Cultural Engagement and Glocal Diplomacy

If we do not highlight it often enough, cultural diplomacy promotes the creation of transnational so

Aspiring to an Interest-free Cultural Diplomacy?

When I hear from people about the relative advantages of cultural diplomacy, they often point to the

Cultural Diplomacy’s Representational Conceit

This post continues my preliminary discussion of the results of a survey I recently conducted, desig

 

Cultural Engagement and Glocal Diplomacy

May 14, 2012 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural Policy

If we do not highlight it often enough, cultural diplomacy promotes the creation of transnational social spaces of engagement and interaction. And, even as they are often identified with particular cultures or countries, cultural diplomatic interventions are also unavoidably cosmopolitan in nature, insofar as they move between, confront, and conjoin multiple social worlds. In this way and even when carried away by the worst excesses of national chauvinisms, cultural diplomacy is inherently a transnationalist project of sorts. How does the work of cultural diplomacy account for its perpetual context of “transit”?

But nor do events and expressions of cultural diplomacy occur in an internationalist ether so much as in specific places and informed by particular historical conditions of possibility. This specificity includes the ways that “global” concepts and practice engage “local” ones or the ways “foreign” ideas and values mix (or not, as the case may be) with “national” ones. How these elisions occur is not often enough a focus of attention but it is also a fundamental question for understanding how cultural diplomacy is received and how it resonates with people’s meaningful horizons.

Perhaps it is time for us to think of cultural diplomacy in more “glocal” terms. Here I am not so much referring to the popular mantra, “Think globally, act locally,” as pointing to the ways that the expressive content of cultural diplomacy: is not self-evident; circulates among publics in particular ways; is often understood by audiences in terms of already familiar and available concepts, beliefs or values; and if it resonates is typically appropriated into local frameworks of meaning and relevance. It is impossible, in other words, to understand the extra-local content of cultural diplomacy apart from its local context.

The British cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s discussion of encoding/decoding is helpful here. Hall helps us to appreciate the extent to which the coding of any given message does not dictate its reception, which is perhaps an unfortunate inconvenience for the advocates of strategic communication. Hall undermines confidence in any notion of communication that mistakenly adopts a straightforward or linear “sender-message-receiver” model. Instead, Hall insists, the two moments of “encoding” and of “decoding” are relatively autonomous from each other, and differently determinate in any process of communication.

In other words, any given public, if an intended audience for the work of cultural diplomacy, is also an important source for the meaning of that same cultural work. And as such, Hall encourages recognition of the “struggle over meaning,” not as zero-sum but as fundamental to all communication. Another way of putting this is that, whatever the intention of cultural diplomacy interventions, publics for whom they are intended will always actively make sense of them in terms relating to their own interests.

Here I am not referring to any so-called “realist interests” – the rational calculus of political self-interest or practical advantage – but to the cultural grounding of ideas, concepts, values, or commitments, that people everywhere use to evaluate the meanings of statements, and which invest the views people have about the world around them with significance. Interests, in the more encompassing second sense, most often take shape amid regular traffic along frontiers of interaction between the global and the local.

We can consider the significance of cultural diplomacy, then, along a glocal gradient. Take the example of “McDonaldization,” as a case of the global circulation of American popular culture. Much attention has been given to whether the ubiquity of McDonalds franchises worldwide represents the triumph of the attractiveness of American fast food (and its associated model of economic efficiency) or is primary evidence for the predatory qualities of American cultural exports that threaten to displace local cultural diversity with a shallower and more monochromatic cultural globalization.

In fact neither story adequately captures another tendency, as colorfully reported in Watson’s Golden Arches East: the burger franchise effectively plies its trade along a global-local frontier that it constantly negotiates, and where the global and the local are brought together in diverse ways. While McDonald’s serves beer in Germany, does not offer beef in India, and offers seasonal “tsukimi” burgers in Japan to celebrate the harvest moon, this is not just an example of catering to local tastes. Franchises are turned into “local” institutions by patrons in a myriad of ways. In this sense, they are not altogether perceived as “American,” but in significant part as different kinds of neighborhood haunts. How a global franchise becomes a local haunt is about what Japanese do with a McDonalds to make it “theirs.”

Another illustration is human rights discourse and practice, which is a regular dimension of U.S. public diplomacy efforts. Typically the U.S. asserts the universal aspirations of human rights, promotes human rights in conjunction with secular and individual freedoms of equality and choice, and disregards cultural frameworks when advancing human rights goals. Nevertheless, international human rights law typically comes to matter to peoples around the world only once it has – in the words of researcher Sally Merry – been effectively “remade in the vernacular,” often in locally contingent and fragmentary ways.

Merry is clear that, to be most effective, human rights advocacy must be appropriated, translated, and framed in local terms. This might include human rights concepts about the nature of the person, the community, or the state, which do not travel easily from one setting to another. Instead of the more prevailing understanding of culture by international human rights activists as retrogressive and anti-modern “custom” and as a ready excuse for non-compliance, Merry encourages attention to the ways transnational human rights ideas and institutions are made meaningful using cultural images, symbols, and narratives – in places like Fiji and India often couched in religious rather than secular terms – that help to articulate specifically local conceptions of social justice that do not simply echo international human rights covenants. Instead they are articulated, for example, in relationship to prevailing kinship obligations, culturally-defined ideas about the body; or particular historical contexts, such as long-term struggles over land ownership, among others.

As a recent lucid essay by Charles Kupchan argues, the contemporary world is not best met with the expectation of “conformity to Western values,” but instead through recognition of the proliferating hybrid modernities that characterize it. In glocal terms, whether dealing with global popular culture or with the universalizing discourses and practices of human rights, we should be considering how the subjects, recipients or audiences of these culture industries, global discourses and frameworks, are also at the same time agents of them, sources for them, and authors of them. Promotion of a more “glocal diplomacy” – the translation of the global and its often creative elision with the local – remains mostly disregarded, given the constant pressure to “control the message.”

