ABSTRACT
The first task facing the analyst of cultural policy is to understand what forms of culture fall within the remit of public policy and why. This is not, as sometimes assumed, the same as understanding what the term ‘culture’ means. Whether we take a broad view of culture as encompassing a whole way of life or a narrower one, referring to artistic activities alone, we can come to understand that not all cultural activities are likely to be the subject of cultural policy in the same fashion. The way the state interacts with, supports, represses or regulates different cultural forms is highly selective and contingent, and it is the task of this chapter to analyse how the ‘culture’ of cultural policy is determined. The definition of culture in most of the ways we currently use the
term emerged in the nineteenth century through two contrasting approaches: culture as a set of artistic practices or products, and culture as an anthropological signifying system marking human
society off from nature. In the first sense, associated with Victorian thinkers such as Mathew Arnold, culture is an idealised practice to which humans can and should aspire; it represents our better selves and can help us to re-think and indeed remake our world. Despite being published in the 1860s,1 these ideas of Arnold’s – about the civilising nature of art – continue to influence cultural policy and are part of its rationale over a century and a half later. The second, anthropological sense of the term culture, which can include ways of eating, dressing or worshipping, is generally not part of the remit of cultural policy in much of Europe and North and South America and societies such as Canada and Australia. In these cases, cultural policy tends to confine itself to culture in the sense of artistic activities; though what counts as artistic can be very broad and is deeply contested. The anthropological sense of culture – as a way of life – has however
remained influential, both in the discourse of ‘development,’ particularly as applied in post-colonial societies in the Global South, and as part of the rethinking of ‘culture’ that has taken place, partly under the influence of cultural studies. What is referred to as ‘intangible cultural heritage’, a broad group of phenomena which includes oral traditions and languages, rituals and even spiritual beliefs, is recognised in UNESCO’s framework for culture (see Chapter 6). Throughout the twentieth century and particularly since the 1940s, the story of cultural policy has been one of steady movement from a narrow focus on the high arts to one which encompasses a broader range of cultural practices, though it remains unlikely to cover all ‘ways of life’. The issues raised by using a very broad definition of culture as
way of life is, as various commentators point out (Gray 2010; Hesmondhalgh 2005; Looseley 1995; McGuigan 1996), that it is difficult to know where ‘culture’ ends and ‘everything else’ begins. This is difficult from an analytical point of view, but even more so from the point of view of public policy, which tends to require a bounded set of activities and understandings with which to engage. For the most part, what we understand by the culture of cultural policy is, as Storey (2006: 2) puts it, ‘the texts and practices whose principle function is to signify, to produce or to be the occasion for the production of meaning’.
