Idea Transcript
THEMATIC REPORT: CULTURAL DYNAMICS: INHERITANCE AND IDENTITY
Working Group: Professor Joep Leerssen (Chair), University of Amsterdam Dr. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin,University College Cork Professor Przemyslaw Urbanczyk, Polish Academy of Sciences Drs. Jantine Beuvens (Secretary), University of Amsterdam
HERA Deliverable 6.2.1. November 2006
INTRODUCTION
Background Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) is a network and partnership between national funding agencies for the humanities. The Consortium has 14 partners and two sponsoring partners, all of which are intertwined with their own national research communities. In addition, the European Science Foundation (ESF) offers a forum of 31 research councils and acts as a panEuropean member in HERA. The HERA Consortium benefits from the networking experience gained over many years through the ESF Standing Committee for the Humanities (SCH). The European Network of the Research Councils in the Humanities (ERCH) established in 2002 brought the partners to closer and more extensive collaboration. The aims of ERCH networking were to promote strategic cooperation and exchange of information between the research councils in the humanities. This collaboration in turn led to the establishment of HERA. The main needs of the partner countries during the period preceding HERA have been very different and thus, it has been very difficult to set priorities. However, the overall strategic objective shared by the organisations is the promotion of research of the highest quality. An outline of HERA and its objectives can be found on the project website www.heranet.info, and the project work involved is fully described in the Description of Work section. The objectives of HERA are: • •
To stimulate transnational research cooperation within the humanities To enable the humanities to play an appropriate and dynamic role in the ERA and within EU Framework Programmes • To overcome fragmentation of research in the humanities • To advance new and innovative collaborative research agendas • To improve cooperation between a large number of research funding agencies in Europe • To attract more funding to research in the humanities by raising the profile of the humanities
Scope and Aims of HERA Task 6.2 In the field of the humanities, lack of shared knowledge of national priorities and plans is one of the most obvious obstacles to planning transnational research activities. Within the framework of HERA, the overall aim of Work Package 6 is to provide and analyse information on current national research interests and priorities within the humanities and thus develop a solid knowledge base for future decision-making. HERA Work Package 6 consists of two interconnected tasks. The first task, completed in December 2005, was to map research priorities in the humanities. This mapping exercise focused on the strengths and the cutting edge of presently funded research within the humanities as well as on new and emerging fields of research. The mapping exercise did not only cover HERA partner countries, but through the ESF also aimed at ensuring wider coverage in Europe. The results were presented in a mapping report European Survey of Research Priorities in the Humanities. In the report, twelve themes were identified. The report was approved by the HERA Network Board in its meeting in
London on 9 December 2005. The mapping report formed a basis for the Board’s decision-making on the further investigation of five themes. In the same meeting, the following collated themes were selected: • • • • •
Past into Future: Creation of Europe on the Basis of Cultural Heritages and National Identities Values, Beliefs and Ideologies as Forces behind the Changing Europe Understanding and Misunderstanding: Cognition, Mind and Culture Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation The Human Factor in Technology, Globalisation and Environmental Issues
Task 6.2 is based on the outcome of the mapping exercise and on the Network Board’s agreement on the thematic areas, each of which were further discussed by an international working group. The working groups, each consisting of a chair, a rapporteur and 2–3 members, were selected through a consultation process implemented jointly by the Academy of Finland and the ESF. At the first stage, HERA partners and SCH member organisations were asked to provide suggestions to working group chairs. Once the chairs were selected and approved by the HERA Network Board, they negotiated the composition of the groups with the Academy. As the themes of each group were expansive and interdisciplinary in nature, the groups were composed of experts with a broad field of interest and experience in conducting similar projects. On the other hand, fresh insights and proven track records of publications were held in esteem. The tasks of the rapporteurs included, for example, data collecting and drafting of reports. In practice, however, they participated actively in the discussions and contributed greatly to the substance itself. The group meetings were arranged and coordinated by the Academy of Finland in cooperation with HERA partner organisations in countries hosting the meetings. All groups but one met at least once in its entirety. Several groups also had meetings between the chair and the rapporteur. Due to the multinational nature of the groups, however, most of the communication had to be done via email.
The nature of the thematic reports The assignment of the working groups was to draft reports describing their specific thematic area, identifying strengths and weaknesses as well as giving recommendations on relevant research questions and themes for joint research activities. Bearing in mind the time-span of the project and the broad nature of the themes in question, it becomes clear that the reports cannot act as exhaustive descriptions of research conducted within the selected areas. Rather, the reports should be read as informed insights into the state of the art in those areas. As such, they should inform strategic decisions to demarcate joint research activities within certain topical areas and, above all, to arouse inspiration within the research community. It also needs to be underlined that each report is an outcome of a process in which the national and pan-European research funding organisations have consulted the scientific community, not only in defining the themes themselves, but also in finding experts to write the reports. Therefore, it may be useful to make the reports available not only to the funding agencies of humanities research in Europe, but also to other research policy developing organisations. The dissemination of the reports more widely may enhance the visibility and standing of the humanities in European research policy.
