A successfully integrated society protects the social and legal rights of its diverse populations, and ensures that individuals and groups enjoy a fair and equitable distribution of cultural goods and services. Schools are busy; libraries thrive; artists’ studios buzz with activity; theatrical companies experiment with new plays while staging the classics; museums take a historical view without neglecting contemporary art. Such a state of well-being, crucial for a democratic polity, becomes increasingly important in an age of complex global transformations - a mobile world marked by the migration of peoples (forced or free); the construction of network societies across national frontiers and beyond regional borders; and the uses of new technologies for diverse, often conflicting, political, cultural and religious ends.
Today, cultural creativity emerges from such a crucible of complex conditions, and unsettles many of our assumptions about cultural value. A “national” culture, for instance, can no longer be considered the homogenizing terrain that sustains an unbroken and uninterrupted tradition of indigeneity. Members of multicultural or multiethnic communities (national or diasporic minorities) with different historical provenances relate to their cultural heritages in ways that are distinct and different. The more diverse the meaning and experience of Heritage in a multicultural community, the more important it is to preserve the singular value of any particular, local experience of a cultural tradition. Why protect the singular in the midst of diversity? In protecting the tangible and intangible heritage of any one culture, we preserve its living memory - its values, norms and aesthetic forms - and can study the way in which it participates in the multivocal and multivalent mosaic of meanings and customs that defines intercultural dialogues in our times. Keeping heritage alive as an archive of living memory, open to the past and the future, protects cultural traditions from becoming frozen in time, memorials to obsolescence and orthodoxy.
The dialogues of everyday life in a diverse global world draw on a range of cultural symbols and practices in order to create hybrid forms of arts, crafts, architecture, literature or cuisine. Hybridity reflects the evolving dynamics of creativity in plural societies. Hybridization does not weaken or dilute heritage or tradition, as is often claimed. What it reveals is that any cultural tradition has multiple lineages of influence and inference, opening it up to diverse interpretations and revisions which enhance its creative potential. Hybridity reveals the capacity that exists within a cultural heritage or tradition that enables it to affiliate with more universal values, and become compatible with ‘foreign’ cultures, traditions, peoples and countries. Likewise, the hybridity of tradition does not compromise the creative originality of a culture; it enhances the ability of an artist or a craftsman to find forms of expression and representation that resonate across different cultures, thereby expanding the scope and scale of communication and creativity.
In the context of cultural diversity, creativity is an expression of what lies at the intersection of values; it articulates the interdependent experience of diverse communities; and it creates a capacity for imaginative, empathic dialogue across diverse cultures. These qualities of creativity can be articulated in familiar modes of cultural expression; or they can be signified through new forms of media and technology like Facebook or Twitter. In either case, individuals and groups laying claim to their own cultural traditions must also be aware that what is indigenous is now also interdependent. A singular or ‘local’ assertion of cultural heritage, made in the context of diversity, is part of a larger framework of values, and a wider network of cultural creativity. And the advantage of the hybrid approach, with its emphasis on the intersection and interdependence of cultures, is that the ensuing dialogue amongst diverse groups or communities is free of any sense of cultural supremacy or sovereignty. Hybridity is the enemy of what is unequal and unfair.
Bearing all this in mind, it is important to see cultural goods as “commodities of a unique kind” that cannot merely be equated with consumer goods. Cultural goods bear the special signature of creativity: they emerge in contexts of social diversity, and take their place at the intersection of values; they refer to tradition and heritage, while establishing their interdependence with other cultural goods that exist “side-by-side” with them; and finally, cultural goods are interpretations of what is the best in the past and the present, and as such they are the unique visions of authors or artists, craftsmen and cusiniers. In formulating their cultural policies, States must recognize that if they treat cultural goods simply as consumer goods - commodifying and instrumentalizing their value - they will not merely pillage the creativity of the present, but will destroy the rich material that, in the passing of time, will become the heritage of the future.
Cultural policies as catalysts of creativity
read more...While ensuring the free circulation of ideas and works, cultural policies must create conditions conducive to the production and dissemination of diversified cultural goods and services through cultural industries that have the means to assert themselves at the local and global level.
It is for each State, with due regard to its international obligations, to define its cultural policy and to implement it through the means it considers fit, whether by operational support or appropriate regulations.