It has been almost 5 years since the last essay! Even though I occasionally share stuff I find interesting and related to this project, I haven’t shared my thoughts on what I’m working on and going through. As mentioned in the last essay I wrote, this project is not synonymous with the ambition. In a forthcoming essay, I will share what I’m doing at this point in time and why. But first, I wish to share a selection of unedited paragraphs from 2020, scattered around different documents intended as future blog posts but lost to insecurities surrounding style, tone, and scope. At the time, I was conflicted and constantly questioning how to express what I was going through with this project. Therefore, before sharing what DIY Cultural Diplomacy is currently thrusting me towards, I hereby free myself of dated doubts.
2020-03-27 R.I.P The Gram
Today I deleted the project’s Instagram account. I don’t have a personal account and therefore created one for DIY Cultural Diplomacy. Somehow, I thought that the DIY Cultural Attaché needs one. How else does one communicate with an audience?
Well, only three out of the eight Swedish cultural attachés have a formal Instagram account – Linda Zachrison in Washington, Pia Lundberg in London and Hedda Krausz Sjögren in Pretoria. It seems safe to assume that there is no formal requirement.
To be honest, between the display of fun and entertainment, sponsored posts and governmental agencies advertising or simply justifying their activities, it started to feel like an assimilation project to use Instagram.
2020-07-02: Last Week I Called the Ministry of Culture…
Yes, one can actually do that. I spoke to a person at the HR-department that oversees the recruitment process of cultural attachés. By the way, not only will they take your call, they are obliged to give you all the information that you need, if its public. I asked questions about the recruitment process for the position as cultural attaché in Beijing: How many people applied? How many were interviewed? I told the person that I was interested in the recruitment process and how they judged the applicants’ knowledge and experiences.
The recruitment process is lengthy and complex. The person took pride in that. It ought to mean that the process is rigorous and fair: At least five people in high level bureaucratic positions co-create the requirement profile according to their institutional needs or ambitions.The ambassador in Beijing being one of them. An external (commercial) recruitment firm act as a consultant. The Ministry of Culture have their say, too. Out of the 44 people who applied, 5 were called to interviews. The interview process itself is a complex process of personality tests and assessments of knowledge of cultural policy and experiences. As well as the candidate’s appropriateness from a security perspective. Prior knowledge of China and its cultural life wasn’t a requirement, but it was of course an advantage.
I shared my concerns about the knowledge and experiences that this very complex system awards. How does this system attend to knowledge and experiences that aren’t institutionalized? Knowledge and experiences that are rendered as informal by way of similar processes in many other institutions on all levels of society. I try to explain this concern to the person I was talking to. I made sure to mention Hip Hop and how the lack of it in cultural diplomacy is a symptom of this issue. The person got defensive: “Maybe it’s because Hip Hop is anti-establishment…”. Cultural Diplomacy works with all art forms; Hip Hop is music so there is no reason it couldn’t be a part of cultural diplomacy – the person explained. It’s not completely false. A Hip Hop head wouldn’t disagree. For why should Hip Hop institutionalize? Both these positions are lacking the conceptual resources and the resolution to make any constructive contribution to the conversation. And I was reminded that it wasn’t the person’s job to care about whatever I was concerned about. But who’s job is it?
2020-12-17 A Distinction
When I write the word Hip Hop, and when I speak it, I can’t help to feel that it doesn’t represent what I mean anymore. This is partly because ambiguity is inevitable when a word or a concept spreads and is used by more people. Different meanings and usage accumulate over time. Additionally, Hip Hop changes and adapts with every generation. The word, then, evokes expectations and associations within us that can be very different depending on one’s relationship to it. Perhaps graffiti, breakdance and rap comes to mind. Maybe you think of violence, crime or political struggle. Or New York. Or immigration. Or money, affluence and blackness. I now feel obliged to treat the word in light of having previously pointed to the significance of Hip Hop being epistemic disobedience.
2021-04-29 The Magic of Concepts
The magic of Concepts is the title to a book by Rebecca E. Karl, Associate Professor of History. She, in turn, is inspired by “magical concepts” – a formulation by Wang Yanan who was an Economic Philosopher and the first to translate Adam Smith and Karl Marx into modern Chinese in the early 20th century. In Karl’s words:
… “The magic of Concepts“ is at one and the same time a condemnation of a lack of historical-conceptual reflexivity as well as a potentially generative call for engagement with the conceptual complexity of history as lived global and local experience and social practice. (Karl, 2017, p. 12)
What I take from Karl is that concepts are appropriated to fit new circumstances. She points out that the magic of concepts is not only a process of discursive appropriation or simply representational practices (art for example) and makes a complex point about lived experience in modernity and the necessity of materialization in the process of sharing experiences. The magic of concept is unavoidably material. I agree. Materialization is an anthropological fact, she explains. Humans transform ideas and beliefs into objects so that they can be shared. The issue for Karl is when a concept is applied without reflecting on the experiences that informed it. When it is dislocated from its who, when and where. Or in Karl’s words: “the externalization of concepts that detaches them from the social realities and the history of their own emergence” (Karl, 2017, pp. 1–2). Karl’s book makes a larger argument about how the placelessness and ahistorical utility of concepts is a form of ideological framing. She argues that a consequence of the demands to comprehend globalization led to prescriptive applications of concepts that fails to account for the specificities that makes the local and global simultaneous.
She does not stop there. We have both come to the conclusion that precisely because of this dislocation – the fact that it does happen, by governments, corporations and in universities – it paradoxically reveals a range of possibilities. Karl is a little vague here and describes the possibilities in terms of imagining desirable futures – a capacity for more and new ideology to be created. My approach is more pragmatic, or perhaps more literal. I simply suggest more appropriation.