1 CULTURAL DYNAMICS: INHERITANCE AND IDENTITY The preparation of this thematic report was entrusted by HERA to an ad-hoc com mittee chaired by Joep Leerssen, Professor of M odern E uropea n Literature at the Un iversity of Amsterdam . The com mittee also included Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Statutory Lecturer in Folklore and Ethnology at University College Cork, and Przemyslaw Urbanczyk, Professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The c omm ittee prepared this report by ga thering informa tion from the relevan t quarters across Europe, by scrutizining current research projects across Europe that are thematically germane to the topic of “Cultural Dynamics”, and by assessing the theoretical and methodological state of affairs in their own respective discip lines. C ontacts w ere conducted mo stly by e-m ail. A me eting of the com mittee wa s held in Amsterdam on 29 June, in which the findings and perspectives were discussed and institutional and contextual informa tion o n the HE RA fram ework was give n by Ku staa Multam äki a nd An nem arie B os. P relim inary draft versions of this thematic report were exchanged and discussed among committee members by e-mail over the mo nths of Ju ly an d A ugust.
0. PREAMBLE Culture is like the weather. It affects all of us, but moves across the map freely. Like the weather, culture belongs nowhere and to no-one. Like the weather, culture is never wholly predictable, yet at the same time it can be analysed and understood: as a dynamic system. The study of the dynamics of culture is timely, even urgent, specifically in the European context; and it needs to be undertaken at a European, transnational level. The idea that culture and cultural dynamics can be studied on a single country-by-country basis is misguided: almost like a meteorological service that would only study weather systems once they enter into the national airspace. What is proposed here is a programme for the transnational study of cultural dynamics, defined here as the interaction, over time, between cultural inheritance and collective identity. All culture comes to us from the past, as a diverse and changing complex of traditions, heirlooms, memories and ongoing practices. Our appropriation of that cultural inheritance, in all its diversity, reflects and affirms our collective identity and situates us in a world of differences and choices, exchanges and conflicts. Our cultural choices and traditions – language, religion, manners and customs, history and collective memories, heritage, the value we attach to certain landscapes and public spaces – all this defines who ‘we’ are as societies and nations. As often as not the resulting collective identities are contested, multifarious, debated – much as our cultural choices and preferences are contested, multifarious and debated. That is what is here described as cultural dynamics. Societies can maintain, change or even in some cases lose their identity over time, depending on how transgenerational cultural patterns are appropriated, modified, rejected or disrupted. This interaction between culture and collective identity is so fundamental to the way societies develop over time, that it seems to occur spontaneously, unreflected and automatically. Also, in political debate, it seems to be taken for granted, and the rhetoric of ‘culture’ and ‘identity’
2 is gaining increasing political importance without the terms being properly understood. A proper, informed understanding of what those terms stand for is now a matter of social and political urgency; on the basis of important scholarly work done over the last few decades, the underlying patterns of cultural dynamics can be identified, studied and understood. Two reasons make the transnational study of cultural dynamics in Europe necessary and promising. One is the increasing importance of cultural debate in the identity politics of the nation-state and of Europe (§1 below); the other lies in the remarkable recent scholarly developments in this area (§2 below). Between them, these two factors open promising perspectives for a scientific programme on cultural dynamics with considerable political and civic value (§3 below). How and why this should be tackled at European level is set forth in §4. (By way of an appendix, §5 will offer clarifications on the concepts of culture and identity as discussed in this report. §6 will give bibliographical references to authors and works mentioned in the course of this report.)
3 1. TOPICALITY : Cultural dynamics, identity politics, the nation-state, Europe European states traditionally claim a ‘national’ basis: they are nation-states. They incorporate a nationality, with its attendant language, social habits, traditions and historical memories, in short: its culture. This rootedness of the European state in a constituent nationality has become a dominant principle in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that is to say: as part of the European move towards modernity. Now, however, at the opening of the twenty-first century, the ideal of the nation-state is subject to debate. Regional and ethnic minorities are making their voice heard against the national ‘master narrative’. Border disputes and mixed-culture areas, from Ulster to the Balkans, continue to be unassimilated factors in the modular ideal of a Europe of nationstates. Both the ongoing process of European integration and the end of the Cold War have resulted in a de-nationalization and regionalization of the political map of Europe. Moreover, Europe’s modernity project is now at a new juncture. Globalization and global mobility are creating multicultural and multi-ethnic societies everywhere; recent communication patterns (mass media, internet) are triggering the development of a ‘network society’ and causing increasing individualization. Europe is moving towards a ‘liquid modernity’ (Zygmunt Bauman, 2000) or ‘second modernity’ (Ulrich Beck, 1992). The cultural cohesion of the ‘nation-state’ is, in these circumstances, no longer a given. Cultural clashes and cultural/ethnic conflicts are accordingly on the rise in many European countries. The state is still the main sponsor of cultural traditions and heritage: by means of education, by providing an infrastructure (academic research, museal and archival conservation and display), and by virtue of its guardianship of public space with its heirlooms, buildings, city-scapes and landscapes. But the state is nowadays buffeted by a tumultuous and contentious