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The Hard and Soft of Cultural Diplomacy: Networks and Stories in Global Affairs

September 28, 2012 in Cultural diplomacy, Cultural Policy, Social Networks

Amy Zalman recently proposed that “soft power” – as a conceptual frame for understanding global politics – is too narrow and has outlived its usefulness. Her provocation generated fruitful responses and suggests that we might be ready to stop treading water and move beyond our decade-long fixation with the term to new and more constructive places. Zalman rightly points to the costs of the partial privileging of the “soft” (e. g. cultural narratives, symbols, stories) at the expense of the “hard” (e. g. economic or military force), insisting that these two cannot be pried apart, even analytically, without diminishing appreciation for how power in fact works.

Complementing Zalman is Craig Hayden’s additional suggestion that her critique helps to shift attention to the myriad ways soft and hard power are connected and simultaneously expressed through the continued proliferation of diverse kinds of (often non-state) networks. The increasingly variegated facts of Castells’s “network society” make clear that networks mediate the distribution of meaning and value in ways demanding our attention.

Conjoined, these arguments present a compelling picture. They suggest the need to reframe our analysis of global politics in ways transcending distinctions of “soft” and “hard” while better accounting for the many entanglements of the “symbolic” with the “material.” This is particularly congenial to me, trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, since this discussion has been front and center in the discipline for some time. I too have promoted doing so in my own recent writing on cultural diplomacy.

Together, one question these discussions encourage is: How are stories meaningfully distributed across different kinds of networks and to what effect? Instead of inferring cultural consensus when identifying specific groups, for the practice of public diplomacy such questions help us to a more realistic appraisal of the variety of cultural accounts among people otherwise related.

At this juncture we can offer the inverse of Zalman’s argument about soft power: too often, ever more ubiquitous network analyses seem to privilege the “hard” over the “soft” to the detriment of our understanding of how networks work. Certainly in security policy and studies this is the case. We have seen a flood of so-called link analyses, where the game is always to identify connections between nodes in different networks, or who is connected to whom and how. The emphasis is upon the importance of the “hard” social facts of the shape and distribution of connections within and across networks, in order to identify key “information nodes,” “information brokers,” or, in the War on Terror, the “bad guys.”

Ann-Marie Slaughter’s recent call for more attention from U.S. foreign policy decision-makers to the ubiquity of “network centrality” is timely. But, while she notes in passing network “nutrients” – flows of goods, services, expertise, funding, and political support – she is most interested in the density of connections and positioning of networks. Likewise, a recent study in Nature on social influence across networks of Facebook users concluded that more frequent interactions between friend pairs – “strong ties” – have a much greater influence than do “weak ties” on a person’s behavior. Again, it is all about the facts of connection. We can further note how behavior, composed of empirically observable actions, is prioritized over cultural meaning or belief.

More attention has been given to identifying people, their behavior, their connections, and network nodes than has been given to how information is distributed across networks or what these symbols, values or stories mean to network participants.

The New York Times recently ran a story about researchers who used the computational tools of social network analysis to assess the historical or fictional sources of well-known epics like the Iliad. In other words, they were examining the relation between epic narratives and networks. Their analysis privileged connections that were highly assortative – that is, with high frequencies of people associating with people like themselves – as one key “real-life indicator” corroborating an epic’s likely historical origin. Here and most everywhere else “hard” trumps “soft”.

Assortativity is a useful principle in epidemiology because it helps to explain the behavior of diseases as they spread through a population. But we are too prone to use viral metaphors to describe the movements of information, ideas, or beliefs through networks. Despite our fascination with social media technologies, we should not assume that a contagion model best characterizes the relationship of stories to networks. Instead, this might be a case of misplaced concreteness, to use A. N. Whitehead’s useful term.

Significant work has been done on so-called “knowledge-based networks” and their relevance for public diplomacy. One case is Mai’a Cross’s analysis of networks of policy decision-makers working toward security integration in the European Union. She shows how greater internal network cohesion increases network influence. For the EU case, cohesion includes the ways these decision-makers share expertise, common cultural and professional norms, and regular participation in the same meetings.