Note: This post originally appeared on the Center for Public Diplomacy blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/cultural_engagement_as_glocal_diplomacy/

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Aspiring to an Interest-free Cultural Diplomacy?

April 26, 2012 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural exchange, Cultural Policy, Cultural relativism, Propaganda

When I hear from people about the relative advantages of cultural diplomacy, they often point to the apparent “neutrality” or “apolitical” basis of, say, cultural exchange. Coming from an anthropological background, this often advanced claim has always puzzled me.

At least historically, when anthropologists have talked about cultures – for example, in the typical mode of cultural relativism – they have referred to the ways that different cultures are either configurations of specific “values” or interpret the world around them in ways distinct. And, if this is not exactly how I would encourage us to think about the culture concept today, it is precisely because the meanings people ascribe to things in the world vary so much across cultures that we seek to take account of cultures in the first place. When we refer to “neutrality” in the context of cultural diplomacy, then, it is often unclear how this reconciles with cultural difference.

I am actually pretty sure that the problem of cultural difference is not intentionally being dismissed by these frequent assertions about the relative neutrality of cultural diplomacy. But, I do think that we might be mixing things up here and that we could more rigorously sort out what in fact we are talking about.

Respondents to a cultural diplomacy survey I conducted described some of its advantages this way: Cultural diplomacy is successful because “it is not there to sell a product.” And there is “no message control.” It is typically “most effective when it is politically neutral, non-confrontational and non-ideological.” It is effective when it is “free of state-to-state interests.” And it tends to be ineffective or it fails when trying to “push a policy position” or “when deeply contested interests limit the impact of cultural diplomacy activities.” In a nutshell, the idea is that when cultural diplomacy efforts are perceived as too obviously entangled with “interests” they run the risk of illegitimacy, and so, ineffectiveness.

Policy recommendations for cultural diplomacy also reflect this equation. A White House conference on cultural diplomacy in 2000 touts its advantages because cultural diplomacy “relates to human creativity beyond the scope of politics.” The Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy’s 2005 report confidently notes the ways cultural diplomacy “creates a neutral platform for people-to-people contact.” A 2007 Demos report likewise asserts, “The value of cultural activity comes precisely from its independence.” As such, culture is a “safe space for unofficial political relationship-building.” And as a 2010 report by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation on cultural exchange programs recently emphasized, these exchanges can “remain apolitical.”

“Neutral,” as these several reports make clear, is most often contrasted with “political.” As Cynthia Schneider suggests, the advantage of cultural diplomacy – particularly in the form of citizen diplomacy – is that it provides an “alternative to the official presence of America.” And, indeed, critics of government-sponsored U.S. cultural diplomacy have pointed to the ways the involvement of the State Department – or during the Cold War, the CIA – have tended to politicize, and so undermine the credibility of, U.S. cultural diplomacy. Neutral-as-apolitical, then, is set against the perception of the pursuit of so-called “national interests” in the competition among nations.

But if we are not careful, neutral-as-apolitical can invite confusion, as seems to be the case with Joseph Nye’s counterintuitive conclusion in his most recent treatment of the problem of power, where he observes that “the best propaganda is not propaganda.” We think we know what Nye probably means here: cultural diplomacy is effective when the “culture” part of the intervention is understood to be authentic and credible. It cannot be viewed as contrived or as having an ulterior motive – as Frances Stonor Saunders’s story of clandestine CIA sponsorship of American artists and intellectuals during the Cold War makes clear. Indeed, as Richard Arndt and others have reminded us, it is important to try to rescue “the diplomacy of cultures from the embrace of propaganda.”

However, we also need to take account of the fact that at least beginning with the end of the Cold War the “culture” of diplomacy has significantly changed its location as well as its meaning. If the 2000 White House cultural diplomacy conference unproblematically assigns culture to the activities of “human creativity,” a 2008 report by the Curb Center points to a more recent trend of the supplanting of a cosmopolitan notion of “culture” as the output of artistic and intellectual elites by an increasingly pervasive understanding of “cultures” in the anthropological sense. This shift is evident, for example, in the recent multilateral promotion of the concept of “intangible cultural heritage,” as generationally transferrable and community-based, over and above the previous international consensus for tangible heritage represented by such landmarks as the 1954 Hague Convention.

And when culture – as universal creative expression – is folded into an anthropological conception of different cultures, cultural diplomacy becomes more like an ongoing series of transactions across frontiers resembling intercultural communication. On either side of these frontiers, we suppose, are relatively different configurations of cultural values.

Part of what is conveyed in claims about the potential neutrality of cultural diplomacy is that we can sort out expressions of culture from the narrow pursuit of interests or political advantage, in the competition among nations. But, while realist accounts of international affairs often assume that politics are driven by competitive self-interest, it is nevertheless a mistake to assume any such interests are at the same time value-neutral. In his classic discussion, the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins demonstrated the impossibility of, in his words, separating out the “utilitarian postulates of practical interest” from the “system of symbolic valuations” – i.e. culture – that invest such an interest with meaning.

The politics of our own culture wars in the U.S.should serve as a ready reminder of this. The very notion of a culture war is based upon the premise that so-called “values voters” are motivated to patrol the borders of a particular definition of moral community in ways commensurate with public life in an otherwise diverse society. When controversies over the public appropriateness of cultural expression are touched off in the U.S., as with the case of the Sensation art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum several years ago or in the more recent decision by the Smithsonian Institution to censor the video artwork “A Fire in My Belly,” the difference between what constitutes public interest and what, cultural values, is nowhere to be found. And, of course, it is also that way everywhere else in the world.

