I think it's interesting how often in the history of culture that what have seemed perhaps at first to be errors of interpretation have later been seen to be kind of intuitions of a deeper structure. The questions of cultural appropriation and cancel culture were on my mind as I was writing this book because this is, you know, if you Google culture these days, most likely some of these terms will pop up. So here too, I think it's in a way I didn't just want to come down on some position in these contemporary debates, but to take a step back and to sort of gain an understanding of how culture works.
In an age where the line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation seems ever more blurred, can anyone actually own a culture? In this conversation acclaimed author and public intellectual Martin Puchner explains that the history of mankind has always been a story of borrowing from one another and that this is something to be celebrated, not lamented. The idea of ownership implicit in debates about cultural appropriation, he argues, presents an insular tale about how culture evolves — flattening out the complicated textures of human history and, in the end, what truly makes us us. Our host for this discussion is Edward Wilson Lee, fellow and lecturer at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge.
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