Assortative thinking encourages demonstrations of how like seeks like, while the effectiveness of knowledge-based networks is understood to turn on shared commonalities, notably, of culture. But exclusive attention to the social facts of connectivity through networks – rather than how people invest network participation with significance – means we assume that the information, knowledge, symbols, or stories that circulate through networks are shared in the same ways and mean the same things. But this is a poor assumption. Social solidarity (or, shared network participation) does not require cultural consensus.

What about when cultural information – like stories – is unevenly distributed through a given network? We are in dire need of a sharper and more grounded appreciation of how compelling ideas, values, or cultural meanings travel through social arrangements of people and how people differently relate to them. This means paying greater attention to variable interpretations of cultural information across networks beyond the shared facts of membership in networks.

Uneven distribution can take the form of stories that mean different things to different people in different locations across a given network. In the 1990s, while conducting research on political change in Bolivia, I interviewed dozens of men about the start of their political careers. Many cited the decisive influence of radicalized high school teachers who encouraged them into joining the Bolivian Communist Party in the 1970s. These men still consorted as members of informal political networks, connected by shared political and economic ties, relationships of kinship, friendship and heritage, as well as long hours spent in each other’s company. But many cited the party’s ideological intransigence – especially its derision of the relevance of cultural identity in largely indigenous Bolivia – to explain their departure from it. While carrying over much of the party’s discourse, they were swayed to other forms of political participation more consistent with their indigenous heritage. While each told the “story of the Left” in Bolivia to me and to one another, they did not interpret it in the same ways.

Resonant stories, particularly political narratives, can mean many things to those perpetuating them. Even “strong ties” in identified networks don’t guarantee cultural consensus. In a climate of policy and research where our attention to networks is increasing, but where this work is focused on the use of computational tools to identify their shape and constituent parts, we might be neglecting the problem of cultural meaning in networks. And so we risk having little insight into the sense network participants make out of their own participation. If we confuse the facts of sharedness with a potentially nonexistent interpretive consensus, we risk missing the import of the story.

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

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“Culture” in the Science Fictional Universe of “Big Data”

June 4, 2012 in Applied cultural research, Cultural Policy, Culture and the Securityscape

As the Obama Administration’s new “Big Data Research and Development Initiative” has made clear, the “big data” era is officially upon us. The term – “big data” has been used in multiple ways, but most generally refers to the avalanche of “raw data” generated by the internet and other new kinds of data-capturing sensor and digital technologies. Or, as one big data guru more pithily put it, it is “all the stuff we do online” – and more. With the “big data revolution” comes unflagging optimism regarding more comprehensive methods for the collection of vast new stores of technologically-produced data, enabling the pursuit of previously unanswerable questions, and carrying the promise of breakthroughs in how we access and understand the information composing our world. Time will tell.

The turn to “big data” represents a potentially exciting set of developments along multiple frontiers of advanced supercomputing, new software tools, other information collection technologies such as GIS, database management systems, and massive data sets, such as the exponentially expanding corpus of information generated by Web 2.0 social media. Government funding has followed a corporate lead, where in recent years the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon have turned a pursuit of “big data” into a major business proposition focused on gathering increasingly nuanced information about consumer behavior to better service and target customers. Making sense of the implications of all this will preoccupy us for some time.

Techno-Optimism

As the press release from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy explains, “big data” projects hold great promise for “scientific discovery, environmental and biomedical research, education, and national security.” The very early returns on “big data”-derived research are already turning heads, from predicting political upheavals like the Arab Spring, market volatility, or new epidemic outbreaks, to mapping emerging cultural trends or the evolution of languages.

And the attraction of “big data” hits a number of sweet spots. Most generally, “big data” is now carrying the torch for the whiz bang potential of the next Silicon Valley-derived infotech revolution for enhancing “innovation” – whatever that might specifically mean. For universities, it is a readily available advert for a more technologically-enabled higher education, which also happily relieves budgetary pressures to expand the physical holdings of campus libraries and other facilities.