Put another way, rather than understanding “interests” to be value-neutral, and as distinct from more authentically credible expressions of culture in diplomacy, we might do better to give our attention to the ways that values determine interests. We might consider how cultural expressions in international affairs are value-laden. In other words, proceeding as if cultural diplomacy is a relatively neutral and apolitical way to build bridges that enable later and more frank dialogue about national interests is likely to cause us to ignore some of the unexpected cultural value commitments – if not narrow national interests, interests nonetheless – that account for the differences we are seeking to bridge in the first place.

The difference between propaganda and an interested or value-laden cultural diplomacy is that the former seeks to manipulate publics, often through purposeful distortion or by withholding key facts, to the end of control. Perhaps, then, the important distinction is not between neutral or apolitical, on the one hand, and interests or values, on the other, so much as between interests or values and manipulation or control. Cultural diplomacy cannot honestly avoid the former – and why should it? But it should take no part in the latter.

Note: This post originally appeared on the Center for Public Diplomacy blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/aspiring_to_an_interest-free_cultural_diplomacy/.

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Cultural Diplomacy’s Representational Conceit

March 22, 2012 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural exchange, Cultural Policy

This post continues my preliminary discussion of the results of a survey I recently conducted, designed to invite practitioners of cultural diplomacy to reflect upon their own practice. Additional discussion of this survey can be found in my February 15th post. As I noted in the earlier post, this analysis is less about criticizing or evaluating cultural diplomacy, and more about arriving at a better understanding of the key assumptions underwriting it. How do those regularly engaged in cultural diplomacy define to themselves the meaning of what they do? This includes how practitioners imagine the relation of culture to successful communication and whether this prevailing understanding promotes a more thoroughly dialogic engagement.

In addition to a notable lack of consensus among cultural diplomacy practitioners about the meaning of “culture” itself, as reported in my previous post, respondents’ survey answers tended to promote what I will call diplomacy’s representational conceit. That is, a majority of respondents assumed that in the diplomatic mode cultures – typically, national cultures as self-evident and as the proper subject of diplomacy – are unproblematically expressively available to others for the purpose of representing a people.  This representational conceit also takes for granted that the “message” (or cultural “value” it intends to convey), which is understood to be easily extractable from its cultural “vehicle” (e. g. an art form, musical performance, or a poetry slam), effectively explains a society in question to international publics. And this assumption is widespread, as a recent report by the International Cultural Engagement Task Force illustrates, noting, “It is in cultural activities that a nation’s idea of itself is best represented.”

Respondents also appeared convinced of this idea, describing “cultures” as the ways different peoples “express themselves.” Again, culture is the “presentation” of “a society’s thoughts and values.” Or, a culture is a community’s “outlook.” The arts are “expressions of American society.” As was noted, cultural diplomacy is “the efforts nations make to portray their societies and values.” It is a case of the “projection” of culture abroad. Likewise, “The best way to explain our culture is by putting it on display.” It is effective when using “the most visible forms of outreach to large audiences.” Another respondent asserted that cultural diplomacy is a case of “explaining” by “demonstrating.” It is effective when it helps people elsewhere “gain a firsthand view” or a “more accurate picture” of American culture. A majority of respondents described the successful communication of cultural diplomacy as analogous to effective visual representation – as a “show.” And historically this has characterized much such work.

When prompted to offer examples of the activities of cultural diplomacy, respondents favored the performative and visual arts, such as exhibitions, motion pictures, radio programs, T.V. broadcasts, music, dance, theater, the plastic arts, and similar activities. And this should not be surprising, since such activities have been the focus of cultural diplomacy programming for some time. Richard Arndt has offered vivid details about the work of the cultural offices of U.S. embassies during the Cold War, which was “to publicize, present, and stage events.” Arndt characterizes the diplomatic efforts to “internationalize America’s arts” as a case of “the US export of performances,” which, it was hoped, were a “highly visible” means to expose international audiences to, in Arndt’s words, the “sounds and sights of democracy.”

In keeping both with the history and practice of cultural diplomacy, then, respondents equated cultural performance with acts of expression primarily understood as representation (usually of “American society” or desirable American “values” like “freedom of expression”). In so doing they took for granted that: cultural expressions correspond to cultural values; they are self-evident, portable, and contextless; and so available for acts of exchange and performance. They also appeared to accept that the performance of this representational conceit amounted to effective diplomatic communication. In other words, key cultural values – as transparently expressed through diverse cultural vehicles of performance like the arts – were understood to be relatively straightforwardly extractable by international “audiences.”  But why do we think this?

The elision by respondents of acts of cultural diplomacy with acts of representation is reminiscent of Suzanne Langer’s discussion of “presentational symbols.” She describes these as presenting otherwise abstract “ideas” because they correspond in form or by analogy to that which is symbolized, as a “projection” of it. Presentational symbols function independently and they work all at once like a “picture.” Langer’s conception reflects a long-standing philosophical commitment, the so-called correspondence theory of truth. But there is a critique of this view. For Richard Rorty, the representational theory, where knowledge is acquired through a process of “mirroring,” mistakenly proceeds as if meaning is like a picture that faithfully “represents.” Rorty has made a strong case that we are better off treating this representational theory as our own folk theory of what’s going on. Such a representational conceit, in other words, might not be shared across communities or internationally in the same ways.

But the work of cultural diplomacy has been consistent in this regard. As with the Department of State’s smART Power program, which sends U.S. artists abroad to create “public art projects” as an example of “people-to-people diplomacy through the visual arts,” we think national “cultural ambassadors” are engaged in comparable sorts of representational spectacle. Historically, this has been the case, whether hip-hop diplomacy, or the USIA’s erstwhile “Arts America” program. Notably, the justification for an “Arts Diplomacy Festival” soon to take place in Berlin is that “cultural diplomacy must show rather than tell.” In each case, whether as part of the formal program or tour, or as part of the more informal interactions on the margins of such programs, individual cultural or arts ambassadors are thought to be showing, expressing, performing, picturing, presenting, mirroring – literally embodying values they are understood to represent – and in this way creating audiences for the uniquely desirable values of one country or another.

