Cultural Dynamics
Cultural Dynamics is an initiative of the NWO Division for the Humanities in collaboration with the Division for the Social Sciences and WOTRO Science for Global Development. This research programme aims to contribute towards solutions for societal issues in which culture and the dynamics of cultural heritage play a key role.
Why Cultural Dynamics?
The past – in the form of buildings, works of art, bodies of thought, customs, rituals, etc. – is selected and reconstructed over and over again. This is a dynamic process. Cultural heritage is not an inheritance that just ‘happens’ to us. It is what groups of people all over the world choose and experience as heritage in the here and now on a personal, political and economic basis. This means, for example, that heritage contributed by new groups joining our society can be integrated into ‘our’ cultural heritage. This applies to heritage from external minorities, and also to neglected, oppressed or forgotten groups within societies. An analysis of these dynamic processes of heritage formation in the Western and non-Western world will generate knowledge about the ways in which cultures and identities develop and change. That analysis will enhance our understanding of how the social cohesion of societies can be strengthened.
Objectives of Cultural Dynamics
The programme is a multidisciplinary research programme into the dynamising role of cultural heritage in terms of the identity of people, groups and national and international society, and their perception of the environment.
This programme specifically aims to contribute towards an understanding of the cultural process at the various levels of national, supranational and international cultural policy and in so doing to offer a guide for cultural preservation, cultural participation and cultural development, in connection with the developments in social identities.
Approaches of Cultural Dynamics
The Cultural Dynamics programme consists of five main research approaches, each of which is pre-eminently suitable for international and comparative research. These five approaches not only appear to predominate the current scientific literature; they also determine the lion’s share of the societal debate about cultural heritage, viewed from the perspective of its use for cultural dynamics.
The five research approaches are:
- processes of inclusion and exclusion, crystallised in the theme of citizenship
- processes of certification of enduring values, crystallised in the theme of canon formation
- processes of creative design, summarised in the theme of innovation and crystallised in a broadly conceived implementation practice
- forms of migration of heritage between the (old as well as new) media and the meaning put on them, summed up in the term intermediality
- forms of widely supported cultural participation, crystallised in the theme of popular culture and with a focus on present-day cultural practices and the new media, from radio, film and TV to computer games and the Internet, but also with an eye to the historical dimension.
These three sets of processes/approaches and two facets or forms interlock time and time again. Together, they can be seen as a matrix which allows a variety of aspects of cultural heritage to be placed and analysed on the scale of cultural dynamics. None of them is limited to the national society. On the contrary, they are all without exception hot issues on the international scientific agenda.
Overarching the five research approaches is the theoretical meta-level. This is where the necessary meta-reflection should take place, both on the terms used in the area of cultural heritage as well as on the methodology and the formulation of theories in the field of cultural dynamics.