (Recife, 2006)
34The notions of appropriation and expropriation presuppose the idea of ownership. Ownership can be defined as the right to use, enjoy, and dispose of something, but in an exclusive and absolute manner, which justifies the establishment, delimitation, and transmission of rights over it. In music, questions of artistic property and the authority behind it are inseparable from those of the technical reproduction of pieces of music and their distribution. Copyrights and authors’ rights (the laws governing intellectual and artistic property) confirm the understanding that music is both a cultural and a commercial commodity. While in the case of traditional music “some consider ‘works’ to be in the public domain […] and others prefer to attribute them to identifiable creators” (Guillebaud, Stoichita, Mallet 2010: 6), in the appropriation of Brazilian popular music by foreigners, these two views are mixed. The boundaries between the public domain and identifiable creators are sometimes blurred, notably in the case of musical traditions that combine an identified composer, a musical genre in which it was composed, and the cultural expression of a community. Individual composers may have a different relationship with their authority as a creator and with their authorship, especially in a musical tradition that honors the ancestors and the transmission of their heritage, and in which the author does not necessarily precede the work. In the case of batucada and its many musical appropriations around the world, the issues raised by the Recife musicians are not apparently limited to questions of copyright infringement or the financial gain that thieves may make from their booty on the backs of the original owners. Worldwide appropriation sparks debate locally about what is or should remain “specific” to this or that community, “race” or religion. The phenomenon of cultural appropriation is denounced to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the degree of economic inequality, colonial past, conflict, and domination between the cultural groups concerned. As a result, French people may feel more legitimate in appropriating Brazilian music than traditional music from former French colonies or communities on French soil, of which other French people consider themselves the “natural” owners because of their cultural history or their family. For the French and Finns studied in my research, Brazil provided a certain “comfortable otherness” to those who enjoy living traditions, by providing a pool of popular music available to the international community via cultural tourism (Hennion 2010: 42-43).
35Patrimonialization institutions, such as Unesco and its Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, base their arguments on the preservation of cultural diversity (Unesco 2002) and establish their inventories on the presupposed existence of a legitimate status of cultural owner granted to “communities”, if possible “indigenous” (Unesco 2003). The Unesco convention is silent on cases of cultural appropriation between two groups. In the case of the dissemination of batucada and Brazilian musical folklore or “popular traditions”, it is now clear that these traditions are not in the process of disappearing but, on the contrary, in a process of global dissemination and appropriation, as Etienne Bours points out when speaking about “contemporary traditional music”:
The opening of the market in all directions is not an immediate threat to these different types of music, but rather a benefit, because it allows music lovers to find them. Music forms are not in danger because they are more widely distributed. However, they are undergoing changes in function and status, changes that had already been imposed on them. (Bours 2007: 18)
36Yet, this is precisely what raises questions for some of Brazil’s rightful owners, who feel that their culture is not in danger of disappearing but is nevertheless being cannibalized and fetishized without their knowledge by dominant socio-economic groups. Legislators have already attempted to address the issue by defining the crime of cultural appropriation as:
Unauthorized borrowing by a member of a given, usually dominant, culture of modes of expression, literary or visual styles, symbolism, themes, or know-how of any kind, usually associated with a culture, most often dominated, other than the person’s own. (Gaudreault-Desbiens 1998)
- 19 “In short, the stereotype which operates similarly to image hijacking, dislocates indigenous realit (...)
37The effects of cultural appropriation described along with this definition correspond to Carvalho’s concept of fetishization. Acts of cultural appropriation contribute to the creation of imitations, stereotypes, and clichés, which diminish and impose changes on dominated cultures. This could harm the groups involved, by reducing their “access to political and economic power,” “reinforcing negative perceptions” or simply encouraging their exoticization.19 This attempt at a legal definition of cultural appropriation originates from minority or minoritized groups in the context of movements for the defense of “indigenous peoples”. It raises a number of anthropological problems. First, it reifies cultures and assigns them to human groups. Second, it invents the concept of an authorization to borrow from traditional cultures and implies that this authorization can be requested from an identifiable and circumscribed group. This approach thus recognizes that intangible cultural assets have traditional rightful owners. However, imposing laws of this kind may obscure –and condone– possible internal conflicts within a given community by aggravating disputes over the legitimacy of representation and the definition of cultural authenticity (Vaillant 2013).