And this is not unique to U.S. cultural diplomacy. UNESCO’s “Living Human Treasures” program is a notable enactment of this representational conceit. Initially proposed in 1993, the program identifies and confers official recognition upon individual culture bearers deemed to possess intangible cultural heritage that is at once scarce (and so, threatened) and particularly representative of a specific group, community or nation. These are, typically, cultural “practices and expressions,” the development and transmission of which UNESCO promotes by providing duly designated “human treasures” with opportunities to perform, demonstrate, or exhibit them, and so to build a larger audience for them. That is, “human treasures” are supposed to generate “public recognition.” As the living embodiments of a community’s intangible cultural heritage, human treasures are granted the dubious honor of being cultural ambassadors for life. In the process they are reduced to the role of perpetually representing – as living mirrors – the “way of life” of his or her community.

There is nothing wrong with any of these activities as such. Artists, musicians, poets, and other performers, should circulate internationally. But why do we also believe that they carry the representational cultural burden of the nation, as a set of shared values? And how do we imagine they effectively communicate, say, the sights and sounds of democracy in the U.S.?

There is good reason to think that, whatever happens as a part of these expressive or performative opportunities, cultural diplomacy as display and for the creation of an audience is in fact not the best route to intercultural dialogue. The effort to perform, express, and project, might succeed in conjuring an audience among international publics, but in so doing this can also build barriers to conversation. An audience member watches the show but is seldom an active participant in it. Audience members occupy another world than that of the players. The representational conceit of diplomacy might inhibit dialogue, in other words, when publics are recruited as audiences for cultural spectacles. If meaningful reciprocal dialogue is a purpose of public diplomacy, in Rorty’s words “to think of language as a picture of the world” – as a set of representations – makes conversation a challenge.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on the Center for Public Diplomacy blog site: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/cultural_diplomacys_representational_conceit/

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Models as Mirrors or Cultural Diplomacy?

February 15, 2012 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural exchange, Cultural Policy

Several years ago I organized a conference designed to encourage those involved in the work of cultural diplomacy – policy makers, practitioners and cultural producers, public diplomacy officers, and academics; who too seldom talk to one another – to generate a shared conversation about what in fact composes this enterprise. The conversation was framed to promote discussion of “the specific role of culture in cultural diplomacy.” That is, participants were asked to address what they took “culture” to mean in this context in the first place and to characterize its efficacy: what did they imagine “culture” does as part of the work of diplomacy?

At the same time I launched a cultural diplomacy survey, together with my then research assistant Yelena Osipova. This short survey was open-ended, and designed to provide opportunity for respondents – primarily active and retired U.S. public diplomacy officers – to articulate their own understandings of the work of cultural diplomacy. Put another way, the survey encouraged elaboration of their emic instead of my etic understanding of this effort. How do those regularly engaged in cultural diplomacy define to themselves the meaning of what they do?

The survey vexed some practitioner colleagues, who nevertheless graciously completed it. One esteemed but exasperated doyen of public diplomacy was moved to comment, “I am delighted to help but disappointed that I am asked such obvious questions.” But this was exactly the point. Over the previous decade numerous reports have been produced, with the purpose of assessing the state of U.S. public and cultural diplomacy. But these reports rarely subject “cultural diplomacy” to sustained explication or justification. They assume its virtues and typically offer perfunctory definitions before hurrying on to their primarily purpose: defending budgets or exploring new institutional reforms.

An uncharitable commentator might call that just so much moving around of chairs in a way that fails regularly to revisit the fundamental meaning of what we think we are up to with line items like “cultural diplomacy.” That “person-to-person exchange” using the arts foregrounds “commonalities in human experience” instead of “exploiting political and cultural differences” – thus advancing diplomacy – might hold promise. The work of cultural diplomacy might indeed foster “mutual understanding.” But it is not a certainty. In fact exactly the reverse often happens.

And as the survey itself made clear, in fact there exists very little consensus among those involved about what cultural diplomacy is, except in the most general of terms. In what follows, and in subsequent posts, I offer a preliminary analysis of survey results in order to sketch out some key questions relating to the semiotics of diplomacy that deserve more sustained consideration. With “semiotics,” I continue to focus attention on the specific relationship of culture to communication, as the crux of the matter and in keeping with my previous writing about how to pursue a thoroughly dialogic cultural diplomacy. The goal here is not to establish “best practices” but to ascertain practitioners’ own working models for what they do as a way to encourage further attention to where U.S. cultural diplomacy practitioners are speaking from, when they engage in their work.

There were a total of 151 respondents of whom 51 completed the survey, administered online between late 2009 and late 2011. The survey was composed of seven questions, and respondents’ answers took narrative form, and were often quite elaborated. Here I address only question 2, “What is the meaning of ‘culture’ for cultural diplomacy?”

Among the 51 respondents who completed the survey, one immediately apparent result is that there was tremendous variability in defining “culture” in this context. Breaking this out, respondents offered 21 different potential synonyms (e. g. “world view,” “ideology,” or “structure of meaning”), 22 candidates corresponding to the basic units of culture (e. g. “values,” “beliefs,” or “symbols,”), and 31 possible expressions of culture (e.g. “music,” “art,” or “film”). It was also notable that multiple respondents answered the question with a tautology, using “culture” or “cultural” in the definition. Perhaps out of frustration, one respondent succinctly answered, “It means what it means.”

