Via Charlie Loyd’s excellent newsletter, some different perspectives on cultural appropriation.

Tangentially, I was watching Elementary, and it did a horrible anthropological fail. One of the characters who was part of the investigation they were doing in this particular episode owned an ISP of some kind, and he said, “We’ve just picked up New Zealand.” Cut to a piece of sculpture which anyone at all familiar with NZ native art would know had nothing whatsoever to do with New Zealand.

It wasn’t even close; even the colours were ones that are never used here. Perhaps Pacific Northwest, but I’m no anthropologist. And I thought, how hard is it to get something like that right? Have an intern spend 30 seconds on Google Images. Don’t just fish some random tribal-looking sculpture out of the props department and pretend it’s from New Zealand because that’s what it says in the script.