“Big data” also has mass appeal: leveraging big medical data promises to help fix our broken healthcare system by making it less expensive; it has been presented as the newest super tool to combat global poverty; it also helps to power the imagination of urban planners hoping to incentivize new creative economies; for the security community, it beckons by offering “crystal ball”-like certainties of greater information dominance and more precise prediction; and in the spirit of C. P. Snow, it confers legitimacy on the so-called digital humanities in a cost-conscious era, as an apparent collaborative bridge for the “hard” scientists to bring more rigor to their colleagues in the humanities and “soft” (or social) sciences. Among other frontiers.

The “big data” train has left the station, with all the concomitant hyperbole and hoopla that so often appears to accompany promising new developments in science heralding paradigm shifts in research. However, from my perspective missing from the enthusiastic rush to adoption is a critically grounded accountability regarding what big data advocates are claiming as opposed to actually doing: attention not only to the benefits but also the costs, to its potential but also its limits. Unrelenting techno-futurist optimism does not nurture this.

Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, I have been most interested in how “big data” has intersected with efforts to better leverage sociocultural information to different ends. Most notably, this includes the Google-powered development of the new “field” of culturomics, elliptically defined by some of its founding practitioners as “the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture.”

This sounds promising, if not altogether clear. The novelty of culturomics is its potential “to investigate cultural trends quantitatively” by generating previously hidden “suitable data” from hitherto unavailable massive databases. Despite this potential, breathless claims about the unprecedented access offered by culturomics to our own cultural history or for the Isaac Asimov-style prediction of future cultural events have derailed more grounded attention to what the “culture” of culturomics actually corresponds to and what kind of knowledge it provides. More on culturomics presently.

Critically Engaging Data

In this era of teraflops, terabytes, and cloud computing, big data represents the future. But the field has so far also displayed a notable lack of interest in addressing what the term fundamentally references, what it’s relationships might be to other sorts of disciplinary and scientific pursuits, what these related developments might helpfully enable but – perhaps more importantly and most neglected – what “big data” either obscures or cannot meaningfully address.

The biggest problem with our conversation so far about the potential of “big data” efforts is that we are spending too much time enamored of the “big” – the prospect of the unprecedented and vast volume and scale of the collection, organization, and processing of mostly digital information, primarily through new data mining applications that rapidly amass unique digital data sets – and virtually no time thinking about what the “data” part might consist of – what the data essentially are. Often exhibiting a naïve digital positivism vis-à-vis “data,” in many ways the turn to “big data” is more like a return to the past. But we need to be much more scrupulous about what we mean by “data” here. What, in short, are the data of “big data” and what, basically, is their value?

What we mean by “data” for emerging “big data” fields like culturomics is an important question for a number of reasons. Big data projects are notably cross- or interdisciplinary. For example, the affiliated researchers at Harvard’s Cultural Observatory, where culturomics has been pioneered, include: several computer scientists and Google software engineers, mathematicians, evolutionary biologists, and one doctoral student in history.

Absent from the team is balance on the cultural end, or a range of disciplinary expertise likely to sustain fruitfully interdisciplinary back-and-forth, say, that might usefully problematize specific, perhaps directly competing, frameworks, perspectives, and characteristic forms of producing and evaluating knowledge, across different communities of computational and cultural research. Understandably, most computer scientists are at best only passingly aware of the characteristic methods and relationships to data among colleagues from the social sciences or humanities.

Its apparent “interdisciplinarity” is a big part of the enthusiasm the turn to “big data” has generated. Big data projects using computational techniques often involve carrying over methods from one disciplinary environment (e. g. the computer sciences) and applying them to often long-standing problems in other disciplines such as economics, hydrology, or in the applied humanities. Sometimes this is a good fit. But sometimes it is not. And, it is often hard to tell, since big data researchers often treat data questions as straightforward, with data presented as unproblematically readily available to collect and to manipulate.

However, when a computer scientist develops a new data mining tool to systematically harvest often vast quantities of online digital information, s/he is not simply collecting data. S/he is also carrying over specific assumptions about what “data” is, how it is identified and recognized, where it sits in a larger context or field of endeavor, how it is determined by an encompassing information ecology of concern to computer scientists, how it can be made legibly available for analysis, and what sorts of conclusions can be derived from it. We might say that this data carries a particular signature identifying it with its disciplinary source — a signature with technical, methodological, and meaningful consequences.