debate on what ‘culture’ means, to whom it belongs, and whom it includes or exludes. Culture and identity, culture and citizenship, culture and social inclusion or exclusion, are now far more heavily invested questions than they were even a few decades ago. These topics are addressed almost daily in the media, most urgently by interested groups and concerned citizens, and in terms of conflicting opinions and conflicting interests. In this situation, a scholarly, dispassionate and multi-national calibration of the role of culture in public life and in collective identity is needed. Not only is such an approach needed at the level of individual countries, it is also a concern for European countries jointly, under a European, transnational aegis. Europe as a whole has traditionally been viewed as a locus of diversity, a mere container term for different cultural traditions. Accordingly, the process of European integration has limited itself strictly to pragmatic issues and to the spheres of fiscal, infrastructural, economic and legal regulation. However, although the Treaty of Maastricht (1993) still explicitly excluded the cultural sphere from the European integration process, developments since then have turned the European debate from a civic, political and economic one into a cultural one. The
4 accession and candidature of new or prospective member states has triggered fundamental questions concerning the reach and limit of Europe as a territory and as an underlying concept. The increasingly multi-ethnic composition of European societies, and the initiative towards a European Constitution, have re-opened old debates concerning Church and State. The emergence of islamism worldwide, and conflicts in the Middle East specifically, have repositioned Europe globally in an uneasy middle position as a Western power alongside, but not quite identical with, America. The identity and position of ‘Europe’ – a term which, while still used in contradictory meanings, is used increasingly as an autonomous and self-evidently meaningful concept – is increasingly defined in moral and cultural terms: as a continent with long historical memories, conscious of the need for the reconciliation of national differences, and with a painful awareness of the treacherous pitfalls and tragic complexities of history. In short: the identity and future of Europe, placed as it is between contested cities like Belfast, Nicosia and Grozny, is seen ever more strongly in terms of culture and its historical dynamics. At the European level, too, we need to understand the nature of the interaction between culture and identity; at the European level especially, that understanding must be based on thorough, long-term historical knowledge, because in Europe current affairs have particularly deep historical roots. Even in the historical investigation, the complexity of contemporary politics and sensitivities is to be noted: the religious and dynastic roots of Europe and its states, the impact of historical experiences on contemporary policies, and the retroactive manipulation of (versions of) the past as a strategy in geopolitical and (inter)national disputes.
5 2. SCHOLARSHIP : Culture, dynamics, identity: beyond the functionalist revolution The last quarter-century has seen important changes in the study of culture and identity. Culture is now no longer seen as a condition of social life, but as a part of it. Traditionally, culture was seen as a fixity, usually divided between ‘high’ (artistically valorized or prestigious practices and artefacts, usually for the elite) and ‘low’ (pastimes, manners and customs characteristic of everyday life, usually for the demotic mass of the population). The canon of high culture was considered fixed and universally recognized; the study of culture was justified in terms of the aesthetic and ethical prestige inherent in high culture, or in terms of the sociological, ethnological and anthropological interest of popular culture. Against this static view of culture as transgenerational ‘given’, scholars have increasingly stressed the fact that culture (‘high’ as well as ‘low’) is in fact subject to continuous socially-determined shifts and changes. The artistic or literary canon is now studied as a multiplicity of different canons, each of them valid for different countries, different sub-cultures or social groups, all of them overlapping and interlocking, with exchanges between them. Cultural canonicity has come to be studied, not just as the power of a given text (or painting, or musical composition) to maintain its prestige over time, but rather as its capacity to translate itself to new audiences, new media, new meanings (e.g. the proliferation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the musical West Side Story and various cinematic adaptations; or the use of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on coffee mugs and mousemats). In the process, the distinction between ‘high’ culture and popular culture has largely vanished, also as a result of the rise of new media with a great potential for social dissemination and reproduction. Cultural history flows across the rapids of media revolutions: the original Gutenberg revolution; the emergence of cheap bulk printing in the nineteenth century; the rise of photography, of sound recording, of film and video recording; the availability of digital storage and instantaneous mass accessibility. As a result, the study of culture now takes account, not only of the conditions of cultural production, but also of cultural dissemination and appropriation. What matters is not only how the book was written, how the painting or the sculpture was made or the symphony was composed, but also, how these were then disseminated in society, how they were received, what reactions they provoked. The processes of cultural reception were by no means uniform, and more importantly, they have changed over time. The terms in which books were read or plays were viewed have changed drastically from generation to generation. The implication is that culture obtains its meaning, indeed its various meanings, in the function it has for its audiences and participants. A dynamic view of culture means that one can study culture’s changing functions; and one of the most dominant functions in Europe over the past two centuries has been that of articulating or affirming a collective identity – which in post-Napoleonic Europe usually means: a national identity. Culture-oriented studies over the past twenty years have accordingly undertaken a
6 huge process of inventorizing the identitarian function of culture, and (certainly among European scholars) specifically its national-identitarian function. This process started in the 1980s in Western Europe with collections like Les lieux de mémoire and The invention of tradition (Nora 1984-92; Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983); after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the paradigm was applied there, too, in particular among the younger generation of scholars now reaching maturity. The breadth and depth of this functionalist revolution should not be underestimated. All branches of the human and cultural sciences, from archeology and folklore to linguistics and literary study, from the various historical sciences to art history and music history, have reassessed their findings of the last two centuries and established to which extent they were themselves, as scientific endeavours, part of a national-identitarian agenda. They have all begun an enormous reassessment, each from the perspective of their respective specialisms, of the way in which various aspects of the cultural field have been implicated in the articulation, construction and ‘invention’ of collective (primarily national) identities. This functionalist revolution, linked to the trend towards ‘deconstruction’ (i.e. the demonstration that identities and meanings are in many instances constructs disguised as givens) has by now run its course. In each of the various disciplines the deck has been cleared, and the findings are now such that one can move on towards the next stage. Rather than flogging the dead horse of controverting the essentialism of earlier generations, the task for researchers is now to collate insights from various parts of Europe, and from various disciplines, and to move from specialist analysis towards interdisciplinary and transnational synthesis. Some signs indicate that the first examples and outlines of such syntheses are being developed even as this proposal is being put forward. – The formula of the Lieux de mémoire or ‘sites of memory’ has found broad repercussion in various European countries (Italian luoghi della memoria, German Erinnerungsorte, Dutch Plaatsen van herinnering, etc.). (An investigation of transnational, European ‘memory sites’ such as the Waterloo battlefield, the concentration camps of Dachau and Auschwitz, is as yet a desideratum; but the growing canon of UNESCO ‘world heritage sites’ in Europe is indicating a trend towards the transcendence of the national context in this process.) The Danish Dansk idenititetshistorie (Feldbæk 1991-92) has given to this branch of historical studies, with overlaps with the study of collective memory, the name of ‘identity history’ or ‘remembrance history’. Also, the study of ‘cultural memory’ has had rich impact in the field of literary studies, following a world Comparative Literature conference in Leiden in 1997 on the topic of “Literature as cultural memory” (D’haen 2000). The commemorative function of culture, e.g. in historical painting, has been the topic of numerous exhibitions in leading European museums (e.g., Flacke 1998, 2005). The interaction between cultural memory and tourism, and what is now known as “the heritage industry” has been put on the scholarly agenda since the appearance of David Lowenthal’s study Possessed by the past (1996). – The study of nationalism and national thought has, following the growing fame of the work
7 of Miroslav Hroch (1985), shown an increasing trend towards international comparison. Whereas national movements were traditionally studied piecemeal, on a country-by country basis, a noticeable trend is emerging to see nationalism as an exchange of ideas and inspirations, and to study the way national movements in one country were influenced by examples from abroad. Interesting source publications such as Delaperrière et al. 2005 and Trencsenyi et al. 2006- are cases in point. – Generally, transnationally comparative studies (history of literature, of linguistics, of the European libraries and universities etc. etc.) are beginning to be conducted on a new basis. No longer juxtaposing a modular array of individual countries, studies now chart exchanges and patterns that are on the whole regardless of borders as they exist nowadays, and that occur regionally in and between metropolitan centres, their catchment areas, and the traffic and dissemination corridors linking them. Examples are the recent multivolume History of Literatures of Central and Eastern Europe (Cornis-Pope & Neubauer, 2005-) and the History of the University in Europe (Rüegg & De Ridder-Symoens 1992-96). This cross-national, regional approach has been pioneered most inspiringly by archeologists, pre- and protohistorians, medievalists and church historians. – Linking the two above-mentioned fields of study is the question of national neighbourhood. Given the multinational density of Europe as opposed to other continents, European nations have, more than elsewhere in the world, the historical experience of being contiguous to, or surrounded by, many neighbours. For one thing, the study of national identities, representations and stereotypes, and of the rhetoric of national character (Beller 2006, Beller & Leerssen 2007), thematizes the situatedness of nations amidst their neighbours as a formative experience. Studying the constant interaction between the nation’s self-image and its view of others, i.e. the way in which national identity takes shape in contradistinction to an Outside, offers a promising working ground, particularly in Europe. Likewise in medieval studies, fruitful studies have been applied to the in-between-ness of Poland as a ‘missing centre’ between its adjacent neighbours (Urbanczyk 2000, 2002). – The methods outlined here have found a good working basis in the concept of cultural transfer. Coined originally in German as Kulturaustausch and subsequently taken up by French cultural historians, cultural transfer denotes the types of exchange and competition whereby cultural practices (including political and scientific models and methods) migrate from one society to another. The sociologist Dan Sperber (1996) has traced such cultural exchanges as an epidemiology: anyone affected by ideas and cultural practices undergoes their influence and at the same time can pass them on to others. The patterns of cultural exchange are now being analysed on the basis of system theory, network theory and “innovation/diffusion” models.
