Cultural Sustainability

This question keeps knocking around in my head, and I would like to start a conversation–not just a flurry of posts–about it. This conversation is part of what draws me to the Goucher program. Most of what I have learned about cultural sustainability as a whole, I have learned my colleagues in the program, especially Rory Turner. So it seems to me that cultural sustainability lies at the nexus of community, commitment and advocacy. It involves engaging communities in ways that help them identify, document, and nurture the cultural traditions that matter to them. Because communities sustained by environment and economy, these too play a role. 

How do you understand cultural sustainability? And more importantly, how would you like to practice it?

Tags: community, cultural sustainability, ecology, economics, tradition

For several months now, I have been toying with the idea of writing a post about Cittaslow–Slow Cities. Related to Slow Food but a bit less developed, Slow Cities is a full-blown part of the Slow Movement. They have guidelines, they offer memberships, and they even have a charter that they sometimes call a manifesto. As the UK site says,

Collective well-being is at the heart of the Cittaslow philosophy….A Cittaslow town celebrates tradition and quality.

Who can oppose collective well-being, tradition, and quality?

My ambivalence about the Slow City Movement has much to do with the fact that it seems to the province of the wealthy. To date Slow Cities only appear in Canada, Europe and South Korea–places where quality of life is already pretty high and some people have the luxury of spending their time pursuing an even better way of life. Because CittaSlow emphasizes hospitality, some people have suggested that it is merely window dressing for the tourism industry. Another concern It’s not that I am opposed to that–in fact, I have considered trying to get my neighborhood in Washington, D.C. to join as a Cittaslow supporter. It is simply the fact that so few people are able to access this approach to cultural sustainability.

Tags: CittaSlow, cultural sustainability, Slow Cities, Slow Food

http://www.stockholmresilience.org/newsandvideos/generalnews/elinorostromawardedeconomicsnobel.5.1fe8f33123572b59ab800030085.html

The video on this page is remarkable. In some ways Ostrom makes a cornerstone argument for the importance of culture in sustainability, culture as a collectively created and negotiated process.

Tags: commons, cultural sustainability, Ostrom

Without compassion there can be no cultural sustainability:

For all those interested in cultural sustainability and the place of culture in the public policy of the United States, I recommend you take a look at and help endorse Art and the Public Purpose. For a very nice comment on this framework by co-author Arlene Goldbard (who incidently helped advise Goucher on our program), see her essay in the Community Arts Network Reading Room.

Don’t forget to sign the petition and to share this statement with your friends and colleagues!

An interesting post from Tierneylab at the NY Times on the Non-Tragedy of the Commons. A quote from the piece, which shares the work of recent Nobel Prize Recipient in Economics Elinor Ostrom:

International donors and nongovernmental organizations, as well as national governments and charities, have often acted, under the banner of environmental conservation, in a way that has unwittingly destroyed the very social capital — shared relationship, norms, knowledge and understanding — that has been used by resource users to sustain the productivity of natural capital over the ages.

Tags: commons, cultural sustainability, economics, social capital

This is a very compelling essay by Jason Baird Jackson on the troublesome dynamics of corporate control of academic publishing:http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2009/10/12/getting-yourself-out-of-the-business-in-five-easy-steps/

Priniciples of sustainability, diversity, access, equity, local control are at work here. At Goucher we are building a program that uses open source tools, and that is committed to the unfettered flow of helpful, voluntarily shared information.

Tags: corporations, open access, publishing

Goucher College will host a catered information session lunch on the Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in Boise Idaho from 12:15-1:30 on Thursday October 22. We will share information about the Goucher program and have a chance to further discuss cultural sustainability and its relationship to folklore. First come, first served.

Also, if you are in Boise, don’t miss Rory Turner’s presentation on the Goucher program at 8:00 AM Oct. 22 or the panel on Cultural Sustainability Saturday Oct. 24 at 10:15 featuring Goucher Advisory Board members Peggy Bulgar, and Jeff Todd Titon and faculty member Jon Lohman.

Tags: AFS, cultural sustainability, folklore

Important work in the area of cultural equity:
ACE REPATRIATION PROJECT SELECTED BY CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE
ACE’s Haiti Repatriation and Cultural Preservation Project was selected as an outstanding project of the Clinton Global Initiative in Haiti, sponsored by the Green Family Foundation, a humanitarian agency based in Miami and operating in Haiti, and a partner of the CGI.

The project brings to light the recordings Alan Lomax made in Haiti for The Library of Congress from 1936 to 1937. Over the last ten years ACE, in collaboration with the Magic Shop in New York City and staff at the American Folklife Center, has had the recordings digitally transferred, restored, and denoised in order to return them to the Haitian people.

read more here

Tags: Cultural Equity, Haiti, Lomax

Have you ever heard of Xoomei, also known as throat singing or overtone singing? Imagine that one person is playing a didgeridoo while one or two others are singing melodic tones. Now imagine that all of these sounds are being sung by one person at the same time! This unique musical tradition originates from and reflects the vast Central Asian steppes of Tuva, where the sounds of xoomei could travel over many miles.

Goucher College will be graced with a performance by Khogzhumchu, a new and flourishing quartet of throat singers on their first tour of America. Formed in 2007 and led by the accomplished Andrey Mongush, this post-Soviet generation of Tuvan musicians has already appeared before the Dalai Lama in India at the first Annual Festival of Buddhist Culture of Russia and Mongolia as well as performed at the Ocean of Compassion ethno-rock festival in Moscow.

Come listen and learn about Khogzhumchu and Tuva in the Hyman Auditorium of the Athenaeum on Monday, October 5th at 8:00 pm. Also free and open to the public, at 4:00 pm October 5th, Khogzhumchu will be sharing their tradition in a workshop format in Goucher College’s Heubeck Multipurpose Room.

This visit to Goucher is sponsored by the Goucher College Live Music House; the Departments of Music, Peace Studies, and Sociology/Anthropology; and the Cultural Sustainability Program.

Khogzhumchu’s tour would not have been possible without the support of the Open World Cultural Leaders Program and National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA).