I’m an Art Therapist. Am I Guilty of Cultural Appropriation?

I work as an art therapist at a hospital, where I invited a group of patients to participate in an exercise based on the practices of several Indigenous American cultures. I led participants on a guided mindfulness journey to find their spirit animals. Afterward, we discussed the meanings of their animals, and patients drew pictures of them and put them on a totem pole. We discussed the internal individual experience and the group experience. The patients seemed to get a lot out of the session. But I am a white male, and one patient questioned whether it was appropriate for me to do this exercise. She claimed that it was an example of “cultural appropriation.” Is she right? Name Withheld

When anthropologists, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, referred to “spirit animals” — as James Frazer did in “The Golden Bough” — they were as likely to be referring to practices in the South Pacific as in the Americas. There are animal spirit-beings associated with descent groups all around the world, including in Oceanic, Asian and African cultures, and they embody various roles: guides, taboos, helpful familiars, powers to be appeased. (The particular Asante clan to which my father belonged had an animal spirit-being, the West African buffalo.) The prevalence of such spirit-beings was one reason Emile Durkheim thought — wrongly, in my view — that what he called totemism was the earliest form of religion. Then certain New Age writers, who tend to assign a hazily homogenized worldview to the many hundreds of Indigenous North American groups, adopted the term as a Native catchall. And so we have handbooks on “how to connect with your animal spirit guide” alongside manuals for using kabbalah to “make your dreams come true” and I Ching for “business strategizing.” Is it wrong to be, er, Zen about this?

Your dissenting patient assumed — as you did — that what you were up to closely resembled the practices of specific Native groups. I wonder about that. When the pedigree of a practice is prized, we overplay claims to ancestral resemblances. Yet change is a cultural constant. “Chutney,” to take a homely example, was a word long used in South Asia for certain kinds of pickled foods. Then the British arrived, with their sweet tooths and their orchard-fruit confitures, and an interesting, world-spanning syncretism arose. I’m not saying that New Age notions of “spirit animals” are a sacralized version of sweet pear chutney. But such practices often conceal what’s modern about them with spurious claims to represent some timelessly “authentic” tradition. You may be borrowing far less than you imagine.

There’s a further wrinkle here. Suppose you took the idea that we have spirit animals not as a fable or a custom but as a fact about the world. The dissenting patient assumed that spirit animals were folklore; you, for all I know, may accept their agency as a truth claim. And when it comes to such claims, talk of appropriation isn’t appropriate.

But then the very concept of “cultural appropriation” is misbegotten. As I’ve previously argued, it wrongly casts cultural practices as something like corporate intellectual property, an issue of ownership. Where there’s a real cause for offense, it usually involves not a property crime but something else: disrespect for other peoples. Now, whatever the source of your ideas, you were using them reverently as a form of therapy. For you, I suspect, nothing could be more respectful than that.

The effort to draw and police boundaries around our cultural practices is, in the end, a mug’s game. I’m reminded of the basketball player Jeremy Lin’s response, a few years ago, when a Black N.B.A. elder reproached him for wearing locs. Lin slyly defended his dissed dreads by explaining that they — just like the other man’s Chinese tattoos — should be viewed not as cultural appropriation but as cultural appreciation.

The District of Columbia announced that masks are required for all indoor settings. But the leaders of the company I work for, which is located there, have decided that masks will still not be required in our open-plan office. They say that our desks are spaced at least six feet apart, that we have HEPA-grade air purifiers and that wearing a mask for eight hours a day would be onerous and uncomfortable. This seems to flout public-health and safety guidance.

I am not going to the office in person, but merely knowing the policy makes me feel complicit. What is my ethical obligation to report my workplace to a federal or local agency for these violations of Covid-19 protocols? Name Withheld

Washington, D.C., reintroduced the indoor-masking mandate after new guidance from the C.D.C. amid the spread of infection driven by the Delta variant. The mandate has a cogent rationale; your company’s scofflaw managers aren’t merely behaving irresponsibly toward their employees and their families (including unvaccinated children) but are weakening a norm. Their claims about the work space don’t change the situation. We aren’t entitled to ignore speed limits on the grounds that we’re especially fine drivers. Thinking that a regulation isn’t appropriate to you doesn’t give you the right to ignore it.

Nor am I impressed by the other reason your company has offered — that wearing a mask is “onerous and uncomfortable.” Spending days struggling for breath, being intubated in an intensive-care unit, even dying: Those things are onerous. For most folks, a face covering is not. People around the country have been doing their part by wearing masks all day. Compliance with public-health mandates is important, as we work to get Covid-19 under control and reduce its assaults on our bodies, our minds and our economy.

You’re right to want the company to mend its ways. That may not be easy. The mayor’s order suggests that primary responsibility for compliance lies with individuals. Every office worker not wearing a mask could, in principle, be fined up to $1,000. Because these employees have evidently been encouraged not to comply with the order, however, singling them out would seem unfair. Still, the order also threatens the suspension or revocation of licenses, which might be more of a disincentive for the company than this fine. So go ahead and report your workplace to the relevant authorities. This may or may not lead to any action on their part, and it’s unclear how vigorously the order is being enforced. Even a simple visit from a city official, though, could encourage your bosses to do the right thing.

If you’re able to talk with your supervisors without fear of reprisal, you should also consider pointing out the legal risks that they might be incurring: A company that flouted the order could be more vulnerable to a lawsuit brought by an employee who contracted Covid-19 than a company that sought to comply with the reasonable measures that your municipality has called for. In any case, I wish you luck. Some of those in the office will, I expect, already be wearing masks, simply because they are prudent about their own health and decently attentive to the risks they might be imposing on others. It would be good if they had company.

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. His books include “Cosmopolitanism,” “The Honor Code” and “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.” To submit a query: Send an email to [email protected]; or send mail to The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. (Include a daytime phone number.)