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CULTURE: Fomenting Diversity in the Face of Growing Homogenisation

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 30 2006 (IPS) - Culture as a universal human right that is opposed to hegemonic dominance, and contributes to development and diversity, is the central paradigm behind the Fórum Cultural Mundial (World Cultural Forum) held Wednesday and Thursday in this Brazilian city.

“A state with a vision of internal and external cultural diversity can strengthen its public policies, expand the concept of culture, and open up infinite possibilities for social inclusion,” said Brazilian minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, who made no less than six presentations at the Forum, as well as participating in parallel activities.

An enthusiastic supporter of the new concept of the “creative economy”, which ranges from works of art and craftsmanship to the latest information technology, the minister, who is better known as a world-renowned singer-songwriter, explained many of his ideas about culture as a tool for social and economic development.

The new digital media make it possible to break down the barriers between producers and consumers to create “prosumers,” said Gil, while he defined culture as liberation, mould-breaking and innovation.

The tension between diversity and hegemony was the topic of one of the six main conferences at the Forum, alongside which dozens of debates, workshops, art exhibits, and music and dance performances were held. The world is at a critical juncture between the concepts of diversity, which encourages cultures to flourish, and hegemony, which cuts down the range of options, said Garry Neil, the Canadian coordinator of the International Network for Cultural Diversity (INCD), a movement of non-governmental organisations and individual activists with more than 500 members in 70 countries.

The forces of cultural “homogenisation”, such as economic and media centralisation, globalisation and multilateral trade agreements, are very powerful and even predominant, Neil acknowledged.

The INCD gained a powerful instrument in the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, adopted in October 2005 by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), said Gil, although he noted that the Convention is not binding, but only a set of recommendations.

The Convention will enter into force as soon as it is signed and ratified by 30 countries, a process completed so far by 20 countries.

However, cultural diversity faces more subtle enemies than the hegemony of Hollywood. In a strong protest, anthropologist Tassadit Yacine, from Algeria, complained that the passing of colonialism had not put an end to cultural domination and the trend towards homogenisation.

For example, in Algeria and other North African countries, imposition of Arabic as the official language after independence led to the marginalisation and attempted suppression of the Berber language, spoken by minorities in several countries of the region. This was a consequence of unthinkingly importing models from the colonial powers, Yacine said.

Another process that undermined cultural pluralism and variety was mass migration to Europe, a continent where “difference” engenders social and economic discrimination, instead of cultural enrichment, she added. Cultural diversity requires recognition of the autonomy of each group, without their being made to feel inferior, Yacine argued.

It is necessary to respect diversity within each country, in addition to defending it in the international arena, said Balla Moussa Daffé, minister counsellor to the Presidency of Senegal and president of the Network of Sociocultural Actors in that West African country.

The Network’s aim is to save and promote the different indigenous cultures, to attain legitimacy, and then to fight for diversity in other countries, Daffé told IPS. Today’s situation of cultural domination is largely due to economic imbalances: “We do not have the resources to take our cultural expressions out into the world,” he said.

“Our problems are economic and cultural,” he summed up, in contrast to views expressed by artists on the primacy of culture.

Economic weakness is “an obstacle to the cultural affirmation” of African peoples, said Daffé, a pharmacologist and former Senegalese minister for science and technology, who became interested in culture when he was doing research on the native pharmacopoeia.

Cultural diversity is facing resistance and controversy, said Leonardo Brant, a Brazilian cultural marketing expert and a member of INCD’s Steering Committee. The United States is opposed to the UNESCO Convention, and claims that cultural diversity can only exist where there are free markets and competition, he remarked.

The importance of cultural diversity for peoples’ identity and advancement is a recent realisation. It came to the forefront in 1998 at a UNESCO conference on culture and development, which gave rise to a Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in 2001. Based on a preliminary draft produced at meetings of independent experts between December 2003 and May 2004, a final draft of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was prepared, and this was adopted by the UNESCO’s General Conference in Paris in October 2005.