ABSTRACT
This chapter presents five arguments that may be made against the claim that 'outsiders' do something wrong when they 'appropriate' cultures. The first two arguments addresses the question of whether people can authentically perform or produce artworks that have their origin in a culture to which they do not belong. The third argument considers the claim that a culture can be contaminated. The fourth considers whether it makes sense to speak of cultural groups as the kind of group that might possess property, and the fifth considers whether social groups possess culture. Inauthenticity is a form of insincerity of expression: unfortunate, but hardly culture-destroying. The chapter also considers claims that such inauthenticity would contaminate cultural groups, and found them to be based on an unsupportable assumption that cultural groups were bounded and unchanging. Marilyn Strathern suggests that: The difficulty of identifying cultural ownership must include the fact that cultures are not discrete bodies; it is 'societies' that set up boundaries.