8 3. ISSUES, PERSPECTIVES The topics listed here are an outline, not claiming to be exhaustive, of the possible explorations of the theme on the basis of the current state of expertise. They are not proposed as separate sub-projects, but rather listed, by way of illustration, as mutually complementary aspects and implications of the overarching theme of Cultural Dynamics. For all of them, the principle holds that they must be addressed transnationally at a comparative-European level, and in interdisciplinary cooperation (§4 below). a. Roots and rhetoric of the national vision. European state formation begins with the centralization policies and consolidation strategies of medieval kings coping with the cultural differentiation and fragmentation of their realms. Such policies were legitimized and rationalized by common origin myths of origin, tightly linked with dynastic legends. From these tentative beginnings we can trace later and even contemporary entities known as England, France, Norway, Poland, Hungary or Rus'. The medieval, dynastic roots of nationformation deserve closer study; in particular also the myths and self-images that were brought into currency as part of that process (Hoppenbrouwers 2006), and the differentiating discourse of collective characters and identities ascribed to these emerging states and nations - a discourse that stratified in the early-modern period and still forms the basis of all current stereotypes concerning a nation’s character, soul or psychological identity. b. The presence of the past: history, memory, heritage. Societies remember their past, not just in the form of ‘official’ academic history-writing (as explored in the ongoing project, sponsored by the ESF, on ‘Representations of the Past: Writing National Histories in Europe’), but through a whole variety of practices. While collective memory may feed into formalized historical narratives, it is also kept alive in more or less informal commemorative practices, landmarks, ritual re-enactments, the historical accuracy of which is often at odds with the insights of academic historians. This leads to remarkable social debates on subaltern histories, recalcitrant versions of the past, and a popular-historiographical tradition often heedlessly or deliberately counterfactual (the success of the Da Vinci Code is not a once-off singularity). At the same time, the historical commemoration of the past is manifesting itself in public space by way of monuments and the monumentalization of landmarks, this in turn generating either ‘secular pilgrimages’ or an entire tourism industry. Analysis has demonstrated that this process is often a reductive one: landmarks tend to attract and conflate different commemorative functions, and the complex and contradictory nature of the past is collapsed into a limited number of easily understandable symbols and material fragments. Thus, the popularization of the past leads to its trivialization. Educational objectives are increasingly overshadowed by commercialization. (Lowenthal 1996) c. The cultivation of culture during and after the rise of the nation-state. As cultural practices
9 are beginning to slip from the grasp of the nation-state, and are themselves affected by patterns of globalization and localization, these processes alert us to the fact that in fact culture never was ‘national’ by default, but became nationalized as it was contextualized in the frame of the emerging nation-state, i.e. from the late eighteenth century onwards. The emergence and subsequent erosion of national cultures in the last two centuries now begins to present itself as one of the more exciting challenges for large-scale interdisciplinary history. The process of a national ‘cultivation of culture’ (Leerssen 2006) involved the developing infrastructure of the modern state, with the centralization of libraries and archives, the reorganization of universities and academies, the professionalization of the humanities and philologies, and the rising sociability of an educated middle class; it involved the ideological emergence of romantic nationalism and national thought, with its interest in cultural identity rooted in language, folklore, and ancient and medieval history. The proces was allencompassing (affecting all aspects of public life and all cultural fields, from architecture and music to language politics and education, from literature and painting to commemorations and festivals). It was also hugely successful in two respects: it aided the process of state formation in Europe (consolidated by the end of the First World War); and it became so ingrained in the public perception that throughout most of the twentieth century, culture was widely perceived to consist naturally, spontaneously, of separate national canons, and the national cultivation process that had led to this canonization model had been lost sight of. The proper understanding of this process of national culture canonization (or cultivation of culture) presents a vast and highly promising topic with an obvious civic dimension, in that it is directly linked to the way people have been taught to view their traditions and cultural identity. d. the interaction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. There has been a scholarly interest in popular culture from the days of Herder and Romanticism onwards; oral epic and folktales were collected, influencing literary production, and folk music has exercised a steady influence on ‘classical’ music from Weber, Chopin and Glinka to Bartók and Theodorakis. This exchange between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture at first took the shape of a cosmopolitan ‘high’ culture taking inspiration from the demotic bedrock of the nation. This canonization of popular culture in national terms involved fixing its fluid, shifting practices into a static unchanging canon; as a result, what we know today as ‘traditional’ folk culture is often a projection of its state as it was recorded in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the rise of mass media and mass dissemination has inverted the terms of the high-low relationship. Popular culture is now less traditional and more cosmopolitan, from soap operas to rap music, challenging the national organization of ‘high’ culture. At the same time, local traditions persist, interacting with the global rather than with the national level. The public valorization and ‘canonicity’ of culture has likewise undergone great changes and has resulted in a blurring of the ‘high’/‘low’ distinction, with commericalism adding a new factor. Problems of canon formation in modern culture must therefore address