For someone trained in sociocultural anthropology, this is familiar data. And it is not surprising. As the Welsh critic Raymond Williams noted in Keywords, “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” Policy reports on the state of cultural diplomacy point to different things, sometimes emphasizing a concern for “creative products” and at other times for “ideas and ideals.” Among commentators on cultural diplomacy, Cynthia Schneider is among the few to consider implications of the fact that, as she noted, “The word ‘culture’ conveys multiple meanings.” She goes on to explore the diplomatic consequences of the anthropologically-inspired conception of culture as “customs and behavior” and as “creative expression” respectively.

Notably, the discipline of anthropology has given up the effort to produce a consensus definition of what has been, arguably, its master concept. Since its professionalization as a social science, anthropology has moved from a “kitchen sink” variety of definition, simply listing out an ever lengthening set of cultural “traits” – which reached its height with the Human Relations Area File project – to varieties of increasingly incompatible schools, each with a definition fit to a narrower purpose (e. g. “the study of behavior” or “the symbols and meaning” approach). By the 1950s, a pair of eminent anthropologists recorded no less than 164 different definitions of culture then in use by their colleagues. By the end of the twentieth century, the discipline, as a whole, had thoroughly qualified its use of the term – culture – to refer not to any “complex whole” or total “way of life,” as one survey respondent defined it. Most recently, it has emphasized the ways cultures are sites of struggle over contested meanings, including over culture itself.

In the context of diplomacy, by assuming we mean the same thing by “culture,” we are less apt to consider or to apprehend the sources of cultural difference. We think: their art and our art might not be exactly the same, but it is still “art.” But this thinking amounts to a kind of mirror imaging. These differences also can be sources of conflict. They include notable differences among countries about the relationship of culture to diplomacy and about the location of culture in international affairs. To ignore these differences is to risk ignoring what matters, from the point of view of the publics for whom cultural diplomacy programs are intended.

By way of conclusion, I offer three examples from recent history: The so-called “Asian values debate” of the 1990s over the global application of human rights standards was a case of East Asian nations characterizing human rights not as universal but as a cultural project. This, the U.S. rejected, and along with it any sustained consideration of culture as a rights-based concept. In the mid-2000s U.S. negotiators surprisingly found themselves at cross-purposes with their European and Canadian allies over a proposed UNESCO cultural diversity treaty, in no small part because the U.S. resisted an understanding of cultural goods and services as in any way “exceptional.” In this case, the fault line was between a U.S. framing of the issue as about “freedom of expression,” as compared to a European concern for the cultural goods and services associated with national “identity.”

Finally, a strong case can be made that the influence of “clash of civilizations” thinking upon U.S. policy for confronting post-9/11 global challenges was counterproductively distorted and narrow, shaping how urgent problems were framed for understanding. As such, the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, its new social scientific research program, assumed a causal relation between religious conviction and political violence, as part of its invitation to study the significance of religious change in the Islamic world. But as one commentator of the program has suggested, this appeared to be an example of an “American solipsism that is driving this definition of threats.” In other words, “clash of civilizations” might less describe what is happening in the world and more reflect a peculiar U.S. suspicion about the cultural sources of conflict.

The common thread here is the problem of a lack of attention to where other people are coming from, with respect to culture. On important part of this is that to engage with the question of culture is less an appreciation of different “ways of life” and more a case of appreciating culture as a site of meaningful struggle. International affairs are informed by multiple definitions and locations for culture, conjoined with variable understandings of rights, of identity, and of the sources of violence. Cultural diplomacy takes place within this field of often competing conceptions, as much a potential source of shared goodwill as of misunderstanding or conflict.

Note: This post originally appeared on the Center for Public Diplomacy blog site:  http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/models_as_mirrors_or_cultural_diplomacy/

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Dilemmas of a Dyslexic Public Diplomacy

December 15, 2011 in Cultural Policy

Does public diplomacy in the U.S. know how to listen? This was the question inspiring a conference I organized not long ago at American University. Historically the evidence is not encouraging. If it has become routine for new Undersecretaries for Public Diplomacy at the State Department to pledge to “listen more and lecture less,” little programmatic room is made for doing so, beyond symbolic “listening tours” abroad which typically exhibit the form but rarely the function of real dialogue. President Obama’s newest appointment to this position, Tara Sonenshine, might signal a change. With a background in journalism and communications, she is not a corporate manager type and is already on record about the need to meet people where they are at, hear others’ stories, and “to be in the listening mode.” But wanting to listen and knowing how aren’t the same.

If public diplomacy is one of America’s critical avenues for conversing with the world, since 9-11 regular attention has been given to the inadequacies of the state-of-affairs for public diplomacy in the U.S. This attention has too often been fixated on how best to combat the “why they hate us” perception initially framing the 9-11 era.  Ten years on Fareed Zakaria’s answer to that question looks less insightful. Along with military and political responses to the problem, he rightly points to the cultural sources of much of global conflict. But his “cultural strategy” for confronting these has an ideological edge: “help Islam enter the modern world”; “broadcast fresh thinking across the Arab world.” Post-Arab Spring, what appears particularly misguided is the notion that the U.S. should be primarily “broadcasting.”

But this merely describes what passes for prevailing public diplomacy “theory” since well before 9-11. If in different ways, it has mostly been about message delivery. The U.S. Information Agency was primarily concerned with “telling America’s story” to the world. Madison Avenue-inspired approaches to cultural diplomacy as public relations treat their subjects as “consumers.” Experts in strategic communication discuss how best to control and to disseminate messages to “target audiences.” Prevailing soft power conceptions, which include the rhetoric of “winning hearts and minds,” are typically invested in getting them to “want what we want” rather than considering other wants.

More recent has been attention given to public diplomacy conceived as a global “war of ideas”: a way of framing international affairs as a kind of zero-sum competition rather than as a conversation. The latest State Department strategic vision emphasizes a need to “shape the narrative” and to combat “extremist voices.” If rhetorical violence toward the U.S. is certainly troubling, engineering the conversation we think we want is unlikely to help us better understand the meaningful sources of such rhetoric. In cultural terms, even so-called “apolitical” cultural exchange programs are assumed to be representational. We treat them as opportunities to express or to display U.S. values abroad to non-Americans. We expect our jazz ambassadors effectively to perform the “music of freedom” for these others.

There is little here to suggest the importance of listening to other peoples’ stories about themselves. The history of public diplomacy points to a relative absence of dialogue, and comfort with our own echo chamber, alongside a disinclination to plumb the depths of diplomacy as a demandingly reciprocal communicative act. And so we are permanently vulnerable to the probability of the wholesale misrecognition of our interlocutors, friends and enemies alike, at once taking them to mean what they might not while missing or not taking seriously what they try to tell us. And when diplomacy is perceived by “targets” as a campaign to influence or to control – as New America Foundation president Steve Coll recently made the point about the cultural diplomatic efforts built into U.S. counterinsurgency in Afghanistan– it is rejected.

Over the years there has been no lack of discussion of how best to fix public diplomacy. Typically these begin by noting the deterioration of U.S. diplomatic assets upon the end of the Cold War, most obviously: the elimination of the USIA and U.S. cultural centers abroad, the evident lack of language and area studies specialists, a near perpetual budgetary crisis for the funding of arts and culture initiatives, alongside seemingly boundless enthusiasm for promising new digital tools of communication and dissemination.

Highly publicized studies by RAND, the Council on Foreign Relations, the GAO, and others, have offered a range of comprehensive recommendations. These are often about how best to use available resources for effective institutional rearrangement, including addressing the prevailing decentralized public-private model for government cultural programming. Foreign affairs expert Thomas Barnett has proposed a new “Department of Everything Else.” Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill Ivey, has called for the creation of a cabinet-level seat for a national culture czar. And in recent years no less than former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates regularly beat the drum for more resources to support the work of U.S. soft power. But institutional challenges are only a part of the problem.

The Obama administration came into office, in significant degree, under the sign of increasing dialogue with the rest of the world. But do we know how to listen? We can point to a sprinkling of efforts to encourage dialogue, as with the National Endowment for the Humanities program on “bridging cultures.” This is a start. In contrast to the U.S., multilateral organizations like UNESCO treat cultural diplomacy as commensurate with “intercultural dialogue.” But of course the U.S. relationship with UNESCO has by and large been a tortured one, and which we’ve recently decided to defund.

Public diplomacy scholar Nicholas Cull has been an advocate for listening, which, he is clear, can be done badly. If good listening happens in a variety of ways, it is cooperative, not covert, much more than market research; and it is not something we, as listeners, can frame. What would a diplomacy attentive to listening as a meaningful cultural act look like? It would recognize that language is not just a medium of communication but also a vehicle of identity. It would be mindful of the different cultural conventions for language and standards of narrative truth that animate the talk of counterparts. It would consider the contexts of diplomatic dialogue, as socially situated events that are open to multiple interpretations and not just our own.

Anthropologist Scott Atran has described his work talking with terrorists – at least as defined by the State Department’s terror list – as “listening to and talking with our enemies and probing gray areas for ways forward.” The gray areas are critical. When talking to a Hamas leader about the potential for a two-state solution with Israel, Atran notes an important code-shift from the Arabic “hudna,” signifying a temporary armistice, to the term “salaam,” with its connotation of a more lasting “peace.” Atran understands the need for a better grasp of others’ terms of reference, with accompanying semantic possibilities, as a way to broaden the conversation. As such “our story” can better sustain a multiplicity of voices.

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A Cultural Policy Listening Project? Long Overdue

November 23, 2011 in Cultural Policy, Uncategorized

If only because it runs counter to familiar American exceptionalist arguments about culture, now is a very good moment to contemplate a cultural listening project, a dialogue with the many ways cultural claims now form the basis for diverse political, economic, and legal priorities beyond the U.S. but in ways that nevertheless matter for the U.S. These priorities are taking shape in terms of arguments, policies, programs, and politics about culture as the basis of claims to: rights, property, digital access to information content, heritage, security, goods and services, and identity. While we seldom hear about any of this in the U.S., we should be giving more attention to the reasons why culture has become a basis for claim-making, friction, and competition, and a subject of multilateral policy making in these and other terms. These are not trivial issues. They passionately matter to people around the globe.

What are the ways culture matters for the rest of the world? I am not talking about the need to fix public diplomacy by improving unilateral U.S. efforts dedicated to message delivery nor sounding a cross-cultural communication-inspired call for better understanding of  “Chinese culture,” “Iranian culture,” or “Russian culture.” I am talking about the expanding relevance of culture as it is incorporated into national and multilateral policy making. In short, culture – as a subject of policy – is a basic feature of political decision-making, global problem-solving, as well as new knowledge production and innovation, in ways both different than in the past and growing in importance. Missing – if sorely needed – is a more regular engagement between domestic U.S. cultural policy and the very different international conversations about cultural priorities and investments now carried forward by states, global civil society, and multilateral policies, programs, actors and institutions. But cultural policy in the U.S.– historically largely dedicated to promoting “arts and culture” on the home front – is barely engaged with the global rush to promote and to protect cultural expression, representation, and practice.

Currently U.S. cultural policy tends toward a relatively narrow commitment to arts policy, and as such is primarily dedicated to defining public support for the arts and U.S. national heritage in partnership with private support. If support for the arts in the U.S. is itself important, it should not be the only priority. Domestic goals, in turn, are often disconnected from considerations of culture in U.S. international affairs, dedicated to the promotion and deregulation of U.S. cultural goods and services as an economic concern and to the branding of the U.S. image as a strategic part of diplomatic efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of different publics. These commitments deserve more regular discussion, evaluation and critique. But the evident lack of communication between domestic and foreign cultural policy in the U.S., as a problem, is nothing compared to the near total neglect of global cultural concerns, formulated as policy.