- 20 Paul Simon excels in the art of cultural appropriation for his own benefit, as can be seen with his (...)
- 21 BMG holds the rights to all the “icons of samba history” (Pelo Telefone de Donga, Carinhoso de Pixi (...)
38José Jorge de Carvalho’s critique of cultural appropriation places the debate on a macrosocial scale, in terms of the broad sharing of access to the culture of the Other. On a smaller scale, he gives concrete examples of the commercial exploitation of popular traditions: internationally renowned artists hijacking symbols of cultural resistance (the example of Paul Simon with the Bahian group Olodum);20 or the five major global corporations that hold the rights (ownership and reproduction) to the most famous repertoires of Brazilian music.21 Thus, the entertainment and leisure industry is the main target of these demonstrations. But can the batucada phenomenon in France be limited to a mere leisure activity, to exotic consumption or even to cannibalistic appropriation by a society that has lost its purpose? Batucada performers and amateurs are not appropriating this music from a cultural vacuum –I prefer to think of it as a rupture– and, for some, are trying to invent and create a shared culture. Attraction to the popular cultures of others cannot be limited to cultural consumption of the exotic, but can also take the form of voluntary acculturation, an expression of respect and recognition of the social history of the owner groups, as in the orthodox and imitative appropriations of certain bands.
39Additionally, the batucada musical phenomenon, which is in a relatively dominated position in France compared to other musical genres, is far removed from artistic elites nor does it for the most part attract the economic interest of the French cultural industry. Dance, music, and song have already long deserted the realm of ritual to become entertainment (Weber 1983: 642), but batucada seemed to be precisely the way for my witnesses to dance, play and sing outside the classic circuits of cultural consumption. The main issue in debate remains the asymmetrical relationship in the act of appropriation, and not the appropriation itself. Openness to diversity and the patrimonialization of this diversity contribute to create contradictory imaginaries of globalization (Martin 2002), which are very present in the context of musical exchanges.
- 22 Raout 2009: 176, about the djembe in West Africa and Europe.
40Some would like to consider batucada and its derivatives (samba schools, afro blocos, maracatu groups) as a musical heritage “now shared.”22 And yet, as we have seen, the question of profits and beneficiaries is still debated in the field. In these exchanges, two parts of the world meet, play music together but still oppose each other: the North and the South, White and Black, the old continent and the new world, the west and the rest of the world. On the one hand, financial power, on the other, coveted cultural wealth.
41While batucada amateurs work tirelessly to gain musical legitimacy, achieve a form of cultural authenticity, and establish sincere and honest relations with their Brazilian transmitters, the fact remains that they participate in asymmetrical exchanges, primarily from an economic point of view. Ideally, authentic music should be music that cannot be bought (Warnier 1994: 18). However, for foreigners in Brazil, money remains the main means of “exchange”, as this Brazilian transmitter puts it simply: “I give to you; you pay; it’s an exchange, an open game” (Recife, 2008). An open game that explicitly sets out the terms of exchange: culture for money. Mercantile alienation stems from the fact that monetary value is not equivalent to cultural value. How much money can compensate for cultural appropriation? A fairer distribution of the income generated by cultural tourism and musical exchanges with foreigners is obviously desirable. But would it truly preserve the coveted cultures from the supposed disintegration of their purpose, dispossession of their uniqueness, and dilution of their symbolic efficacy denounced by the accusatory logic (William 2019)? Finally, protectionist postures aiming to “save cultures” are also at odds with the reality of musical circulation: the global appeal and the participation of tourists is increasingly becoming a guarantee of survival for local cultural events. However, while some Brazilian musicians have managed to achieve international success, and Brazilian communities have renewed their repertoire through contact with foreigners, the pragmatic situations of local transmission and appropriation largely confirm the structural racism underlying globalized cultural appropriation.
- 23 Suggesting a certain obsession with origins and generating an essentialization or even racializatio (...)