10 the blurring divisions between separate national canons, between high and low culture, and between genres (given the increasing tendency towards intermediality with the rise of new genres and media: film, television, the graphic novel, historical re-enactment societies, online gaming etc.). In this of all areas, commercialism and commodification pose an unprecedented challenge (cf. also below, section e) e. citizenship, ownership, ‘belonging’: cultural participation between recognition and appropriation. Identity is a choice, an identification; citizenship, as an identification with the state, must be situated between other possible identities (gender, religion, ethnicity, region etc.). A considerable percentage of Europeans (more so than Americans or Asians) lives, not in their respective nations’ metropolitan core areas, but in border areas close to neighbouring countries. In the smallest villages, the TV set’s remote control gives access to a global culture. What culture and which identity are focused on and selected can be contested from case to case. How does a national, or a European, identity present itself in a regionalizing Europe and a globalizing world? What is the future of the nation-state as an ‘imagined community’? Does ‘Europe’ have the potential to develop as a primary identity-focus? How do religion and state compete, now as in past centuries, for the overlapping loyalties of their constituencies? What is the identitarian force of language, or of minority and regional languages and dialects, amid other loyalties? These questions deserve to be addressed on the basis of trans-national comparison and with reference to their historical antecedents and roots. Also, these issues are determined, not only by sociopolitical circumstances but also by cultural factors such as ingrained (self-)images and long-standing cultural stereotypes concerning ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, requiring an analysis in terms of their discursive history. The relationship between culture and participants is often felt to be one of ‘ownership’ – a two-way ownership where it is possible to say “this belongs to me” as well as “I belong to this”. Who owns culture? For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the moral rights of cultural producers (artists, writers) were in the ascendant, leading, not only to the cult of the individual artist as creative genius, but also to copyright conventions and the notion of intellectual property. Nowadays, the easy reproducibility of information and culture is putting this idea under pressure. Culture can be ‘sampled’ and shared by all its users, through fotocopying, downloading, scanning and otherwise. However, while culture is more accessible than ever before, it is also, to an unprecedented degree, owned by private and corporate proprietors.What does this mean for cultural practices, for the status of the artist? A long-term historical analysis of notions of authoring and ‘belonging’ may offer valuable perspectives on a thorny political issue. Such an analysis may also offer insights on the question of how culture is financed. The financing of culture, once a question of private sponsoring, has become increasingly a state affair funded by tax payers; recently, however, a trend has become noticeable for a retrenchment of the state’s financing role, a return to private funding, but with commercial
11 enterprises increasingly acting as corporate sponsors. Should culture be left wholly to the invisible hand of the market place? Are there cultural forms or fields in which a national or European dimension ought to be maintained against commercial pressures, and if so, which (e.g., cinema) are these? What insights does history have to offer us concerning the various ways in which cultural practices have been, and can be, financed? The idea of collective ownership also affects the use we make of public spaces: as landmarks, as memory sites, and places of congregation and social intercourse. Modern urban and rural planning often faces the contradictory imperatives of innovation and conservation. Space itself is a valuable resource in modern Europe: as natural landscape, as historical landmark, as living ambience. The cultural investment of public spaces, particularly of urban spaces, is a complex process of appropriation and adaptation. Buildings can be restored, replaced or refurbished; churches or palaces can be made commerically viable by being turned into office or apartment buildings, museums or shopping malls. Alternatively, other landmarks may be considered exempt from interference because of their high symbolical prestige in the public’s cultural or national consciousness. Decisions take place in a direct confrontation between logistic planning, commercial-economic initiative, and citizens’ identitarian need for cultural continuity. Such processes, again, affect all of Europe, and, again, have longer historical roots than we tend to realize.
12 4. THE EUROPEAN LEVEL: The need for transnational and interdisciplinary approach Processes like the national cultivation of culture and cultural participation are not just an aspect of different developments in separate countries; they are, rather, the national stratification and crystallization of a Europe-wide cultural dynamics affecting all European countries jointly. The main actors, from the days of Sir Walter Scott and the Brothers Grimm, had a Europe-wide influence and contact-network; leading figures in national revivals had contacts with, and took their inspiration from, other European traditions. From a culture-historical point of view, Europe presents itself as a zone of traffic and exchange. Formative ideas move across the European map, in a catchment area that reaches from Iceland and Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic to the Volga. Culture is mobile. It is not just a reaction, within a given country, to the sociopolitical conditions of that country, but it moves over the map like a weather system or an epidemic. Culture proliferates internationally, spreading and ramifying across the European map; movements and debates in one country may spawn copycat movements and spin-off debates elsewhere. When one traces all this traffic and exchange, it is striking and very suggestive that the area in which all this ideological contagion and migration of the ‘cultivation of culture’ took place coincides pretty precisely with the continent of Europe, from Gibraltar to Murmansk and from Reykjavik to Istanbul and Odessa. Indeed, Europe in this respect forms a ‘society’ in Lévi-
