Cultural Identity by Bart Verschaffel
The phrase ‘cultural identity’ sounds almost like a pleonasm. Today, questions about the social significance and/or function of culture immediately link up with the theme of ‘identity’. It seems that in matters of culture someone’s identity is always involved, and every identity is interwoven with or based upon ‘culture’. If we consider the dominance of technical and instrumental rationality, with its international and atopic connotations and its (presupposed) tendency to erase individual characteristics or distinctions, it may hardly surprise us that cultural policy today seeks to protect or amplify identities that looked upon as perpetually weak or potentially threatened. Such an identity finds its roots in local contexts and specific traditions or in its so-called ‘own culture’.
Many important issues are involved here. Several aspects need to be clarified on a conceptual level and have to be contemplated with a certain critical distance. What does ‘culture’ signify in the expression ‘cultural identity’? An individual or a group of individuals becomes ‘someone’ or ‘something’ when he or it identifies with a particular ‘form of life’. This anthropological interpretation of the word takes a broad view on the notion of culture. No standards are established, and ‘culture’ cannot be considered as a value in itself. This broad interpretation of the world ‘culture’ includes also the specific ways of torture and of executing death sentences of a particular society or, to give another example, the way in which the windows of the houses open from the inside to the outside or vice versa: all these aspects belong to ‘culture’ or ‘our ways of living’. And it goes without saying that a society or a group is very much attached to its ‘form of life’ and will protect it as it will protect itself.
It is nevertheless true that – particularly in the context of cultural politics – the notion of ‘culture’ can also be interpreted in a more restricted way, namely as the collective noun for all the manifestations of man’s creative abilities, more particularly of (the) art(s). (It speaks for itself that the notion of art is open for interpretation, but even when we consider art on a broad level, we still cannot use it as a synonym for the anthropological interpretation of ‘culture’). ‘Culture’ interpreted as ‘art and spiritual life’ seems to belong to the culture or form of life of the modern, Western or westernized civilizations. This particular interpretation of the word ‘culture’ does establish certain standards: here culture is something essentially valuable although, even in Western society, it is not necessarily present. It is a social substructure or a field of activities that can or must be stimulated; it can also be protected or defended against other priorities or fields of interest, such as political, religious or economical matters. It is considered as a given fact that one can or cannot chose for art.
One of the foremost theoretical issues with practical consequences is the question in which way ‘culture’ (in the narrow sense of the word) belongs to ‘culture’ in the broad sense of the word, namely as a synonym for our form of life. More specifically one could ask in which way culture in the narrow, normative interpretation of the word - ‘ art’ in other words – is linked with culture in the broad sense of the word, and so with ‘identity’. This is an important question since it could be well possible that ‘art’ is at the same time very important for our ‘culture’, in other words, for our ‘identity’, w i t h o u t having any function in the so-called ‘strengthening of our culture’, unless we use the word ‘art’ uncharacteristically. For one cannot deny the fact that precisely artists and intellectuals raise questions like whether it is true that a ‘good’ identity m u s t be strong and cannot be ‘weak’, whether a ‘weak’ or unfocused identity is d a n g e r o u s, balancing on the edge of becoming ‘nobody’, and whether such an identity must or can be protect as ‘identity’ something which you can or must protect? And can art s e r v e this purpose?
There is more. One speaks easily of o u r identity and o u r culture. But who is this ‘we’ implied in the affirmation that at a principal level art plays an important part in our form of life. The nineteenth century notions of ‘people’, or ‘community’ as a ‘subject’, and the way in which identity used to be based upon the conglomerate or origin, heritage, tradition, language and (in most cases) land, has lost (at least intellectually) most of its most obvious validity. One cannot deny the fact that today much of the identity can no longer be called ‘cultural’ identity, if one still wants to cling to the narrow, restricted sense of the word ‘culture’. For a growing amount of people in our modern, western society, art and spiritual life (traditionally defined) is no part whatsoever of lives – except when it appears in a caricatured, perverted way: as a flag, a fetish, a name, a spectacle…
It is therefore possible under these circumstances, that art policy or cultural politics in general can consider the reinforcement of the ‘identity’ of a culture (now some prefer to use the word ‘region’) as a valid objective.
Leuven / Antwerpen
5/04/94
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