December 2005 ˇ Anthropology News
27
V I E W S O N P O L I C Y
ALEXANDER A BAUER
U PENNSYLVANIA
The adoption of the UNESCO
Convention on the Protection and
Promotion of the Diversity of
Cultural and Artistic Expressions in
October and its earlier counterpart,
the 2003 Convention on the
Safeguarding of the Intangible
Cultural Heritage, reflect increasing
international anxiety about globalization
and its effect on cultural diversity.
Cultural policymakers have been
restless in discussing the preservation
of "traditional" ways of life and
expressions, understood as threatened
by an encroaching Western culture,
and the West's appropriation
and deconstruction of "traditional"
cultural forms within the emergence
of global genres, such as "fusion" cuisine
and "world" music, popular with
the consumer market.
As these anxieties grow and spur
new regulatory instruments and
regimes, it is important to ask
whether cultural groups should
control the flow of cultural expressions.
And is it possible to ever really
do so anyhow?
As an anthropologist, I have my
doubts about the wisdom of developing
policy around essentialized
notions of "culture" and its specific
expressions, however "traditional"
they may be. An anthropological
view of culture as fluid, multivalent
and continually re-enacted by its
constituent and evolving social
groups is difficult to reconcile with
the fixed and bounded notion commonly
required for executing law
and policy. The recent cultural diversity
convention's attempt to define
cultural content for regulation and
protection in fact embodies the very
tension and worries at the heart of
regulatory regimes aimed at controlling
cultural flow. While there may
be strategic reasons for using fixed
notions to assert cultural rights, there
is an underlying concern that delimiting
culture in this way will
inevitably commodify or fossilize it.
From Property to Heritage
Over the past 35 years, UNESCO has
responded to issues of cultural
exploitation and destruction with an
impressive series of conventions,
declarations and recommendations,
which, though different in terms of
law, have had similar effects in practice,
primarily to call attention to a
global problem and shape the practices
of those who might make a difference.
The clearest example of just
such an effect accompanied the
enactment of the 1970 Convention
on the Means of Prohibiting and
Preventing the Illicit Import, Export
and Transfer of Ownership of
Cultural Property, an effort to stem
the looting of archaeological sites
caused in large measure by a rapidly
expanding global marketplace for
cultural items. At the time of the convention,
several important university
museums, including the University
of Pennsylvania Museum and the
Harvard University Art Museums,
conformed to the new ethical standard
by agreeing not to buy antiquities
without a clear and documented
history of ownership.
Theoveremphasisoncultural"tangibles"
like artifacts and monuments
and Western meanings of alienability
and ownership embedded in the
term "cultural property" soon raised
concern. As a result, debate about cultural
productions shifted, and "cultural
heritage" became the preferred
term. At the same time, intellectual
property (IP) law was increasingly
seen as unable to sufficiently secure
the rights of groups seeking to protect
their traditional knowledge and cultural
expressions from exploitation
and appropriation. It was pointed out
that things like copyrights and
patents in IP were designed to protect
original works of individual creators
rather than communally-practiced
"traditional" expressions. Furthermore,
IP only grants rights to persons
for a limited time, with the ultimate
purpose of enriching the public
domain, the opposite goal of groups
seeking to protect their traditional
knowledge. In many people's eyes, IP
regimes, which treat knowledge and
creative expressions as alienable commodities--and
regard "folk" traditions
as being in the public domain
already--actually served corporations
in appropriating and commodifying
traditional knowledge against the
interests of its practitioners.
In response to the expanding
scope of such cultural preservation
problems, the term "cultural heritage"
was thought to better
acknowledge "intangible" traditions
such as music, folklore and dance.
Deeming these traditions, considered
more common in non-Industrialized
countries, as worthy of protection
too provided them with their fair
share of the benefits resulting from
UNESCO designations and other
structures of the heritage industry.
Moreover, the new term served to
highlight the beliefs, practices and
values of cultural content that give
meaning to both tangibles and
intangibles in the lived experience of
individuals and communities.
Counting Meaning
But while the move from "cultural
property" to "cultural heritage"
seemed to be an attempt to construe
meaningful cultural content more
broadly, there remained the problem
of dealing with it in a regulatory way.
The 2003 convention requires that
states draw up lists enumerating precisely
what their important intangible
heritage is, and develop management
programs for their preservation.
Along the way, this often
means deciding who can and cannot
claim to be cultural practitioners, and
which particular variation of a practice
will be codified as the "authentic"
one. Thus these newest UNESCO
instruments present a paradox in
that they require defining and documenting
cultural expressions and
products by adopting the very frameworks
of objectification and commodification
these international
efforts supposedly have been developed
to oppose.
The institutional angst over how
to define and thus regulate cultural
content in the convention on cultural
diversity is palpable and obvious:
included among the definitions enumerated
in Article 4 are separate
entries for "cultural content"
(defined as "the symbolic meaning,
artistic dimension and cultural values
that originate from or express
cultural identities"), "cultural expressions"
(which "result from the creativity
of individuals, groups and
societies and that have cultural content"),
"cultural activities, goods and
services" (which "embody cultural
expressions"), and "cultural industries"
(those which "produce cultural
goods and services"). That such definitional
murkiness (not to mention
circularity) is tolerated reveals that
the cultural domain itself remains illdefined
in the intergovernmental
regulatory sphere.
Conspicuously absent from this
list of terms is "cultural heritage."
This could be because the convention
is considered a complement to
the 2003 convention on intangible
heritage. But it may also be an intentional
move away from the obvious
political overtones of heritage discourse
with strategically deployed
language about equitably regulating
Definitional Anxieties the flow of cultural content
that is, on the surface at
least, value-free.
Securing Market Share
It is true that the multiple entries
enumerated in Article 4 include fluid
concepts such as "cultural content"
and "cultural expressions" that seem
to open the space for the interests
and practices of "traditional," minority
and other intra- and transnational
communities, but in practice,
these groups are largely cut out of the
convention's framework. Article 14,
aimed at sustainable development in
developing countries, encourages
support only for formalized cultural
industries, thus encouraging some
degree of appropriation and commodification
of cultural expressions,
even if only on the level of statebased
industries.
Moreover, by institutionalizing the
"cultural exception" assertion that
there is something more than the
market, this convention both secures
market share for specific cultural
expressions and promotes a definition
of cultural content as a mobile,
extractable resource, at once alienable,
appropriable, mimetic and commodifiable.
Lurking all the while
behind such claims are both national
interests discovering the economic
opportunities offered by local cultural
expressions and the private and corporate
interests of cultural industries
in controlling the expansion of, and
access to, IP rights and the public
domain. Thus, offered as an alternative
to IP regimes, these recent efforts
replicate many of the same problems
most advocates for securing the rights
of cultural groups to their "traditional
knowledge" had identified in IP.
How anthropologists can positively
engage in these discussions is not
at all clear. That said, a positive first
step might be to simply show up for
them, since dealing and arguing over
definitions of culture is the crux of
what we do. We can point out to policymakers
that preserving culture
also means safeguarding its fluidity,
dynamism and creativity, and that
despite (or perhaps because of) all the
discursive strategizing over cultural
content of all kinds, international
frameworks may have a difficult time
escaping the contradictions inherent
in regulating that which they are
anxious, yet loath, to define. IAN
Alexander A Bauer is a graduate student
at the University of Pennsylvania, a
lecturer in the writing program at
Princeton and editor of the International
Journal of Cultural Property.