Strauss’s definition of that term: ‘A society consists of individuals and groups which communicate with one another. The existence of, or lack of, communication can never be defined in an absolute manner. Communication does not cease at society’s borders. These borders, rather, constitute thresholds where the rate and forms of communication, without waning altogether, reach a much lower level. This condition is usually meaningful enough for the population, both inside and outside the borders, to become aware of it.’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 296). Europe today may be considered, to a greater extent than is often realized, a communicative community. Much as the idea of the nation-state is a European development, so too the issues outlined here are a specifically European affair, with all of Europe implicated in it, and setting European patterns apart from those in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America or in twentieth-century Asia and Africa. As contemporary culture is reverting to more local/regional levels on the one hand, and global patterns on the other, the danger for the study of cultural dynamics might be to lose itself either in the limited specialism of detailed small-scale case studies, or else in overly wide and general theorization ranging from Korea to Vanuatu and from Jamaica to Senegal. The European level presents a good mid-size case to study the dynamics of culture in its first and second modernity, its pre-national, national and postnational phases; what is more, it is thoroughly documented over a long period of time. At the same time, a challenge for international cooperation and coordination lies in Europe’s linguistic diversity. Many important cases are documented and/or studied in languages as far apart (and mutually unintelligible) as Estonian and Bulgarian, Danish and
13 Hungarian, Portuguese and Polish. To collate these cases and findings will require a concerted international effort. Likewise, an interdisciplinary approach is essential. Culture is a very broad concept, and its cultivation can take many forms. It can involve practices and pursuits as diverse as the collection of proverbs, folktales and folk beliefs; archeology; historical genre painting; proposals for language purification and spelling reform; the establishment of museums and the rise of historical tourism; the narrative genre of the historical novel (or the historical film or television series); the establishment of historical commemorations and cultural state prizes. A first attempt at ordering this vast diversity is given in §5 below. Again, none of these various activities took place in isolation. Many authors practised both the writing of history and of historical novels; folklore collectors dealt with dialect variants, oral epic, proverbs, superstititions and music, and inspired rustic novels and choral societies; linguists were involved both in the academic study of language and in language activism or the political instrumentalization of language as a marker of nationality; the borders between literature, literary history and political history-writing were thin and vague, and many poets and scholars became important political protagonists. This means that the piecemeal study of the topic as divided according to present-day academic specialisms is unhelpful. While many specialisms and disciplines can respond to a research programme as proposed here, there will have to be interdisciplinary cooperation. Among the specialisms and disciplines targeted by this proposal are: sociolinguistics; folklore, ethnography, cultural studies; cultural sociology; art history, music history, literary history, architectural history; literary studies; history of ideas and history of cultural memory; mentality and identity history; church history; heritage studies; nationalism studies; studies of cultural representation and stereotyping; the histories (Fachgeschichte) of these various disciplines.
14 5. CLARIFICATIONS: Identity, culture, the cultivation of culture Identity involves two inseparable aspects: being individually distinct from others, and maintaining a permanent existence over time. I am ‘myself’ [1] because I am not interchangeable with anyone else, and [2] because I carry with me all the memories, promises and experiences of my past life and project all this into ‘my’ future. This fundamental dual nature of identity, synchronic and diachronic (discussed in detail by Ricoeur 1990) means that identity involves, unavoidably, [1] a sense of alterity and [2] a sense of historicity. Individuals and societies profile and silhouette their identity [1] by distinguishing themselves from others, and [2] by their ongoing identification with what they have been and what they expect to be. Nations, accordingly, tend to foreground in their sense of identity both a synchronic alterity and a diachronic permanence. They highlight those aspects in which they differ most saliently from other nations (often at the expense of registering their inner differentiation or the many aspects wherein they resemble their neighbours); and they highlight the idea of a transgenerational tradition, a sense of historical permanence, which renders them a stable presence amidst historical changes. In both these aspects, culture plays a crucial role. Shared cultural patterns affirm a sense of belonging together, especially if they are considered characteristic of the nation and not of others. Cultural differences are accordingly foregrounded in order to highlight and rationalize a sense of separateness between societies. At the same time, culture (often under the appellation of ‘tradition’) is seen as the continuity that binds generations together into a permanent community-over-time. Culture is an inheritance which previous generations have bequeathed to us and which we aim to pass on to our offspring. Thus, both in its synchronic and its diachronic dimensions, culture constitutes a sense of collective identity, both in marking off cultural community from its non-members and in embodying the persistence of that community across the succeeding generations of history. But what exactly do we mean by ‘culture’? It would be quixotic to try and impose a definition of that notoriously protean concept. Usually, the notion of culture is opposed to that of ‘nature’, connoting all aspects of human life that are not directly determined by biological and physical factors. Within this very broad semantic spectrum, one can emphasize culture either as outcome or product (the more traditional perspective of the humanities) or as a system or process (the more anthropological perspective). This difference in perspectives often coincides with the heuristic distinction (ingrained, but ultimately unhelpful) between ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture (discussed above, §2). In terms of the dynamics of culture, it is important to realize that something becomes cultural to the extent that it is cultivated: food preparation becomes haute cuisne, clothes become haute couture, to the extent that these practices are valorized, invested with prestige and importance, in a word, cultivated (Cf. Leerssen 2006). Without wanting to impose an abstract, a priori definition, it seems useful to inventorize current, commonsense aspects of what is commonly considered a cultural