We are not served if we continue to view them through the narrow lens of our own arts policy in the U.S. Counting how many people “participate” in the arts, NEA-style, might be a necessary rearguard action in the U.S. to defend budgets, particularly during economic crisis and as a way to survive domestic “values” debates. But it is also insular. State Department cultural ambassadors are fine, but offer little opportunity to hear from other corners of the world about how culture matters in their lives. Massive exports of U.S. popular cultural content might be the key to soft power, but encouraging people to “want what we want” obviously actively discourages listening. It’s not surprising, then, that recent NY Times articles have, in different ways, pointed to the thoroughgoing inadequacies of U.S. cultural policy for Afghanistan, in China and Iraq. This is a dismal record. And it results from the long history of U.S. neglect of culture as a serious subject of policy and of international affairs. This is, too, about a legacy of exceptionalism that has never advanced more meaningful engagement with other peoples’ desires, commitments, values, and attitudes.

The terms of globalization and global conflict are not defined simply by the global economy, new media technologies, or transnational movements of people, but also by the meaningful cultural frames that organize the ongoing significance of globalization as an everyday lived experience in both these and other ways. These cultural frames include the stories and forms of representation publicly mobilized to convey diverse circumstances of cultural identity, which, if they acquire global circulation often have specifically local origins. Particularly in the post-colonial, post-Cold War and post-9/11 era of international relations, culture is a more self-conscious fact embraced at once – if differently – by communities, civil society, and states as a basic transversal factor and framework for a variety of public, political, technological, economic, and security goals.

Cultural identity is a source of new social movements but also of exclusionary politics, conducted in terms of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, language, the built environment, and more. Culture has at once become a basis for the power politics of advancing political claims and a creative source driving new global developments. This is the case for: the creative sector and the post-industrial information economy, new international legal and human rights frameworks, and approaches to public diplomacy, efforts in sustainable development, multicultural state reforms, and democracy promotion, as well as the work of civil society, and the advancement of community claims, among comparable local and global projects. These developments have far reaching implications for the changing public role of cultural institutions – museums, libraries, and archives – which now often function as important sites of convergence for interactions among cultural producers, communities, and international policies, and as key nodes in global cultural flows.

Constructive engagement with this emerging international cultural division of labor has never been more important. Understood as a question of policy, this includes not simply the recognition of culture as: an expressive basis of identity, source of conflict and potential obstacle to desired change; but also: as a resource, and asset, as empowering, and as creative capital, as a means of self-definition, basis for expanding choices, and as an essential element of basic freedoms. At the same time cultural policy and practice are directly implicated in such wide-ranging priorities as: the expressive life of nations, humanitarian aid, the content of the information economy, urban planning, the application of so-called soft or smart power, and efforts to understand the meaning of political change, among others – all evidence of the ongoing international renovation of the culture concept as a component of global events.

But in the U.S. we pay little attention and there appears to be little room for such a cultural listening project. Despite: a regular concern about the decline of the U.S. image abroad, growing appeals to uses of soft power, a recognized deficit in applied cultural knowledge and training, and the encouraging fact that the Obama administration is the first ever to formally present a cultural policy platform prior to the election, there is little sign that the U.S. is ready to change its exceptionalist ways in cultural terms in the interest of real global dialogue.

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A New Conversation about Military Approaches to Culture

November 21, 2011 in Culture and the Securityscape

A recent article in the New York Times Book Review surveys new anthropological writing on Afghanistan, with an eye to contrasting this with ongoing U. S. military efforts to carry out effective culturally-informed counterinsurgency in that country. The reviewer wants to underscore the considerable challenges the U. S. — or any military — faces when it aspires effectively to apply cultural knowledge to its missions. Highlighting these difficulties, the review contrasts ethnographically-grounded insights about the workings of local politics, power, and culture from anthropologist Noah Coburn’s book Bazaar Politics with the often very different top-down efforts of “centralizers, modernizers, and humanitarians” in Afghanistan to apply cultural knowledge to encourage particular outcomes.

The review also makes passing reference to a report written by a commission I chaired for the American Anthropological Association, which described in some depth many of the concerns anthropologists have had about a U. S. Army program to collect and apply cultural knowledge to its decision-making in theater. Even as the U. S. mission in Afghanistan follows its long and winding path toward an end-game, the question of how the military chooses to make sense out of, and to apply, local cultural knowledge, promises to be a significant feature of its mission for years to come. The U. S. military is likely to continue to have an interest in developing its cultural assets, as it is deployed in the context of varieties of “operations other than war,” including humanitarian, stability, development, and diplomacy operations. And, just as the Times review reflects on the U. S. military’s “applied anthropology” in Afghanistan, now is a timely moment to sort though what the military’s cultural turn might mean for the U. S.’s foreign policy and global footprint for the foreseeable future.

