We opened our meeting at Bellagio by asking each participant to envisage cultural democracy: What are we working for? What are the conditions we hope to bring about through community cultural development? People’s responses give a flavor of the group — its members’ pragmatic idealism, their uncanny ability to engender hope and possibility where others might see cause for despair.

Tony Le Nguyen: To give an alternative voice to the community. To allow and accept a different way of thinking and doing things and making decisions.

Munira Sen: Not just to respect and tolerate other cultures, but to celebrate other cultures.

David Diamond: It has to do with creating the space for authentic voices in the midst of a growing corporate voice. To be in true dialogue is a human right.

Judy Baca: What we’re struggling with is the creation of a kind of homogeneity that is going across the world, and what we’re trying to do is preserve the specificity of various cultures and to amplify those voices in such a way that they become valued.

Nina Obuljen: Giving space, on different levels, from individuals to small groups, nations, and eventually coming into something that is globally appreciated.

Dee Davis: Finding strategic ways to take cultural voices and frame public discourse.

David Kerr: I am interested in cultural exchange, and a big problem is unequal exchange, like when Paul Simon comes and gets Ladysmith Black Mombazo to work on his record, it’s not really an equal cooperation. My point is trying to create conditions in which cultures can exchange on an equal basis.

Liz Lerman: One aspect of our work is to insist that art making is a central, critical and crucial aspect of decision making within the culture, and it’s not marginal.

Prosper Kampoare: To facilitate the empowerment of the population to be actors in their own development.

Nitin Paranjape: To create spaces where multiple flows of information are possible, to empower people to believe in themselves, their own values, their own personal strength.

Mary Marshall Clark: To create ways of communicating across cultures and all other kinds of barriers, people communicating to create community.

Maribel Legarda: We’ve seen that the political and economic spheres have not really contributed to finding resolutions to our problems. The cultural sphere is the last bastion of trying to struggle against globalization. Coming from culture being an appendage — a thing we did to support political and social issues — the cultural sphere takes the lead role in the changes, insurrections and struggles that we need to be able to let mankind survive.

Tony Stanley: For me it’s all about connectedness — us as individuals helping other people connect with their own imaginative lives. But more important perhaps is the connectivity between people and through that, the building of cultures and the sustainability of cultures.

Gary Stewart: Young people around the world tend to be the most consistent targets of negative global practices. The way I envision cultural democracy is for those young people to have ways of articulating their concerns and ideas with each other that aren’t mediated necessarily through adults or other agencies.

Norm Horton: Given that there’s a lot of economic and cultural and social development that’s happening around us all the time, protocols should be established that are particular to place, so that development work is actually informed by the specific place where it’s acting and that drives it.

Sarah Moynihan: Being able to create a space for dialogue between or amongst the mainstream and all the marginal groups, so that can start to impact on more appropriate development.

Mok Chiu Yu: We should work toward everyone becoming active creators of art, not just passive consumers. Cultural democracy means people have control of their lives.

Brian Holmes: Discovery —  people discover themselves in relation to a community or a group. Expression, confrontation.

Iman Aoun: To break the silence and develop the art of listening. By breaking through the walls of each self, we might create a bond.

Paul Heritage: I believe in inclusion, but cultural democracy is about exploring the margins. We should watch the margins change as our cultures develop, and find a safe place for the excluded.

Bárbara Santos: The challenge is to find the means to stimulate people to find themselves and find their own futures.

Azril Bacal: Globalization has bred a lot of hopelessness: how to breed hope? And how to reappropriate and democratize cultural definition and development?

Masitha Hoeane: Looking around the room I see the diversity of humanity. In that divergence, those differences, there is a convergence. It is important to redefine culture and how it is perceived.

Martha Ramirez Oropeza: To find ways of motivating through participation. The way to motivate the original part within us as well as indigenous people and communities is through self-esteem. Globalization is destroying self-esteem.

Arlene Goldbard: To awaken compassion, a passion for justice and freedom.

Don Adams: There is a fundamental way we understand our participation in culture. Most people do not think, "What I see around me is a direct result of what I do."  

Most community cultural development work is conducted in microcosm, at the level of the individual in community. Paul Heritage’s and Bárbara Santos’ essays share experiences of prisoners and guards in Brazil’s penal system; Liz Lerman talks about employees of a shipyard in Portsmouth, Maine; Judy Baca recounts the experiences of gang members in East Los Angeles. The localism and particularity of this work is both its strength and its vulnerability.

On the one hand, there is no way to mass-produce transformation of consciousness: the individuals who make theater out of their own lives or unearth their own cultural heritage as preparation for creating a history mural or a computer game come to consciousness of the roles they may play in changing the world precisely because their own minds and bodies are directly engaged in the process of self- and community-discovery. The labor-intensive, time-consuming effort that Maribel Legarda describes in creating a youth theater in Smokey Mountain — a mountain of garbage near Manila where children endanger their health working as scavengers — or that Sarah Moynihan and Norm Horton recount in discussing their work in creating a database of local cultural information with the people of Dajarra — a small, remote, predominantly Aboriginal township northwest of Brisbane, Australia — has dynamic transformative impact that can’t be reached by any shortcut. The work’s power and its enduring effects stem from its intensely personal nature.

But one of the impacts of globalization has been a cheapening of the local and the particular in favor of the general, and especially whatever gives "more bang for the buck." What is distended through mass replication or swollen with its own putative significance shows up on the "globalized information network" to which Manthia Diawara refers. Everything else — such as community cultural development projects on the ground in Australia, Mexico, India or Britain — is too small to signify. As one consequence, this democratic community cultural development movement, with its tremendous potential to respond successfully to the negative effects of globalization, has been marginalized by its invisibility in the mass media, and thus lacks the resources to realize that potential. This is a pity, because right now many of those who wish to oppose globalization’s most dangerous effects can be seen as acting them out, if only inadvertently.

Consider what has come to be known as the anti-globalization movement, the decentralized network of many thousands of activists who have demonstrated in Seattle, Montreal, Genoa and beyond against the World Trade Organization and other multinational attempts to regulate trade at the expense of local livelihood and culture. Part of the critique of globalization is the globalized media’s cynical manipulation of symbols to disguise its real impact: the very concept of "free trade" reduces the meaning of liberty to little more than corporations’ unfettered access to world markets. Yet the centerpiece of the anti-globalization movement’s campaigns has been symbolic action transmitted through sound bites and film clips on CNN: smashing the windows of a McDonald’s, spray painting slogans on the facade of a Gap outlet, temporarily shutting down a world capital’s business district in time for the evening news. Certainly these efforts have publicized the fact that there is a serious opposition to the globalization of corporate interests. Certainly they have forced international trade meetings to seek out more remote and secure meeting places. But it is hard to argue they have done much beyond that to slow the advance of globalization’s harmful effects or hasten the realization of its liberatory potential.

Many of the essays in this volume were completed during September 2001, as can be discerned from some authors’ mention of the appalling terrorist acts that cost so many lives in New York and Washington. In the aftermath of those tragedies, commentators at all points along the political spectrum have remarked that the World Trade Center was chosen as a target because it was a symbol of American capitalism — just as the Pentagon is a symbol of American military might. As we write, a few months later, pre-September 11 photos of the New York skyline evoke tears, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center have come to symbolize thousands of lost lives. In this context, spray painting anti-capitalist slogans on a McDonalds may read one way to a committed North American or European anti-globalization activist, but how does it read halfway around the world? Consider this account of Asian young people’s consumer preferences:

A NEW GenerAsians survey asked 5,700 children, between the ages of 7 and 18, in 18 cities in 12 Asia-Pacific countries, about their activities, aspirations, food, drink and entertainment. The survey was sponsored by Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network, and conducted by ACNielsen in March and April of 1998.

FOOD & DRINK:

"What’s your favorite fast food restaurant?"  
"What’s your favorite soft drink?"

AUSTRALIA: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola  
CHINA: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola  
HONG KONG: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola  
INDIA: Suvarna Bhuvan, Coca-Cola  
INDONESIA: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola  
JAPAN: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola  
MALAYSIA: KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken], Coca-Cola  
PHILIPPINES: Jollibee, Coca-Cola  
SINGAPORE: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola  
S. KOREA: Lotteria, Coca-Cola  
TAIWAN: McDonald’s, Coca-Cola  
THAILAND: KFC, Pepsi [13]

The perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, the corporations targeted on that day and the anti-globalization movement all have this in common: their activities have been staged for the global media network, which they have used to disseminate one-way messages that — whether or not one agrees with any of them —  have no organic relationship to communities’ own aspirations for their development. Neither embracing nor rejecting consumerism constitutes a cultural identity nor a platform for social change. Nor can it be demonstrated that the global media themselves have the power to bring about real social change. To the contrary, it has been convincingly argued that their main impact is to solidify the existing social order by broadcasting a continuous stream of official pronouncements and reactions to them, so that there is absolutely no confusing the "center" from which authoritative messages originate with the "margins" where the less powerful reside.

As has so often been pointed out, mass media are fascinated with images of destruction because spectacle — fire, explosion, blood and agitated crowds — makes "good television." In the days following September 11, news footage of the World Trade Center towers was repeated on CNN with such disturbing frequency that the Red Cross ran public-service announcements during commercial breaks exhorting viewers to limit their TV news watching, thus avoiding the trauma that might result from a permanent mental imprint of the horror. During the demonstrations accompanying international trade meetings in Seattle, Montreal and Genoa, images of demonstrators smashing shop windows and blocking streets and of police smashing demonstrators’  heads were broadcast with proportionate repetitiveness. So far as we have seen, no one has even suggested that the result of these image-wars will be positive social change. Indeed, the main result traceable to both seems the same: an escalation of the barrage of symbols asserting the desired status quo; and new and expanded security measures that promise to constrain the lives of ordinary citizens, if not to deter terrorists.

In times of stress and upheaval, pundits are forever tempted to divide the world into easy dualities: two popular versions are Benjamin Barber’s "Jihad vs. McWorld," and Samuel P. Huntington’s "clash of civilizations." In the current fashion, Islamic fundamentalism is placed on one side of the dividing line, with a version of the West characterized by post-Enlightenment ideals of rationality on the other. Implicit in these divisions is the assumption that modernity can only be opposed by the oppressive nostalgia of fundamentalism. But fundamentalism, protectionism and nationalism are based on the fortress paradigm of the walled city discussed in Dee Davis’ essay, something impossible to achieve given the interpenetration of realities already accomplished through globalization. Nationalism and essentialism create disconnection, asserting that a separate destiny somehow awaits each people. But the fate that unchecked globalization threatens would be truly encompassing, rendering all cultures dispensable in the face of market imperatives. Rather than attempting to wall cultures off from each other, the urgent question now is how it will be possible to construct dynamic relationships between communities and the larger world, relationships that allow for agency on all sides.

In community cultural development practice — and this is also supported by what we now know about human consciousness and learning processes — it is understood that no ideological platform can accomplish the shift needed to expand freedom and equality in the world. Declarations inevitably evoke counter-declarations. The only meaningful dividing line is between received ideologies that demand to be swallowed whole and regurgitated intact and the process of questioning that defines human intellectual and spiritual freedom. The passion for global justice does not attach to the human spirit as a good idea: it is acquired through first-person experiences that concretize concepts such as freedom and equality, allowing them to be integrated and lead to constructive social action. When Nitin Paranjape writes about tribal children in the Indian government’s Ashram Schools discovering their own agency by publishing a "wall paper" in their own words, he shows us this process.

There is infinite scope for books, films and broadcasts about globalization and its discontents. There is infinite room for interesting ideas and analyses, for quotable scholarship and theoretical exploration. It is altogether a good thing that the process of globalization be examined and interrogated, that room be made to assert its constructive powers and condemn its destructive forces. But the only real promise for ordinary people in their own communities to have a say in how their cultures will be affected by the process of globalization lies in efforts like those described in this volume, in which the process of conscientization — discovering one’s own voice and learning to speak one’s own words — emancipates those who experience it, equipping them to enter the public sphere and take action to realize their ideals.  

The community cultural development field is still taking shape. As we wrote of the U.S. field in "Creative Community," there is as yet no consensus on definition or nomenclature. Many different names are in simultaneous use:

Community arts. This is the common term in Britain and most other Anglophone countries; but in U.S. English, it is also sometimes used to describe conventional arts activity based in a municipality, such as "the Anytown Arts Council, a community arts agency." While in this document we use "community artists" to describe individuals engaged in this work, to avoid such confusion, we have chosen not to employ the collective term "community arts" to describe the whole enterprise.

Community animation. From the French animation socio-culturelle, the common term in Francophone countries. There, community artists are known as animateurs. This term was used in much international discussion of such work in the 1970s.

Cultural work. This term, with its roots in the panprogressive Popular Front cultural organizing of the ’30s, emphasizes the socially conscious nature of the work, stressing the role of the artist as cultural worker, countering the tendency to see art making as a frivolous occupation, a pastime as opposed to important labor.

"Participatory arts projects," "community residencies," "artist/community collaborations" — the list of labels is very long. Even though it is a mouthful, we prefer "community cultural development" because it encapsulates the salient characteristics of the work:

• Community, to distinguish it from one-to-many arts activity and to acknowledge its participatory nature, which emphasizes collaborations between artists and other community members;

• Cultural, to indicate the generous concept of culture (rather than, more narrowly, art) and the broad range of tools and forms in use in the field, from aspects of traditional visual- and performing-arts practice, to oral-history approaches usually associated with historical research and social studies, to use of high-tech communications media, to elements of activism and community organizing more commonly seen as part of non-arts social-change campaigns; and

• Development, to suggest the dynamic nature of cultural action, with its ambitions of conscientization … and empowerment and to link it to other enlightened community-development practices, especially those incorporating principles of self-development rather than development imposed from above.

Within the community cultural development field, there is a tremendous range of approach, style, outcome — in every aspect of the work.[14]

Researching the current state of the global field in order to identify participants for the May 2001 Community, Culture and Globalization conference, we began with archival resources. At first, we searched through Web sites and publications for organizations that had been fairly prominent in years past. Some of these — for example, the Third World Popular Theatre Network mentioned above — had effectively disappeared from view. Later, during the online dialogue that preceded our conference, David Kerr e-mailed this story:

In 1983 popular theatre workers from all over the "Third World" meeting in Koitta, Bangladesh, tried to set up IPTA (International Popular Theatre Alliance), to help mobilise work at a global level, with an annually rotating leadership. The first chair was to be Karl Gaspar.… Unfortunately, shortly after Karl’s return to the Philippines, he was detained by the Marcos regime, and his files confiscated.… IPTA was in disarray. Several others in the original organisation had problems. The police in Malawi simply confiscated virtually all my mail for two years (my postal arrest I called it!). Dickson Mwansa in Zambia did try to pick up the mantle, and did draw attention to abuses against popular theatre workers (Karl’s case, arrested student actors in Malawi, etc.), but it was very difficult. The inertia of involvement in local struggles made it hard for us to unite at a global level.

Such are the conditions faced by many community cultural development workers, making continuity and coordination a perpetual challenge. But we were heartened that even though earlier networks had disintegrated, it proved possible to trace the progress of some of their constituent parts, and thus we were able to learn a little about who is active now and what they are doing.

Within the field as a whole, development has been uneven. Without question, the most vigorous and well-established branch of the community cultural development field today centers on Theater of the Oppressed and other dramatic practices originated by Augusto Boal: fully a third of the essays in this volume touch on such work, and that is representative of the community cultural development work evident around the globe. Related but independent popular-theater practices — such as PETA’s "Basic Integrated Arts Workshop," used by many Asian people’s theater workers — have had tremendous staying power, enabling community artists to work effectively with an enormous range of social and age groups. As Paul Heritage’s essay points out, the effectiveness of such work has been recognized even in sectors that don’t normally interact with community cultural development practitioners, such as prisons, and this recognition has aided its expansion.  
 

MASS MEDIA & SOCIETY

A Sociological Perspective on Media

The communication media are the different technological processes that facilitate communication between (and are in the "middle" of) the sender of a message and the receiver of that message. The mass media include newspapers, magazines, radio, and films, CDs, internet, etc. The media communicate information to a large, sometimes global, audience. Near-constant exposure to media is a fundamental part of contemporary life but it is  TV that draws our attention  the most as one of the primary socializing agent of today's society.

• 98.3 % of households (hh) have TV sets (2.3 sets per hh)
• 99% of hh have a radio (5.6 radios per hh on average)
• 65% have cable TV
• 82% have VCR (US Census Bureau, 1996).
• by 1999: 1/2 of US hh have a home computer, 1/3 of hh have internet access @ home
• TV sets are turned on for an average of 7 hours each day
• average american spend 2.5 hours a day in front of TV ( = 38 solid days of TV viewing in a year)