Seeing Culture Everywhere.

In 2001, we published an article in the German management journal Organisationsentwicklung, criticising the “intercultural communication” profession for perpetuating reductive views of cultural difference that, we argued, were often based on false premises and did not help reduce cultural misunderstandings and mistrust. Yehuda Elkana, rector of Central European University where Pál worked at the time, read the article and said: “Fine. You convinced me that their approach is counterproductive. But then what do you propose? Government officials, too, are told these days that culture matters – but they have no clue in what way, and they have no place to find out.” Stephan Breidenbach, Joana’s husband, long involved with German government policy making, made the same point. “How are they supposed to know better if nobody offers them an alternative’” he asked.

[1]) – and forced its major regional competitor, Hong Kong, to follow suit. The Hong Kong Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, said in his 2001 policy address[2]:

Fostering the “creative industries” – from fine art to fashion – as a vehicle of economic growth is a strategy that is now spreading from Singapore and Hong Kong to Shanghai and Peking. But the origin of this approach is in the United States, where since the early 2000s, an increasing number of city planners have followed the advice of urban guru Richard Florida that “cultural diversity” – including a mix of ethnicities and a gay scene – is necessary for creating that environment. Emphasizing diversity is now de rigueur for every city hoping to compete in the global market, from Austin, Texas, to Singapore, where the inflight menu cards of the national airline feature work by expatriate artists. Consequently, states are selectively liberalizing their immigration regimes to allow in a flow of highly skilled foreigners, even as they restrict the entry of other migrants and refugees.

The race for “creative cities” is one sign that economic planners of the 2000s treat culture as a form of capital – just as French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested in 1986. He defined it as the set of knowledge, attitudes and skills that give a person higher status in society. As desires and opportunities of social advancement, employment, capital accumulation and consumption diversify and expand beyond national borders, and as the goal of education shifts from abstract knowledge to universally marketable packages of habitus and skills, cultural capital – now understood not as a largely inherited set of class-related savoir vivre, as in Bourdieu, but as a toolkit for global living – gains in importance. The explicit or implicit assumption behind both the Australian backpacker ethos of “discovering different cultures” and the Chinese government’s exhortations to improve peasants’ “cultural quality” (Friedman, 2004) is that doing so increases the individual’s value in the “market of talent”. Increasingly, the goal of education – especially higher education – is seen as acquiring globally marketable skills rather than universally applicable knowledge. Part of this is a basic familiarity with “other cultures” – whose spokespeople do their best to emphasise their distinctiveness as a way to draw tourists, whether to a remote country or to an urban neighbourhood.

Becoming cosmopolitan globetrotters is no longer the Kantian promise of aesthetic pleasure in appreciating the foreign; parents and children now see “cross-cultural experiences” as linked to a good future life as manager or consultant. So universities compete in providing programmes with names like Semester at Sea or Global Leadership Programme. According to the Institute of International Education, almost 200 thousand Americans were studying abroad in 2003/04, up from 76 thousand ten years earlier. In particular, the number of those studying in China grew by 90% over the previous year (“U.S. Study Abroad Increases by 9.6%, Continues Record Growth[3]”). Yet the number of American students abroad is far below that of their Chinese peers. In the same academic year, fifty thousand new students from China went to Australia alone (Hugo, 2005).

If, twenty years earlier, Chinese students in the West had tended to be doing PhDs in science and engineering, now many of them were going abroad while in high school – and the quality of the school is often less important than the “intercultural experience”. Proficiency in English is, of course, very important, but so is the ability to navigate among “whities”. The rush for Chinese nannies for the children of New York executives, too, is about mastering interaction with the future’s superpower – not just linguistically but also “culturally”. Riding on the wave of this mutual obsession, international schools such as Yew Chung[4] – which has campuses in four mainland Chinese cities as well as in Hong Kong and the Silicon Valley – advertises itself with the slogan “Educating the Global Child” and promises to deliver an “education that leads our students to an inner transformation whereby they are both Eastern and Western”.

The rise of “symbol analysts” and the cultural turn.

