Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 146

I first discuss the definition of culture, encompassing two dimensions of the
concept—culture as a “way of life” and as object of anthropological inquiry
and also culture manifested in different forms of elite artistic creation—after
turning to a discussion of culture wars as encounters between opposing
identities. Two cases of culture wars—the early history of the Edinburgh
Festival and the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis—seek to
illustrate the complex interplay of politics and art in contemporary culture
wars. The essay does not seek to give a historical overview of the Festival (for
a comprehensive historical overview, please see Bartie ����) or an exhaustive
analysis of the refugee crisis, but rather it aims to bring to life the complexity
of meaning and artistic representation that constitute “culture wars.”
Throsby (����:�) defines culture as a “way of life” made up of “a set
of attitudes, beliefs, mores, values and practices which are common
to or shared by a group.” But there is also meaning that dates from the
European Enlightenment, which uses the term to group “the arts and other
manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively”
(Oxford Dictionary ����). The use of the adjective “cultural” in the more
functional sense of the word is dated to the later part of the nineteenth
century (Williams ����:��). The second definition highlights the performative
aspect of identities through certain activities as well as the cultural products
of these communities that affirm and consolidate group identity. Throsby
identifies three main characteristics of cultural endeavors: “activities
concerned involve some form of creativity in their production; they are
concerned with the generation and communication of symbolic meaning;
and their output embodies, at least potentially, some form of intellectual
property” (Throsby ����:�). This definition informs the recent intellectual
efforts of a number of international political economy scholars to investigate
cultural outputs and activities as social variables in causal relationships with
economic and political indicators.
The two main definitions discussed above are by no means exhaustive of the
semantic complexity of the concept of “culture.” Importantly, the conceptual
distance between the two is not always as visible in the following examples.
These two cases seek to illustrate the cultural politics that underlie two cases
of culture wars motivated by the two different understandings of culture.
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