Introduction

This chapter will discuss the intellectual debates on culture and development in international programs and institutions. We know that culture, the concept of many meanings, is used not only to describe certain kinds of empirical phenomena but also to evoke sentiments of historical ancestry, political loyalty and emotional attachment. This is why culture is a very sensitive issue in politics and policy debates, as anyone who has dealt with development programs will know. It also helps explain the polarized views that have considered culture alternatively as a positive instrument or as an obstacle for development.

The complexity in dealing with culture in development in the last fifty years has to do with the failure to distinguish the constitutive, functional and instrumental aspects of cultural discourse. As the report of the United Nations Commission on Culture and Development explicitly stated: it is not culture that is embedded in development; it is development that is embedded in culture.

The concept of culture, as defined and used by anthropology for more than a century, derived from the need to find order in its increasing knowledge of immensely varied human ways of life. Culture, as understood in the Western world of art and intellect, refers more narrowly to a universal longing for meaning and quality in human existence. Both connotations have been constantly entwined and confused in discussions on culture and development. In the last three decades, cultural policies and development actions about culture have become ever more urgent as intellectual “culture wars” and real “ethnic cleansing” wars have proliferated, the former usually in developed countries and the latter in some countries in transition or developing ones. Of the approximately 160 wars that have occurred since 1945, most have taken place within nations, and, especially since the end of the Cold War, a very great number have been driven by ethnic, religious or cultural discourses. Why is this so? Is the underlying cause of such conflicts the unequal development that has favoured some cultural minorities or ethnic groups at the expense of others? Or is it the other way around: do such cleavages exacerbate the inequality in development by pushing culturally distinct peoples towards power and wealth and others into intolerable poverty? This is the unresolved debate that began even as the foundations of the United Nations were being put into place. At that time, in 1945, horrified by the devastation brought about by the Nazi belief in their cultural and religious supremacy, war-torn nations set forth the foundation for the international concern for culture by recognizing in the Unesco Constitution that “…wars begin in the minds of men”.

Indeed, the attack of September 11, 2001 in New York and the subsequent military interventions were initially couched in terms evoking strong religious and cultural claims on all sides although such claims were later on carefully denied by Western governments. Culture, an ignored factor in the second half of the twentieth century in politics and policy, seems to have come back with a vengeance as the new century opened, we had all hoped, to an era of rational negotiation. Now cultural and religious factors have been placed prominently in the world political agenda while development thinking is still moving too slowly in incorporating such factors into their models.
At present national and international institutions at present are not yet equipped to take full account of cultural processes. The intellectual ambiguity in the use of the concept of culture and early international geopolitical negotiations in setting up international institutions led to a splintering of culture from development actions among different United Nations agencies, national ministries and international and non-governmental development organizations. As Mahatma Gandhi once explained it, development thinking requires “...a recognition that economic activity, at every stage of technical development, has no value except as a contribution to a social aim”.

What then, is an operational definition of culture? My own definition is that culture is the flow of meanings that human beings create, blend and exchange. Cultures are philosophies of life that hold together all the social practices that build and maintain a capable, creative human being. Such practices also hold together well-functioning, balanced societies. In this sense, cultures function as primary regulating systems that help to keep peoples´ feelings and actions within the bounds of institutionally acceptable behaviour. Guidelines for behaviour are expressed in discourse as values. When such systems are ignored in development they tend to create unsocial behaviour.
It is very important to emphasize that cultures do not exist except through the thoughts, actions and performance of real people. There is no essence to cultures, except the beliefs that people decide to place on them. Something special, however, is happening in our present world with people’ s representations of cultures. A threshold is perceptible, created by the new scale and intensity of certain cultural phenomena, but more precisely by the synergy among them. This Cultural Transition, as I term it, requires developing new concepts and a new intellectual framework to reflect this changing reality. Clearly, culture is more important than ever before.