in cultural policy have increasingly emerged as an independent domain as well as topics central to the planning, implementation, and evaluation of initiatives in public, private, and government practices. The possible intrinsic, humanistic, and material benefits to be gained from understanding culture and devising rational ways for dealing with it socially have been sought by artists, cultural workers, scholars, corporations, museums, universities and pre-collegiate institutions, racial, ethnic and gender communities, the health professions, environmentalists, and economists. These and many other professional and social sectors are engaged in unprecedented explorations of the meanings and significance of culture and cultural policy. The formulations and contestations of group and national identities occurring across the world put culture on a par with economic, military and other major statecraft issues. "Cultural wars" and bloody conflicts influenced by perceptions of cultural differences command attention from Los Angeles to Jerusalem, from Rwanda to Bosnia, from Chiapas to Capitol Hill. Major issues of cultural policy between the United States and France or the United States and Canada have been disputed and tried in the World Court, and new rifts about global trade and local and national culture are emerging in the World Trade organization. UNESCO, the World Bank, the International Committee for Cultural Policy, and the International Network for Cultural Diversity are among a growing number of multilateral and global civil society organizations focused on issues of culture and policy.
The Center engages cultural policy issues as a necessary part of its regular internal and external practices. Our interests and work in cultural policy are framed principally around local agency and cultural democracy in grassroots communities, and collaborative projects designed to foster self-representation. This page is the first of a series in which we intend to present documents and commentary that speak to these issues and to review the cultural policy implications of the Center's collaborations with grassroots cultural communities.
We invite your critical reflections and comments about issues in cultural policy.
Linked here is a publication of the proceedings of a 1999 Smithsonian-UNESCO meeting on Safeguarding Traditional Cultures and two papers that, respectively, address cultural policy implications in modern nation building (revisiting Amilcar Cabral's thesis on culture and national liberation) and a global artists-citizens' civil-society movement for cultural diversity.
James Early, Director of Cultural Heritage Policy
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