This is exactly the spirit behind a conference I’ve organized together with Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center, to be hosted by the Wilson Center in Washington D. C. this December 9th. The conference offers a snapshot — along with discussion of associated implications — of ongoing developments across the U. S. military dedicated to cultural capacity-building. Giving particular attention to clusters of activity around: cultural training and education, cultural data collection and analysis, and cultural heritage conservation and management, this conference also locates this conversation on the frontier between the U. S. military’s cultural policy-making, program-building, and operations, on the one hand, and diverse humanitarian efforts into which it is often drawn, on the other. Further details about the organization of the conference, including speakers, can be found here. What follows is the conference precis:

 

Invited Conference:

Accounting for Culture in the Military: 

Implications for Future Humanitarian Cooperation

 

This one-day conference, organized by Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy and hosted by the program in United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., builds directly upon the success of the Curb Center’s Arts Industries Policy Forum. Since 2003, this forum has convened cultural policy experts and government decision-makers to discuss the policy implications of key cultural issues through a participant-driven, nonpartisan program of information exchange. This has included attention to the implications of culture for national security, as represented by 2008’s Cultural Diplomacy and the National Interest, and which the present conference actively extends. As host, the Wilson Center’s program in United States Studies has a track record of attention to complementary concerns, including: the relationship between U.S. culture and Muslims in the U.S., the domestic impacts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the work of citizen diplomacy. As partners, the Curb and Wilson centers are well-prepared to take the next step to examine the varied connections between culture and security in greater depth.

This conference takes that step focusing specifically upon the U.S. military’s efforts to develop cultural expertise and the forms that this expertise is currently taking. While the military has made the question of culture a focus of particular attention starting in the mid-2000s, in the process elaborating doctrinal, strategic, and operational ways both of understanding and applying cultural knowledge, this conference seeks to build a broader inter-agency conversation among military and non-military stakeholders about implications of the U.S. military’s several approaches to cultural problem-solving. If these approaches are non-traditional for the military, they are nevertheless becoming increasingly relevant to the work of other government agencies and non-governmental actors, across a wide array of efforts in diplomacy, development, and humanitarian relief, among others.  This makes the present moment a good one for a fruitful exchange with stakeholders across government and outside of government regarding the ways that the military understands the relationship of culture to security.

Rationale

That the purposes, methods, and organization of the U.S. military have changed dramatically since the Cold War is now taken largely for granted. Nowhere have these changes been more evident than in the pursuit by the military in recent years to increase its cultural understanding, and to incorporate cultural knowledge into its operations. And while the military’s cultural turn has been widely noted, most often as represented by the so-called “Petraeus doctrine” of culture-centric counterinsurgency, implications of the military’s turn to culture are still not widely recognized or well-understood beyond the military itself.

This turn is not illustrated by a single overarching approach, so much as by multiple parallel approaches across the services meeting a variety of different needs, among them: training and education, cultural intelligence and analysis, and culturally-informed decision-making in theater, including cultural heritage resource management. As the military has developed a variety of culture-based policies, programs, and operational goals to meet its current mission requirements, these developments have remained largely siloed within the DoD. But, as present and future military missions increasingly include traditionally non-military dimensions, forms of expertise, and priorities, civil-military collaborations are becoming more regular and routine. This makes the need for a more comprehensive inter-agency understanding of the military’s particular approaches to culture more urgent, both at present and during peacetime after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down.

Since the military’s commitment to cultural capacity-building has been widely discussed, we will not rehearse the details of this story here. But, briefly, the more important drivers include the following: 1) In broad terms, post-Cold War and post-9/11 realities have been regularly referenced by the U.S. policy community using “clash of civilizations” frameworks, for which soft power becomes a crucial tool, and which are understood in essence as cultural conflicts; 2) for the military this has meant refocusing basic objectives toward waging asymmetric warfare, that is, unconventional conflicts among non-state actors and with culturally distinct populations; 3) for which counterinsurgency doctrine, requiring significant awareness of and sustained engagement with non-combatant cultural communities, has become the answer; 4) and where its ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred the military to seek to rapidly raise its perceived “cultural knowledge gap” and to build up a sustainable cultural capacity.

5) Paralleling these developments, as the U.S. military’s global footprint has shifted significantly away from preparing for the next large conventional conflict, its logistical capabilities have been utilized as a first responder and global backstop for diverse humanitarian disasters, ranging from the 2004 Banda Aceh Tsunami to the 2010 Haiti earthquake; 6) As a humanitarian agency, the military must frequently coordinate with such diverse civilian and NGO actors as the United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the Department of State, other development, refugee, and human rights organizations, and including the Smithsonian; 7) If many of these activities are incorporated into counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan (often in the form of civil-military cooperation on provincial reconstruction or civil affairs teams), they are also recognized parts of military doctrine as “operations other than war” (MOOTW) or as “stability, security, transition and reconstruction operations” (SSTR), 8 ) which complexly combine work in development, diplomacy, peace-keeping, human rights, governance, and reconciliation, among other activities, requiring an in-depth concern for relevant “socio-cultural dynamics.”

The increase in civil-military collaborations in this changing environment of military cultural initiatives has also been characterized by regular reaching out to new interlocutors, in government, in academia, and in the private sector. This involves a broad range of “culture experts” historically not looked to by the military, and including: sociocultural anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural geographers, cultural psychologists,  people with backgrounds in communications, international relations, cultural studies, and other subject matter experts from the humanities (e. g. experts in Arabic literature). However, such military-academic relationships can present conceptual, practical, and even ethical, dilemmas, where differences in background and training, in conceptual framing, and in modes of analysis can mean that potential collaborators find it challenging to bridge these divides. They are often working with different definitions of culture and its relationship to policy in the first place, which makes constructive exchanges about cultural interpretation, analysis, assessment, or metrics, difficult to achieve.

Another collaborative challenge, in the context of inter-agency whole-of-government efforts, is that the different historical roles of stakeholders lead to distinct assumptions about best practices and tools, which can be perceived as competitive rather than complementary. Finally, discussions of new cultural initiatives that require coordination across agencies, such as standing up rapid cultural response teams dedicated to helping secure national heritage or patrimonies in the aftermath of humanitarian disasters, also create new working relationships between the military and counterparts, which would benefit from substantial ground clearing. For these reasons, this conference seeks to open up a space for dialogue about military-culture efforts along the frontier of potential collaborations between military and non-military counterparts.

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