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The Social Dimensions of Culture
Thierry Verhelst
LEADER Magazine Winter 1994
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Contents
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Culture
has four social dimensions, which can lead to development
Culture is a living thing, consisting of elements inherited from the past, outside
influences, which have been embraced and new elements invented locally. Culture has an
important role to play in society.
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Culture first of all
provides self-esteem
Self-esteem, whether it be personal or collective, is an essential precondition if
culture is to flourish. Without a minimum consciousness of his or her values or abilities,
without a quiet confidence in his or her own resources and means, the individual remains
static and muted, both metaphorical, and occasionally in the literal sense. Paolo Freire
has analysed this culture of silence, which is a characteristic of societies, which
have grown dependent and inarticulate. This silence, this apathy, is a specific result of
the loss of a sense of societys self-esteem. If it is told incessantly that it is
backward, ignorant, incapable, uncompetitive, lazy, marginal, underdeveloped and outdated,
the population finally internalises this message and behaves in conformity with this
negative image. Affirming its value and potential opens a society to creativity and
action.
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Culture
is a selective mechanism for all kinds of external influences
The ability to select outside influences, to make a choice, is extremely important.
Every community must be able to make a free choice between what it considers to be useful
and beneficial and what it considers to be superfluous and harmful. This is equally true
of the cultural elements inherited from the past. The past heritage is ambiguous; it may
be harmful. It is for this reason that the inhabitants of isolated villages often have
only one concern to jettison a culture, which they associate with a past filled
with isolation, discomfort, deprivation and humiliation. They aspire to greater material
welfare. Who can blame them for this?
The ability to stand up to cultural imperialism or the harmful elements of the past,
the ability to select, is determined by culture. It is culture, which contains these
values and determines the priorities; it is also culture, which directs the choices in
accordance with these priorities.
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Culture
inspires strategies for resistance by creating a counterweight
Resistance to everything, which is imposed from outside and which is considered to be
damaging and unacceptable, is an essential element for harmonious development of every
community. After selecting everything, which can be usefully adopted and earmarking the
harmful elements for rejection, a strategy of resistance has to be organised. If this is
not done, power politics mean that a society will rapidly be overrun by unwanted elements,
and finally will passively or unconsciously accept them.
So resistance is to be advised. It should not condemn a region to remaining a
fruitlessly isolated community or an outdated backwater a dream for the
city-dweller, but unacceptable to the rural population. Once more, only a strong,
confident culture can assess the advantages and the disadvantages, can weigh up the
benefits of an immediate financial profit against long-term consistency and a lifestyle
open to the outside world. This is a difficult choice; in the final analysis, no magic
formula or expert opinion can act as substitute for the judgement of those involved; but
if they want to be capable of judging and acting according to this value judgement, they
must have a living cultural identity. Culture is primarily a force, which provides
direction.
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Development must have a direction
Making sense of what one does is of primary importance. Development must have a
direction. In every process of social change, economic shift and general development, we
must be able to keep to the same course if we do not want to be swept away be different
events and pressures. In several European languages, the word sense means both deep
significance and direction.
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Culture is,
after all, the vitality, which provides sense
This is exactly what this means; on the one hand attaching appropriate importance to
the values which make us do what is sensible that is, full of good sense,
and on the other hand, orientation towards the future, progress in a given direction. The
faculty of providing direction for what one undertakes is unique to man. This faculty
presupposes some kind of self-esteem and the capacity for selection and resistance as
mentioned above, but it is far more than this. It is closely allied to life and the joy of
living. Culture is, after all, the vitality, which provides sense. In this regard
its symbolic dimension (values, spirituality, etc) plays a crucial role. This search for
sense is not only an individual activity. It is also collective and encroaches on the
political: co-existing , social relationships, which in this time of fragmentation and
change are often of a new kind, or need to be re-established.
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The subject/object culture
When Ricardo Petrella, a senior European Commission civil servant stressed in the
October 1993 edition of the magazine Economie et Humanisme the necessity of
providing direction for our societies, he wrote that it fundamentally concerns cultural
development.
" To a certain extent it means passing from an object culture (building
more houses, infrastructure, roads, machinery, ferrying and transporting more passengers,
goods, capital, etc), which has been given priority over the last 30 to 40 years to a subject
culture (developing links for co-existing, the search for quality of life
..)
"
This subject/object culture distinction has to be looked at individually for each
intervention. This is why the methodology behind the intervention is at least as important
as the intervention itself; it is this on which the real cultural nature of the
intervention depends:
the capacity to make it catch fire under the ashes of passiveness and resignation, the
glowing embers.
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This article was largely inspired from a presentation made by the author at the
European LEADER seminar on Cultures and Development, held in Molinos, Aragon, Spain
in June 1994.
Thierry Verhelst is an expert for UNESCO and member of the staff at the ICHEC in
Brussels. He is one of the founding members of the South/North Network on Cultures and
Development (1985) and author of the book No Life without Roots, Zed Books, London,
1992, ISBN 0 86232 849 7.
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