42The localist adaptation described above caught my attention notably in that it concretely examines the drivers and needs that may motivate the appropriation of exogenous cultures. For Jean Baudrillard, the taste for what is old can be explained by the fact that the object has been freed from the stigma of industrial production, which allows its purchasers to increase their symbolic capital and find an ancestry (Baudrillard 1972: 28-29). Does this apply to Europe’s taste for the exotic? Is it also a search for objects freed from Western stigma? Does their acquisition allow us to seek out a “different culture” that has escaped uniformity, modernity, rationality, and disenchantment? The appropriation of exotic cultural objects, whether tangible or intangible, is not a recent phenomenon. However, the democratization of culture and the growth of distribution and acquisition channels since the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the development of new ways of relating to culture, characterized by individual choice. Cultural consumption today is the result of the spread of a free-market view of culture, in which individuals seem to choose their cultural environment. This form of utopianism is also embedded in social games of distinction according to Pierre Bourdieu and expresses a rejection of all that is finite in oneself, or the refusal to be confined to a specific place in social space.23 Paradoxically, alongside the rejection of an imposed culture, there is a growing attraction to “authentic traditions” and an essentialist conception of culture that seeks to preserve them from all outside influence. Music remains an ideal environment in which to observe the complex relationships that play out between imitation and creation, between consumption and commitment, between individuals and the aspects of “culture” imposed on them or chosen by them. Batucada raises these questions from the more specific angle of tradition, orality and a form of dissemination that does not follow mainstream routes. The appropriated object is exotic and seems to meet the needs of receiving countries (Warnier 1994: 28). Cultural appropriation also reveals a specific relationship to culture in “first world” countries. Much more than a cultural transfer, batucada seems to resonate with a “feeling of lost authenticity” (Garrabé 2011: 125), a feeling generated by the real or supposed disappearance of local traditions. This malaise in the culture, to use James Clifford’s expression, could be felt during interviews in which witnesses explicitly described their practice as a substitute. A musician from Lille, member of a reggae samba band in Marseille, said:
There’s a party with Brazilians, who’s going to liven things up? The Brazilians. If Africans are there, who’s going to sing? The Africans. Us, I don’t know why, besides Au Clair de la lune, we don’t know any songs (laughs); well, I don’t know if you have the same impression… I think we’re poor! I don’t know where our musical culture is; we need to steal it from somewhere else… Maybe because we don’t have any… […] The songs, you get the impression that they’ve always heard them since they were little; they come into the room; they sit around a table; other people come in and everyone plays along with the same songs. […] Compared to what I want to hear and sing, it’s not part of my culture; I don’t know. (Marseille, 2009)
43We note the use of “us” referring to “we, the French today” as opposed to “Brazilians” or “Africans”. In this excerpt, which is highly representative of several conversations with Europeans, complex links can be observed between taste, heritage, and popular culture. This witness from Marseilles was talking about his amateur musical practice, but more broadly about his repertoire of songs.
- 24 Suggesting a certain obsession with origins and generating an essentialization or even racializatio (...)
44The idea that the first world could fill a cultural void by appropriating the cultures of others runs through many anthropological studies dealing with the consumption of exotic aspects and the search for authentic ones.24 Researchers at the Frankfurt School have linked the idea of a loss of meaning with the headlong rush into cultural pastiche (Warnier 1994: 28). Baudrillard also suggests the possibility of a “lack” as the driving force behind the demand for authenticity (1972). These abstract notions of loss, lack and emptiness are used more than ever by witnesses of batucada in France, members of musical societies (Molle 2008), regionalist musicians (Cestor 2004) and also by some transmitters who view the appropriation of their musical heritage as a way for others to “fill themselves up” (Garrabé 2011: 125). Batucada amateurs confided in me that they had no “popular culture”, and that they were playing Brazilian percussion to satisfy a practical and elementary need for a culture they can share. The ideal of a cross-cultural exchange, free from financial considerations, seems unreachable: what else could they exchange besides money? What aspects of their own culture could they offer to achieve a fair cultural exchange? Many of the foreign witnesses in Brazil told me of this inability to share aspects of their own popular culture. Transmission is one-sided. This musical asymmetry is obvious to everyone: “We Brazilians transmit much more, that’s clear” (Recife, 2008), much more than what foreigners share of their culture, and always much more than money can buy. The endless quest for legitimacy and the impossible material or symbolic compensation for cultural appropriation seem to create distinctions between “authentic” cultures and “appropriated” cultures. This thirst for culture observed in the field is inevitably intertwined with the world’s colonial history: the colonial exploitation of natural, human, and material resources is extended here to the extractivism of the last intangible resources that still represent community and humanity. The viral, capitalist, and accumulative dimensions of cultural appropriation raise anthropological questions about the possibility of future cultural existence outside the market, patrimonialization, or art. It also raises questions for Europeans about the colonizing and colonized aspects of their own popular cultures.
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