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Cultural Implications

A modern, commercialized Kokopelli figure

The construction of the Santa Fe Railroad in the 1880s brought about the rise of Southwestern Indigenous arts and crafts as commodities. This commodification was the result of the growing tourist industry in the Southwest and the appeal of directly purchasing artwork from Indigenous makers. Kokopelli represents these commercial facets of the Southwest, and his humpbacked, flute-playing figure can be found on a variety of merchandise and marketing products.

The commodification of Kokopelli represents cultural appropriation – a single element from a single Indigenous culture is appropriated and misrepresented to stand for an abundance of unique Indigenous nations, cultures, and identities. The cultural appropriation of the hyper-sexualized Kokopelli ties in with the practice of “othering” in the United States, in which the white hegemony romanticizes the pre-European contact “primitive other.” The 1900s saw a rise in this form of cultural appropriation. Also, in this process, the true cultural meaning and value of Kokopelli is lost, because it has been replaced by an Anglo-modified, distorted version of itself.

Scholars argue that on a sociological level, Kokopelli represents the tension between the civilized masculinity of Anglo-America and the primitive masculinity of the “other." In the process of “othering,” the primitive masculinity of Kokopelli is projected onto Indigenous males as a single entity and highlights sexual virility and immorality. The contemporary iconography of Kokopelli is that of a castrated flute-player, and with dismissal of pre-existing cultural connotations, his commercial abstraction represents the function of neo-colonialism in modern, Anglo-American society.