15 endeavour, and to attempt some pragmatic systematization on that basis. This would at least have the heuristic value of being able to ‘place’ a given cultural endeavour vis-à-vis others, to situate a given activity against at least a more systematically diversified and specified template of the notion of ‘culture’. A first line of systematization involves the type of cultural field in question; some four of these appear to allow a meaningfully differentiated capture of most data. [1] Most fundamental among these four is clearly that of language. Overwhelmingly important in Europe’s cultural politics for the past two centuries, and the development and articulation of Europe’s cultural identities, language has come to be seen as articulating the essence of a nation’s identity and position in the world. An extraordinary number of cultural initiatives are concerned with language: from grammar-writing to purism, from language and dialect revivalism to language planning. [2] Closely attendant on this is language’s twin sister: discourse, in the wider sense of ‘the textual expression of culture’, culture as expressed verbally. This involves (of course) literature, but also history-writing and other reflective, non-fictional genres of disquisition. Narrative and theatre are now increasingly given the multimedia form of cinema and television; its lyrical form, when orally performed, takes the form of song, now increasingly mediatized. [3] Outside the fields of language and discourse we can identify a category of ‘material culture’: artefacts and objects in space such as painting, sculpture ancient and modern, antiquities, monuments, traditional dress and architecture, symbols such as flags and heraldry, public buildings. [4] Finally, that leaves the field of non-verbal, immaterial culture: cultural practices, involving folkdances, patterns of rural and urban sociability, cuisine and dress, pastimes and sports, manners and customs, and (last but not least) music. (There are, of course, overlaps between these fields. The theatre, for instance, can take place in architecturally meaningful buildings and involve literary texts, but also music and possibly dance. On the whole, however, the division along the lines suggested here provides a workable sorting-grid.) These four fields of culture have been instrumentalized in different ways for public, social and political purposes. To begin with, there is the presence and stock-taking of the cultural heritage (be it linguistic, discursive, material or performative). Manuscripts and linguistic data have been inventorized, preserved, collected and investigated; literary works from the past have been reedited, re-issued or re-mediatized; ancient artistic heirlooms and historical or prehistoric artfacts likewise, witness the importance of art conservation, the public function of musea. Popular culture, folktales and folk music, an entire traditional lifestyle is studied as the historucal/anthropological bedrock of the nation. All across Europe, there are strenuous
16 public debates about the conflicting needs, in public space, between the preservation of historical and archeological sites (ancient buildings, monuments, historical sites or symbolically invested landscapes) and the demands of modernization and infrastructural or commercial development. A second type of cultivating culture involves the inspiration of fresh cultural production by its historical antecedents, the emergence of contemporary initiatives. The importance of language emerges in debates about orthography, standardization, the status of dialects vs. a central norm, and the need for linguistic purity from foreign contamination. Literature frequently forms as a type of national or cultural memory by activating the registers of patriotic or historical verse, or narrative, or drama, and on the whole it provides the forum on which questions of identity ware debated and argued out, in critical interventions, manifestos etc. Of particular importance is the writing of history. In the fields of material and immaterial culture we also see that inspiration for fresh cultural production often derives from themes and concerns that are already operative in the cultural sphere. The re-mediation of cultural themes is a remarkable feature worthy of detailed investigation: how new media (opera, film, television, rock music, internet) are very often used to re-activate canonical and traditional cultural themes. In music culture, there is the historical rise of schools of ‘national composition’ – which, tellingly, means two things: [a] nationally distinctive, in that it makes the nation stands out amidst others, and [b] drawing for that purpose on the idiom of demotic, non-classical musical traditions (folk music and folk dances); also, in music, the relationship between popular and ‘high’ culture, and between national and global trends, has become particularly rich and complex since the rise of the new media. This also applies to sports and pastimes. Thirdly, culture has been heavily instrumentalized in the last two centuries with a specific view to proclaiming the state’s claim to be a nation-state. First and foremost that happens in the field of education: the language is taught in schools, as is the national history and the nation’s literature. In the public sphere, pageants, posters, historical monuments and pantheons are used to proclaim the nation’s history and to give it a firm presence in the here and now. Historicist architecture (neo-Gothic or otherwise) is used; newly-built streets, bridges or metro stations are given dedicatory names taken from historical memories and great names from the past. Festivals, awards and other public manifestations are held involving linguistic, literary, historical or folkloristic agendas. All this is nowadays open to new, complex processes of multiculturalism: incrasingly, other cultures are asserting their separate position within the state, leading to something which has often, misleadingly and dangerously, been described as ‘culture wars’. Culture and citizenship stand in a particularly fraught relationship to each other in contemporary Europe; also, Europe itself is in quest of a mode of asserting a shared cultural identity that can command the allegiance of Europeans and at the same time position Europe’s specific identity in the world at large. Debates around membership of the EU, and around possible new accessions to EU membership, are increasingly fought with arguments of cultural identity; this process needs careful monitoring
17 if the danger of a European ethnocentirism is to be avoided. The above outline gives a differentiated idea of how one can position various aspects of culture, and aspects of its public dynamics. If we arrange the two dimensions, ‘culture’ and ‘public dynamics’, against each other in a matrix, the following template results: presence
production
instrumentalization
language
grammars, dictionaries etc.
language maintenance
language activism/planning
discourse
text editions, canon formation
literature, history, criticism
education, festivals commemorations
material culture
archeography
monument protection, musealization, architecture
dedicatory investment of public space
practices/ performances
folklore studies
folklore revivals, national music
folk pageantry or traditionalism in state propaganda
Once again: this model it is merely an analytical tool: an accessory in order to locate, in a set of coordinates, a given pursuit or practice in the public dynamics of culture. Its main intended use-value is heuristic, intended to provide a ground-plan for a more detailed Europe-wide comparative study.
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