Cultural Appropriation In Pop Culture

The argument of cultural appropriation has always been a huge topic, particularly with the rise of social media. The debate is strongly portrayed in pop culture such as animations, games, movies, fashion and art. The portrayal of cultural appropriation in these different platforms usually happen through language, music, clothing, and appearance. Given an example of a animated Disney movie “Moana” released in 2016, it tells the story of adventurous pacific islander which is the chief’s daughter, who sets sail to save her people. "Moana" has been labelled as cultural thief because it is said to be borrowing stories from the culture of Polynesia and exploits it for profit. So Is it true that Disney has made Cultural Appropriation in "Moana" ?

According to studies, the progress of making "Moana", the producer and his members study by

Appropriation in the world of music refers to adopting different aspects of music tone into their style, and the use of theme, clothing, accessory and etc in the music videos. It is often used without any real understanding of the original culture or the meanings behind these activities (Bruce & Pratima, 1997). These artefacts and musical tones are used and covered into pop-culture turning its meaning into something completely different from their predecessors. According to Dr Young, there are types of appropriation and some of them can be intangible like music. Music is one of the example that can be labelled as “Content appropriation”. For example a musician sang a song from another culture can be content appropriation (Young, O, J, 2008). It is an idea of using someone’s cultural element like clothing, accessory ,tone, music or words from their language, without the permission of the people from that culture (Scafidi, 2005). There are various traditional music have adopted into the style of western pop music, many argue this is an act of appropriating and it is harmful to the people from the