Anthropology News ˇ December 2005
26
V I E W S O N P O L I C Y
ROBERT ALBRO
GEORGE WASHINGTON U
As contestation over UNESCO's
Convention on the Protection of
the Diversity of Cultural Contents
and Artistic Expressions made clear,
there is little consensus among cultural
policymakers about what kind
of diversity we currently live with,
let alone should seek to promote.
Throughout negotiations, little serious
attention was given to potentially
divergent meanings of "diversity"
within and across cultural
boundaries, and for economic globalization.
It is precisely the indirectness
or ambiguity in this convention
of the attachment (or lack of
attachment) of the diversity concept
to particular cultural subjects
that has gone largely unremarked
but remains most problematic.
sion," since the latter emphasizes a
rights-based approach for the expressive
subject and the former does not.
A rights-based approach to culture
requires a defined subject to act as a
"claimant." But it might be impossible
to locate a subject for diversity. If
"freedom of expression" implies that
there should be a subject, the "free
flow of ideas" resists the identification
of any specific subject by directing
attention to the circulation of
cultural materials in acts of exchange.
"Freedom" carries multiple burdens
in this debate, both of human rights
and of trade liberalization. But
"trade" and "rights" promise very
different futures for diversity.
Defining Diversity
UNESCO's convention defines "cultural
diversity" as "the manifold
ways in which the cultures of
groups and societies find expression"
(Art 4, No 2). This definition
notably privileges the variety of different
means of expression over differences
among cultures. A preoccupation
with the forms culture
might take instead of the varieties of
cultures would not surprise critics
insisting the present treaty is meant
to be a broadside to the influence of
recent WTO global trade agreements
over such cultural industries
as the audiovisual. The argument is
that UNESCO's diversity of expression
is synonymous with "technologies
of dissemination."
The UN has connected diversity to
human rights in several ways, understanding
the plurality in culture (or
"unity-in-diversity") as a reservoir
needed for freedoms and as inseparable
from a democratic framework.
The UN Development Program's
2004 Human Development Report
has promoted a novel formulation of
"cultural liberty," defined as the
"capability of people to live and be
what they choose," including choice
of identity. The report treats diversity
as a matter of "individual freedoms,"
and as a means of "expanding individual
choices," and in so doing
aligns diversity with choice. Such a formula
potentially confounds an
understanding of diversity as a
source and frame for these choices
rather than simply as a range of available
choices.
Managing Diversity
UNESCO repeatedly emphasizes
the dangers to diversity posed by
globalization's encouragement of
homogenization--the specter of a
global monoculture where we are
all left to choose from the same cultural
menu. For UNESCO, since
diversity is subject to scarcity it
must be managed. Both the
Convention for the Safeguarding of
the Intangible Cultural Heritage,
adopted in 2003, and the present
convention justify diversity as a
means to promote exchange, innovation
and creativity. They work
together to grant diversity instrumental
importance as a resource.
The two conventions are complementary
in their handling of diversity--the
potentially nonrenewable
Diversity's Fate in Cultural Policymaking
expanding cultural marketplace.
Such a narrow conception of diversity
is a cause for concern.
Diversity's Contexts
During convention negotiations,
"diversity" was a widely referenced
floating signifier--useful for diplomacy
but not helpful for policy--
gathering to it a growing set of
uneasy bedfellows. One upshot is a
realization that there is no stable
subject or referent for diversity
beyond the legislative and regulatory
arena of intergovernmental cultural
policy itself. This arena aligns
diversity with national cultures,
individual freedom of choice, and
state-managed inventories of items
understood as resources, to circulate
in acts of exchange. But this deconIf
we do not direct attention to the
relationship of diversity to particular cultural
subjects, we might very quickly lose any
handle on the diversity of the future.
resource. With heritage as a source
of diversity, both conventions task
states with drawing up "inventories"
of cultural "content" to safeguard
by itemizing, counting and
listing it. In practice diversity
becomes a kind of inventory of cultural
"content" that is potentially
extractable from any context, to be
copied, appropriated, traded or
recirculated. Diversity turns into a
question of access to the cultural
public domain.
As understood with regard to
debates over national cultural industries,
diversity quickly comes to refer
to a desirable variability or quantity
of cultural products. Here the subject
of diversity is the "individual consumer,"
a circumstance promoted by
the ways "individual freedoms" are
folded together with the "free flow
of ideas," in a framework of "cultural
liberty." Once cultural expression
is taken to be an itemized or an
extractable array of resources aligned
with choice, it becomes almost natural
to conceive of diversity as measured
in terms of the greatest range of
consumer choice within an evertextualizes
diversity in other ways,
with potentially sobering consequences
for the political recognition
of cultural differences in pluricultural
societies, when these are
contingent upon specific territories,
communities or neighborhoods.
Policymakers are defining the
human rights, legislative and regulatory
contours of new global cultural
and economic configurations. Anthropologists
are well-positioned to
take up the task of demonstrating
risks run by ignoring important
implications of context, of situated
knowledge, the meaningfulness of
cultural forms, or the relation of cultural
production to the shape, character
or quality of social relations. If
we do not direct attention to the
relationship of diversity to particular
cultural subjects, we might very
quickly lose any handle on the
diversity of the future. IAN
Robert Albro currently works on questions
of transnational indigenous advocacy
and anti-economic globalization
activism in Bolivia, and teaches at George
Washington University. He is a member of
the AAA Committee for Human Rights.
V I E W S O N P O L I C Y
Locating Diversity
The publicity given to debates over
France's "cultural exception" argument,
in fact, assumes just one possible
account of diversity, which
takes for granted that diversity
refers to national cultures rather than
intra-state cultural diversity. The US
negotiating team opposed this with
a view of "diversity," well illustrated
by what one member, past Institute
of Museum and Library Sciences
Director Robert Martin, called our
"notions of freedom of expression
and the free flow of ideas."
However, "freedom of expression"
is not necessarily synonymous with
"cultural diversity." Though these
terms often become entangled,
they have distinct purposes.
"Freedom of expression" refers to
an individual or collective right of
enunciation or representation (the
saying of "it," the doing of "it" or
the making of "it"). But "cultural
diversity" refers to variations within
or among a given set of "its"--of
collective cultural differences or
available cultural products. These
differences dramatize the question
of whether diversity is a process to
be promoted or a state of affairs to
be accounted for and preserved.
Nor is "diversity of expression"
the same as "freedom of expres-