The ascent of the economy of culture is part of a broader process: the rise of the group that Robert Reich (1992) called “symbol analysts,” people engaged in the manipulation – creation, explanation and distribution – of data, words and visual representations. These people, the ones “creative cities” compete for – consultants, lawyers, artists, software engineers, investment bankers, advertising executives, political analysts – produce goods and services that account for an increasing share of global consumption and wealth. They also wield tremendous influence in the interpretation of the world and in political and economic decision making as institutions of power devolve an increasing amount of responsibility for their decisions to “experts”. Such situations range from court rulings involving expertise on cultural norms of a defendant’s ethnic group to congressional hearings on foreign affairs, to reviews of proposals by research funding bodies, and to reports prepared for the European Union. Thus the market increasingly encroaches on both domains of policy that used to be limited to political elites or corporate boards and domains of knowledge production that used to be the sanctuary of scientists. This is related to an erosion of the authority of science as such and of natural science in particular, and to the democratization of the relation between scientists and the lay public.

Traditionally, policy makers – and the broader public – have seen science as a representation of objective reality, free from value components and expressed in a particular kind of formalised, structured language. Decision makers wishing to grasp social processes would likely turn to the kinds of work in social science that corresponded to these norms – modeled on the natural sciences – and showed society as operating within a framework of structured mechanisms that one could understand and even predict, if only one put sufficient good research into it. But the growing anti-elitism of liberal democracies, the general distrust of state authority that intensified in the 1960s, the perceived complicity of the natural sciences in the arms race, and the growing influence of environmentalist movements all contributed to challenging the privileging of science over other forms of knowledge. Demand for a democratic oversight over the class of experts was seconded by a growing number of social researchers who called into question the value free nature of scientific advice by claiming that scientific knowledge is itself powerfully shaped by cultural forces.

The declining influence of the sciences as ultimate arbiter of human dilemmas was inseparable from the rise of such cultural critique, resulting by the 1990s in a shift away from privileging “hard,” quantitative, economic explanations and towards foregrounding “soft,” cultural ones. This “cultural turn” was visible in public debate, but had an even more powerful effect within academic disciplines such as history, sociology, and geography, as well as economics, medicine, and even business studies. (In 2006/7 the University of Leipzig in Germany, for example, offers a course on “The Cultural Turn and Its Consequences for Physical Education” to its physical education students.) In a review of the “cultural turn” in the humanities, Peter N. Stearns points to how the inclusion of culture in research assumptions has enriched our understanding of the sense of smell, the history of emotions, the nature of illness, and gender roles in society among others (Stearns, 2003). As before, cultural explanations have to contend with biological ones; in fact, they have to do so in more areas than before, as advances in genetics, claiming to have discovered genes responsible for obesity[5] or human cooperation (Ridley, 1997) continue to reshape the boundary between biological determination and cultural learning. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that, in the general public, cultural explanations are now much more readily invoked to challenge the authority of “hard” science than twenty years ago, while, surprising as it is, “culture experts” are less likely to be challenged, say, on the customs of Iraq than physicists on the safety of nuclear reactors. “The punditocracy,” as anthropologist Bill Maurer writes, “are our modern day mythmakers” (comment on Besteman and Gusterson, 2005, dust jacket).

Civil rights.

The “cultural turn”, and indeed many of the processes we have outlined, would not have occurred without the emergence of the civil rights movement. From its inception in the 1950s and early 1960s United States, this movement developed from a struggle for “racial” equality based on ideals of universal rights and responsibilities into an ideology of asserting and celebrating cultural distinctiveness in the 1980s and 1990s, when the “politics of recognition” caused school curricula to be rewritten, and museums established to showcase “Black history” – but also, now, its Chicano, Asian-American, and Native American equivalents. The rigid bounding of ethnoracial categories, a unique heritage of 19^th-20^th century America institutionalized in the US Census, was now further solidified by turning it into a “heritage” to be cherished – resulting in greater identification with what previously were stigmatized ethnic labels. Thus, between 1970 and 1980, the population of American Indians in the United States grew from 800 thousand in 1970 to 2.5 million in 2000, a rate that can only be explained by more people identifying themselves as Indians. Marshall Sahlins points to the civil rights movement as being at the root of “the formation of … a culture of cultures,” as more and more groups, from American Indian “First Nations” to sexual subcultures, developed a new level of self-consciousness about their own way of life, discovering (and reinforcing and inventing) their own specificity vis-à-vis other groups in society (Sahlins, 1993).

