ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the bureaucracy that organizes the public administration of culture at national, sub-national and local levels in the United States (US). In the US, a good part of the cultural infrastructure and action in the cultural domains takes place outside of government, in the commercial and nonprofit sectors. Many functions of cultural administration in the US were innovated by nonprofits and only later were absorbed into government; some have remained in the nonprofit arena. In the initial formulation of cultural policy, The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization termed these existing entities "channels of cultural action." Although cultural policies tend to avoid explicitly defining culture, they are framed by implicit understandings of culture that shape the boundaries of what will be recognized as cultural policy proper. Cultural infrastructure and cultural domains form a framework to tidy up culture, so that it is possible to figure out how to go about trying to affect it.
