Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesIndeed, this extended sense of the scope of cultural policies is an essential prerequisitefor cultural diversity policies inasmuch as these are typically concerned withforms of artistic and cultural expression that have usually fallen outside the purviewof official hierarchies of the arts which, historically, have been ethnically andracially discriminatory in their marginalisation and denigration of non-Europeancultures and, within Europe, of the cultures of ethnic minorities. However, there isno reason to suppose that the more extended scope of contemporary cultural policiesis sufficient, in and of itself, to curtail the influence which such hierarchies ofthe arts exercise upon and within the policy process. There is, to the contrary, evidencethat they still exert considerable influence on what gets funded, by howmuch, and on how what gets funded is classified, owing to the ways in which –often through the interpretation of criteria of excellence – they are embedded in theoperating routines of cultural institutions, funding agencies and granting bodies. 1These are matters that require continued investigation and monitoring if theextended scope of contemporary cultural policies is to lead to greater parity ofesteem across and between the competing cultural tastes and values of differentsections of the community in culturally diverse societies. As a part and parcel ofthese concerns, attention needs also to be paid to the ways in which the extendedscope of contemporary cultural policies is embodied in the administrative arrangementsthrough which cultural policies are developed and put into effect. The relationsbetween arts policies, media policies, heritage policies, sports policies, and –as an issue we pay special attention to in the next section – the broader disciplinesof cultural planning are all relevant here with the likelihood being that the morethese fuse with and inform each other, the more cultural policies will deliver a differentiatedrange of outcomes for a wide range of constituencies.Few would doubt the importance of these tendencies in extending the scope of culturalpolicies and weakening, although by no means fatally, the influence of elitistconceptions of the arts within those policies. They have been especially importantin facilitating the transition from the “democratisation of culture” – in which it wasassumed that there is only one true or worthwhile form of culture, and that the taskof democratic cultural policies was to equalise the opportunities for access to thatculture – and “cultural democracy” in which cultural policies are (theoretically) toaccord a parity of esteem and equality of treatment to an array of different cultures.The view that we can divide the field of culture up into different ways of life, however,is one that has been called into question in the new approaches to theories ofrace and ethnicity that have been developed since the 1980s. Stuart Hall’s work onthe “new ethnicities” has been especially important here in calling into questionessentialist constructions of ethnicity which view the divisions between differentpeoples and cultures as more or less permanent and unbridgeable barriers, fixingindividuals into one culture, one identity and one form of belonging. Hall (1991),__________1. See, for a challenging discussion of these issues in the Canadian context, Tator, Henry and Mattis,1998.52