When asked about this, the Harvard team’s response was, “It’s irrelevant. What matters is the quality of the data…” But “data” is not all of a piece, varying simply in quality and quantity. Particular disciplines understand their knowledge production and their relationship to data in often starkly different – or even incompatible — ways. And culturomics relies upon a conception of data that makes particular sense for computer scientists but is not necessarily consistent with the ways different social sciences deal with the cultural data with which they work.

Different disciplines have historically specific relationships to data, and which significantly express that discipline’s unique development and characteristic pursuit of problems. And “data” are not self-evident, universally fungible, straightforwardly equivalent or comparable across these pursuits, say, in the same way as we might think of the circulation of currency in the global economy. But this is exactly how the NSF is talking about the “big data revolution.”

The data of “big data” are in fact a particular kind of data: largely digital in nature. And this has definite consequences. Early adopters of the techniques of culturomics are so far spending little time with the implications of this, instead opting to promote the seemingly limitless potential of such techniques. In part, the reason is because for them questions about data are more often than not technical problems to be solved (e. g. about building the platform architecture, writing computer codes and algorithms, or compatibility with one or another digital database) instead of more fundamental questions about the identity of “data,” the sources of knowledge, and – for culturomics – the relationship of culture to meaning.

Simply “plugging in” data collected and understood for use by one community of practitioners might, from another’s point of view, simply add up to: “garbage in, garbage out.” This problem can quickly lead to fundamental misunderstandings about what is being done with such work and about the potential it offers for better understandings of cultural questions.

Culturomics and Data

As the “big data” trend gains momentum, the concerns that have been raised have primarily revolved around two issues: privacy and transparency. On the one hand, primarily in the U.S. legal debates have focused on the potential negative implications of the increased vulnerability of personal information as a result of the tremendous improvements in online data mining and technological surveillance. On the other hand, researchers have pointed to the lack of public availability of these massive data sets, often because they are corporately owned, which makes restudies or assessments of results based on these data almost impossible.

These are legitimate and important concerns, deserving attention. But, in themselves, they do not add up to a nearly robust enough discussion of these data. Culturomics is not the only “big data” front to apply comparable techniques to trying to make sense of sociocultural knowledge. We can also point to the rapid growth of attention to computational sociocultural modeling and simulation on the part of the security sector, which uses similar techniques. Given this incredible enthusiasm, much more critical scrutiny of these tools is required so that users can better determine their appropriate niche.

For the universe of culturomics, if we were briefly to characterize its “data” – to identify its particular disciplinary signature – we might point to a variety of factors. First, culturomics pursues a quantitative content analysis but on a colossal scale, using automated forms of collection derived from algorithms – computer code – designed to look for, and to sort through, particular properties of information already identified as a relevant data set, like Google Books, financial market indicators, twitter feeds, or country surveys. Its goal, in other words, is to record the frequencies or associations of key words and phrases over time and across these already structured sets.

A “culturome” (yes, arrived at via analogy to the “genome”) has, therefore, been described as “the mass of structured data that characterizes a culture.” Like a “gene” or a “meme,” it seems to be largely taken for granted that the data of culturomics are standard, and comparable, bits of information. This claim is controversial for a contemporary sociocultural anthropology engaged with a diversity of forms of cultural expression, and for which cultural meanings are not generated in just one way.

Digitally, the data of culturomics largely are standard bits of information: they are frequency counts of 0’s and 1’s, that is, variables processed according to particular search and classification criteria that are themselves written into the search algorithm of the data mining phase of work. And yet, in the results stage, these variables are re-presented as “data,” but with an empirical and even positivist sensibility. They are presented as if preexistent “stuff” out there in the world waiting to be extracted, processed, and explained. This is a sleight-of-hand. They are in fact “variables.”