Although what Dwora Yanow calls the “lumpy hyphen” – the creation of large, bounded ethnic categories like “Latino-American” (Yanow, 2002) – is unique to the United States, the effects of the politics of ethnic representation have been felt very widely. Canada and Australia first, and then some European states, adopted ideologies of “multiculturalism,” which stressed the right to cultural difference alongside the right to equal citizenship. In the international arena, organizations fighting against racism, for minority rights, and for the recognition of indigenous peoples have adopted the language of cultural distinctiveness in advancing their causes. Support for such groups – whether Gypsies in Romania or Dayaks in Borneo – often comes from North America, Western Europe, or from activists of the “global South,” and in order to be heard, their grievances must be articulated in the stylized language of cultural rights. Thus, the Ainu, the indigenous people of officially ethnically homogenous Japan, have successfully managed to revitalize their cultural identity since the 1970s by establishing tourist villages, in which not only Ainu food and crafts are produced and sold, but children are taught the Ainu language and traditions. In 1997 a Japanese court for the first time officially accorded the Ainu minority status, potentially opening the way for land claims and representation in central or local government (Morris-Suzuki, 1999).

How important a role culture plays for minority movements can also be seen from the story of a folklorist who was recently abducted by Khasi separatist rebels in the Indian state of Meghalaya and taken to a clandestine camp. “They asked him to stay there for two weeks to talk about folklore of the Khasis in order to inspire some sort of unity among the cadres (Kharmawphlang et al., 2004).

Desecularization.

The last great trend contributing to the culturalist phase is the desecularization of the world. Since the burning of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1989, religion has been steadily reclaiming the place in public and political spaces that it had lost during the rationalist era of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Evangelical Christianity and Islam in particular, but also other old and new religions, have been spreading rapidly and waging political claims in new arenas – from anti-abortion politics in Africa to Hindu mobilization in the diaspora and Falungong’s global war against the Chinese government. While the relationship of religion to cultural representation is a complicated one – many religious movements want to transcend cultural divisions, while others, like the Christian Right in the United States, argue against them for political reasons – in a number of cases religious authority has reasserted itself as cultural authority. Examples are found in Europe, where states dissatisfied with the politics of liberal multiculturalism are seeking religious figures able to speak for and exert power over “Muslim” constituencies, and in Iraq, where, based on a similar logic, religious divisions are taken for a synonym of ethnic groups and religious leaders are endowed with a self-fulfilling clout of influence.

The meanings of culture.

The fact that “culture” is increasingly frequently invoked does not mean that people mean the same thing by it. Until the 1980s, “culture” in everyday parlance referred mainly to the arts. Since the “cultural turn,” people have started talking about “gay culture”, “company culture” or “culture of poverty”. Western businessmen write bestsellers about “Confucian culture” in China while Chinese newspapers berate the “clique culture” of officials and write about “residential culture” in articles promoting upmarket apartments. In other words, while “culture” is still in use in its first sense as art (and science), it is now increasingly used to encompass all human behaviour that is not biologically determined. Although in principle such usage could refer to all of humankind, in practice it mostly constructs “culture as difference”, as a set of attributes that distinguishes one group of people from another. As Seyla Benhabib writes, “much contemporary cultural politics … is an odd mixture of the anthropological view of the democratic equality of all cultural forms of expression and the Romantic, Herderian emphasis on each form’s irreducible uniqueness” (Benhabib, 2002:3).

Even when used in this last, most common sense, “culture” refers to different entities for different people. Michael Schönhuth (2005:45), following Christoph Antweiler (2003:41), identifies four different units for which “culture” is applied to human groups, which vary highly in terms of scope and range. At all of these levels, culture is roughly linked to ethnicity – although based on highly conflicting and contested claims: