Cultural Democracy

The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

James Bau Graves

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252072086, 9780252029653
• eBook ISBN: 9780252091407
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Cultural Democracy explores the crisis of our national cultural vitality, as access to the arts becomes increasingly mediated by a handful of corporations and the narrow tastes of wealthy elites. Graves offers the concept of cultural democracy as corrective--an idea with important historic and contemporary validation, and an alternative pathway toward ethical cultural development that is part of a global shift in values. 
 
Drawing upon a range of scholarship and illustrative anecdotes from his own experiences with cultural programs in ethnically diverse communities, Graves explains in convincing detail the dynamics of how traditional and grassroots cultures may survive and thrive--or not--and what we can do to provide them opportunities equal to those of mainstream, Eurocentric culture. 
 

1

Communion

Early in my career as a facilitator of community cultural programs, I thought it might be possible to build some social bridges between Portland’s African American community and our newcomer population of African refugees.¹ They are all of African descent, I figured, so they must share some common cultural roots. Surely, the African Americans will have an interest in probing a piece of their own heritage; and the Africans, I imagined, would have a compulsion to connect with their American cousins.

We convened a planning meeting in the basement of the local AME Zion Church, inviting everybody we knew in both communities. It quickly became apparent that building consensus within the group about what kind of project to develop would be difficult. An African American proposed assembling a program around percussion traditions from both sides of the Atlantic. But a Nigerian countered with a demand for “real drummers”—drummers from Africa.

Gary Hines energetically leading the Maine Mass Gospel Choir. Photo by Tonee Harbert.

“What do you mean, real drummers?” came the heated response. “Do you think our drummers here are somehow less than real?”

“Everybody knows the best percussionists in the world come from Africa,” the Nigerian flatly stated. “Why settle for anything less?”

Ultimately, the meeting swung away from the conflict around real percussion and into the hands of a pair of preachers—one African American, one Congolese. With my enthusiastic support, they agreed to bring their respective choirs into a large mass chorus that would perform both American gospel and African hymnody. Together. To lead this new ensemble I hired two of the most inspiring singers and teachers I know—Gary Hines, director of the Grammy-winning gospel group Sounds of Blackness, and the supercharged South African singer Thuli Dumakude. Each artist was engaged to spend three weeks in Portland over the course of a year, culminating in a public unveiling of this new collaboration.

At least that was the idea. In reality, nothing worked out as planned. During the first week of rehearsals with Hines, the pastor of the African Fellowship turned up for one session—but he was the sole participant from the refugee community. Where, I wondered, were all the Africans? Their pastor was equivocal. Many of the refugees work nights and can’t attend. Child care is always a challenge. They’re busy with other things.

Soon we followed up with a second residency, this time with Thuli Dumakude. The results were even bleaker. Only two African Americans, out of a large group that had just enjoyed a fabulous experience working with Hines, showed up for the rehearsals. Where were they? I demanded. Their pastor was more straightforward. “They’re just not interested in singing in African,” she explained on behalf of her choir. “They love the gospel music, but they just don’t want to have to sing something that is strange and they can’t understand. Bring back Gary Hines and they’ll be there. I promise.” But that wasn’t the worst of it: no African refugees showed up this time, either.

What went wrong? In my naiveté, I’d made a series of mistaken assumptions about the prospective participants. I violated the first rule of anyone who has ever tried to do any kind of community organizing: know your community. The African American singers were simply not interested in African music. They sing gospel with celebratory abandon, but a song in Zulu was well outside their comfort zone. And Gary Hines’s brilliance was irrelevant to the Africans, most of whom harbor a deep ambivalence about African Americans in general. Hines’s artistry simply doesn’t show up on their cultural radar as something worth pursuing. Neither did they care about Thuli Dumakude’s South African songs. Most of Portland’s Africans come from the horn countries—Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia. Sudan is twenty-five hundred miles from South Africa, about the same as the distance between Madrid and Moscow. I would probably not have assumed that a Spaniard would have a passion for Russian music, but my own cultural blinders allowed me to assume that as “Africans” these diverse ethnicities would have something in common. They don’t. I had failed to perceive where the insiders draw the boundaries around their communities. And those communities provide the context in which culture is invented and sustained. Without an understanding of that context, cultural development is rendered meaningless.

What is community?² Any group of individuals who share something, anything, in common, and consider themselves to have some allegiance to each other as a result, forms a community. We all begin life within the community of our own families but quickly become part of other participatory communities as well: second graders, baseball players, dancers, college students, workers, parents, senior citizens. We are born into some communities, such as nationality, ethnicity, or religion. Others we select for ourselves: political affiliation, occupation, place of residence, pursuit of interests. Within each of these spheres, we share with the other members of the group a set of common experiences and assumptions about what is valued, how it is to be cherished, and how to interact with each other and the world. Each of us is part of many different communities, effortlessly shifting conceptual gears as we move among them. The internal rules that govern what is proper and what is unacceptable will vary substantially between the dance hall on Saturday night and the church on Sunday morning. Still, many people participate in both communities without committing social gaffes or feeling any sort of conflict.

It is this complex matrix of coexisting and overlapping community allegiances that forms the core of personal and social identity. We determine who we are by finding our grounding in relationship to others, through seeking our own place in the web of social obligation. Growing through childhood is largely a process of gradually looking further and further beyond ourselves, first to our families and later through the accumulation of community connections. That’s where we find out who we are.

The evolution of the human species is a long history of expanding social awareness. Game theorists and evolutionary psychologists suggest that this process is built into human nature, that the grand trajectory of humanity consists of our learning to play increasingly complex non-zero-sum games: win/win interactions as opposed to I win/you lose contests. “Indeed,” says Robert Wright, “even if you start the survey back when the most complex society on earth was a hunter-gatherer village, and follow it up to the present, you can capture history’s basic trajectory by reference to a core pattern: New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then social structures evolve that realize this rich potential—that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and depth.”³ Advances in non-zero-sum community cohesion create the social capital that allows for the evolution of cultures that are perceived as positive and healthy by their participants.

Like financial capital and human resources, social capital is an essential link in the drive chain of human activity. A society with a low capacity for accumulating social capital, one that stresses zero-sum games offering some members advantages at the expense of others, will be unstable and probably dangerous. Dynamic, progressive societies develop mechanisms to enhance the web of social capital.

Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone offers a striking statistical portrait of the decline of social capital in contemporary America, as we increasingly become observers, rather than doers. He suggests that the creation and sustenance of social capital is vital to the functioning of any society, and offers an analysis of how it functions. “Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps the most important is the distinction between bridging (or inclusive) and bonding (or exclusive),” he writes. “Some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups. Examples of bonding social capital include ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women’s reading groups, and fashionable country clubs. Other networks are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages. Examples of bridging social capital include the civil rights movement, many youth service groups, and ecumenical religious organizations. Bonding social capital is good for under-girding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity.… Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion.”⁴

In our ancestral environment, early hominids learned that there was more security from predators and other hominids in a band of nomads than in the solitary life (bonding social capital). By the time of the agricultural revolution, this epiphany had grown to encompass large tribal groupings, other people with whom we felt a common bond of fealty, if not kinship. With farming came permanent settlements that slowly evolved into towns and cities. Some tribes joined forces to create larger regional identities (requiring bridging social capital). Most of these jealously guarded a common set of racial, religious, and social characteristics that set them apart from all the others. Usually, the champions of this kind of ethnic identity scorned those of other ethnicities, particularly those close at hand. When the Hebrews were preparing their conquest of the land that became Israel, God was explicit in his instructions: they were to have nothing whatsoever to do with the locals:

When YHWH your God brings you to the land that you are entering to possess,

and dislodges great nations before you

—the Hittite, the Girgashite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perrizite, the Hivvite, and the Yevusite—

seven nations more numerous and mightier (in number) than you,

and YHWH your God gives them before you and you strike them down:

you are to devote-them-to-destruction, yes, destruction, you are not to cut with them a covenant, you are not to show-them-mercy!

And you are not to marry (with) them:

your daughter you are not to give to their son, their daughter you are not to take for your son—

for they would turn-aside your son from (following) after me

and they would serve other gods,

and the anger of YHWH would flare up against you, and he would destroy you quickly.

Deuteronomy 7:1–4⁵

Gradually, the divisions between city states merged into national identities. Athens and Sparta made peace, but each continued to maintain its own ethnic character, as any contemporary Athenian or Spartan will tell you. Empires rose, governing vast territories that included numerous ethnicities. Sicily and Britain were both part of the Roman Empire, but their inhabitants remained Sicilians and Britons. Despite their long occupation by the Ottomans, the Greeks remained Greek, and the Arabs stuck to their Arabic. Among Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points following World War I was the remarkable notion of ethnic self-determination.⁶ In a world still under the heel of empire, this was a radical departure. The wisdom or folly of Wilson’s vision is still being tested all over the globe as nations are dismembered along ethnic lines or join forces, usually to face a common threat.

In the world that we have inherited, ethnicity remains among the most powerful organizing forces in human societies. It plays a central role in the formulation of the personal identities of most of the world’s people, and it is the fundamental base of human culture. An examination of how culture is created begins with a consideration of ethnicity and its implications.

Ethnicity manifests itself through a remarkable range of possibilities for group identification. Some tribal cultures that might include only a few hundred individuals form ethnic communities and identify themselves as distinct populations. They share a set of characteristics that symbolize, for them, their membership in a unique portion of humanity, endangered though it might be. Every member of such an ethnicity would be likely to have direct and personal acquaintance with every other culture bearer, bringing an immediacy to their group identity not shared by most of us. Among larger ethnic groupings—Ukrainians or Japanese, for example—individuals are linked to an abstract concept of the people that separates us from them. Although they are for the most part anonymous to one another, members of such ethnicities are bound by a common understanding and acceptance of what constitutes normalcy in human relations. In many of the world’s languages, the names cultures use to identify themselves translate literally as human beings. Other ethnic groupings tend to fall outside of this linguistic and social classification—their status as less than fully human makes for easy justification of brutalities that would be viewed with horror if practiced within the insider circle.

Ethnic identity expands, contracts, and shifts in response to circumstance. Two hundred years ago, Genoans or Milanese would have considered themselves distinct ethnic groupings and would have recognized little mutuality with Calabrians. Today they can all join together to riot on behalf of the Italian World Cup team. Although the linguistic and cultural distinctions have not been erased, most Italians have embraced a national identity that is expansive enough to incorporate their regional differences. Italians who emigrated to the United States, while maintaining ties to old country traditions, have constructed their own forms of Italian American ethnicity. “Displaced populations often conceive of themselves as living in exile,” writes folklorist Roger Abrahams, “and they artfully deploy their traditions as a means of maintaining their sense of self-respect and value.”⁷

This was certainly true of Africans who were brought to America as slaves. The continent of Africa supports hundreds of distinct linguistic and cultural groupings, some of which do not live together peacefully. In this hemisphere, chattel slavery erased consciousness of those discrete tribal identities and forged a new African American ethnicity, drawing on the traditions of the innumerable cultures that endured their joint captivity. Many of the characteristics that combined to form this unique ethnic identity were surely lost, but the resiliency of African heritage in adaptation to the circumstances of America is manifest in the contemporary traditions that have made African American culture a driving force in worldwide aesthetics.

With its wildly diverse population, the United States is a continuing encounter with ethnicity. “The sheer magnitude of American ethnic communities,” according to economist Thomas Sowell, “makes them autonomous cultures with lives of their own—neither copies of some ‘mainstream’ model nor mere overseas branches of some other country’s culture. Chow mein, the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and the Afro hairdo all originated on American soil.”⁸ These overt expressions of ethnicity have historically struggled with the tide of assimilation to a denatured American standard.

White America has provided, perhaps, the world’s grandest experiment in the systematic denial of ethnic traditions. From the Industrial Revolution onwards, the dominant American ideology ostensibly demanded the surrender of ethnicity as a part of the passage to American citizenship. Many immigrants to this country have viewed the trappings of ethnicity as barriers to full participation in the bounties of the golden land. As the children of immigrants were educated, they often became less depend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Appreciation
• Introduction
• 1. Communion
• 2. Tradition and Innovation
• 3. Presentation and Participation
• 4. Conservation and Commercialization
• 5. Donation and Deduction
• 6. Education
• 7. Mediation
• 8. Globalization and Localization
• 9. Revolution
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index