For the case of culturomics we might point to a close, even closed, relationship between a specific data mining and processing tool and the data it generates. Any work with Google Books, including Google’s N-gram viewer – created to allow researchers to generate frequency counts and distribution curves of words or phrases from the Google Books archive – of course ignores non-written, non-published words, and all non-linguistic expressions of culture. It is also limited to those books which have been scanned and digitized (approximately 4% of all published books), and works only where a book has been digitized with adequately extractable metadata tags (e. g. indicating publishing date, author, genre, etc.). Too, the Google Books project has been limited by other prevailing factors, such as legal limitations upon public dissemination presented by intellectual property restrictions.

Why, then, would we even suppose that any results from a culturomics study using Google Books could “roughly represent the larger culture that produced it”? Or, more ridiculously, why are we hearing talk about the promise of culturomics to help identify “power laws for culture”? Books are particular kinds of cultural artifacts not simply ciphers for them. But experts seem willing to suspend disbelief. Part of this suspension includes a lack of attention to the ways that culturomics data are notably prefigured – even determined – by the technical choices made, the platforms used, the algorithmic codes written to mine the data, as well as the digital availability and legibility of the already-formatted data in the first place.

Another way to say this is that, even as researchers treat culturomics data as interchangeable, we might suggest that the data of culturomics more accurately express the world view of culturomics. Culturomics researchers have acknowledged that their work is not intended to replace existing varieties of cultural analysis. But they refer only to the “close reading of texts,” presumably the activity of historians, literary critics, some semioticians or cultural studies scholars.  This is a kind of interpretive work also conversant with the largely digital textual landscape with which culturomics is concerned, but in no way exhaustive of other cultural research methods and kinds of interpretive attention. Minimally, we need more regular reminders of the partiality of such projects.

Culturomics: Market Trend

One of the techniques culturomics researchers are using is “tone analysis” or “tone mining.” The object is to establish whether a particular word, phrase, or text possesses a positive, negative, or neutral tone. Terms like tone, mood, style, or texture have long been mainstays of the lexicon of literary criticism, in particular for the “new critics” inspired by the work of I. A. Richards. Tone has also come to inform other interpretive approaches, including contemporary attention to “voice.” Often associated with the work of Michael Bakhtin, such work is distinguished by attention to the dialogic interactions between a speaker in a text and multiple other points of view, for which any particular utterance is always multi-voiced. In other words, tone has been a doorway for appreciating the ways that texts are variously embedded in and animate different social and cultural contexts.

But culturomics treats tone as a “metric,” which can be turned into computable numeric data. A recent project funded in part by NSF’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment program used a database from the Open Source Center and Summary of World Broadcasts of approximately 100 million news articles between 1979 and 2011 to measure shifts in the “global news tone,” which retroactively appears to forecast the recent Arab Spring. Such forecasting tricks are impressive.

But it is exactly at this juncture that much more scrutiny of what is involved in “tone mining” (also called “sentiment” or “opinion mining”) is needed, if we hope to come to terms with what such forecasting or trend data in fact mean in cultural terms. Here it is important to understand where this computational attention to tone comes from – what the genealogy of this kind of data is.

Amazon, among others, pioneered the proliferation of digital apps which transmit an increasing variety and volume of consumer preference data back to retailers. And for several years now many Fortune 500 companies have utilized tone mining to monitor news coverage and social media activity associated with their products. These companies, of course, have an interest in learning as much as possible about what consumers are saying about their products and in identifying new demographics. Most often they would like to be able to map or to anticipate consumer responses to particular products.

The work of data mining for tone, sentiment or opinion – incorporated into so-called culturomics 2.0 – basically works like this: 1. First, identify precompiled dictionaries of “positive” and “negative” words against which other digital texts can be compared and scored; 2. Develop an algorithm as the basis for an automated computational method for mining tone data; 3. Record frequencies of these properties across so-called “opinionated texts,” as comparable items that compose an already “structured” online database or archive; 4. Assign a “value” to each so that it can used as a variable to plot trend data; 5. For culturomics, take a leap of faith by treating these plots as meaningfully indicators of cultural trends of one sort or another, often spanning decades or centuries.

However, in the enthusiasm for culturomics we have been too quick to shake off the origins or history of these data. They are certainly not “raw data” of some sort. They are, instead, specific artifacts of digital business practice. Attention to “tone” or “sentiment” – as data – works well if you are invested in trying to figure out peoples’ preferences. But its meaningful or representative relationship to culture, or as any sort of expression of culture, requires much more unpacking and qualification than we are getting so far.

In interdisciplinary terms, this kind of quantitative knowledge about culture (read: products) might not be usefully complementary to other forms of cultural research, data, or analysis. It might simply be an entirely different sort of information, for which use of the word – “culture” or field “culturomics” – is in fact misleading and unconstructive.

I have emphasized briefly some of the ways that tone mining generates not “data” but a very particular kind of data significantly prefigured by the technological architecture of the tools used, organization of existing digital databases, and computer code supporting such tools. These are preconditions that queer the game, as it were, as doorways encouraging certain kinds of attention to information while rendering other kinds illegible or marginal. In their very form, we might say, culturomics data already answer the possible questions to ask.

But there’s more. Culturomics relies on an alarmingly consumerist, or neoliberal, theory of meaning, for which tone or sentiment is the product of choices by cultural agents (originally, consumers), only insofar as they take the form: pro/con, either/or, positive/negative, or similar variant. This makes perfect sense if you want to know what people think of a toaster or if you want to record distributions of “thumbs up” among Facebook or Twitter users – after all, the impetus for collecting such information in the first place.

Contesting Culture, Data, Meaning

The “culture” of culturomics expresses the organization of available, countable, compilable information, which can be systematically extracted from digitizable texts like books, newspapers, maps, and twitter feeds. In this way culturomics is itself an often very creative exercise in selective choice-making. But it is not in any way describing the shapes of previously undescribable macro-cultural landscapes.

Whatever “culture” is, to proceed as if it can be assembled from discrete and comparable units derived from algorithmically-assigned “values” of machine-processed digital information is to emphasize very particular structured properties available for a technically and commercially specific prior purpose. And it equates culture with consumer choice. But to reduce the meaning of cultural trends to the prodigious mass of opinion data generated online by consumers is to grossly reduce what “culture” is to a narrow market calculus. We are better off leaving the question of the sources for cultural meaning open-ended.

Despite frequent assertions to the contrary, “more – and better – data” does not automatically lead to “more robust results.” We need to temper our techno-futurist optimism with basic questions: What is meant by cultural data in the first place? What is significant about frequency counts of cultural “stuff”? How do we attribute meaning to cultural data? And what is their relationship to real-world referents? Among other relevant questions. Such a constructively skeptical approach should inform “big data”-type projects of all sorts.

Some early critiques of culturomics have complained that it cannot address the humanist “search for meaning.” But I have suggested that, with their focus on the interpretation of texts, such concerns are still located well within the culturomics world view. They represent a latter day revival of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” debate about science and the humanities, which sets up a goal of interdisciplinarity that assumes a pride of place for the technologically-enabled “sciences” (specifically, computer science) to make sense of the world.

Developments like culturomics have intriguing potential. But the claims associated with them – in this case about “culture” – can obfuscate and confuse. Sociocultural anthropologists also aspire to make sense of cultures. They typically do this ethnographically, and where cultural meanings are not simply latent and extractable, but instead emergently negotiated with counterparts (people we encounter “in the field” who we used to call “informants”). The data are usually multivocal, polysemic and perspectival, and not simply reducible to a pro/con or either/or-type choice.

The often serendipitous open-endedness of ethnography also contrasts with the technological and other prefigurements of the method of culturomics. More proximate to different specific contexts of meaning-making, ethnography is likely better located to apprehend emergent ground truths, other cultural points of view, and the diverse ways difference travels through the world. It is not clear at all that culturomics is even compatible with, let alone complementary to, ethnographic apprehensions of culture. And this raises serious questions about the celebratory interdisciplinarity with which big data projects continue to be met.

Note: This post first appeared on the blog site Ethnography here: http://www.ethnography.com/2012/06/culture-in-the-science-fictional-universe-of-big-data/

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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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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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