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Ginny Brink explores the role of the voluntary arts in an international arena.

What do obesity, heart disease, breast cancer, teenage pregnancy, drug use, teen crime rates, community cohesion, social inclusion and public health targets all have in common? The arts!

These days, the world appears to be getting smaller and bigger simultaneously. Improved travel and communications allow us to be world citizens, and our lives seem to be increasingly controlled by remote events and structures. As this process seems here to stay, it is vital that we protect the huge diversity of the ways we express our cultures. We need to be able to respect and value difference, and know that we will receive parity of esteem in return.

We also need to resist both the extreme position of valuing art for arts sake without reference to a social context, and that of supporting the arts solely as an instrument of social policy. The voluntary arts do just this, by providing the means for people to both express their own cultures and to reach out in friendship to others.

Globalisation

Globalisation is a term that often divides people into two noisy camps. On the one side, there are the idealists and activists who want to resist capitalist domination of the world. This camp also provides a home for extreme preservationist conservatism, which tends to believe that nothing should ever change and that the world was a better place in the remembered past of rosy summers. In the other camp are those who believe that a totally connected world and marketplace is inevitable and that all problems can be solved by technology. Here you will also find those who believe that greed is good and that market forces must be allowed to prevail over old-fashioned protectionism.

These positions are so polarised that it is almost impossible to speak on the issue without being labelled an extremist. If you express regret that every town is beginning to resemble every other, with the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonald?s displacing local symbols, you are likely to be considered an anti-progress activist with eco-terrorist leanings! Similarly, if you speak about the enormous opportunities of global communication ? not least the ability to connect directly with people and cultures hitherto considered exotic ? you may well be identified as a selfish, planet-destroying demon!

In reality, of course, there are good and bad aspects of globalisation, which of itself is a neutral sociological phenomenon. As little as three hundred years ago, most of us lived not in the global village, but in the local village. The world beyond a day?s walk or ride away was largely unknown and had little impact on our lives. Our understanding of this outside world was limited to word-of-mouth tales conveyed by travelling tinkers or fairs, snippets in newspapers, or facts or fictions in the few books we read. Surprisingly, it could be said that we have not changed that much. We still measure our familiar world by where we can travel in a day. And we still gain our understanding of the world from other people?s words and pictures, though now mainly through television ? which is a mechanism for selling us things (goods, services and opinions) in return for keeping us entertained, rather than an impartial provider of factual information.

Much is gained from globalisation. Sharing objectives and resources and achieving convergence of working practice permits the creation of mechanisms that allow the weakest to bring their economies and infrastructure closer to the standards of the strongest. But much is also lost. Harmonisation can give an extra impetus to standardisation of life in general ? and the same brand names and shops in all our cities. This can be seen as a dilution of distinctive cultures, which, in turn, can be an impoverishment of our human experience.

The impact on culture

Does this matter? Of course it matters. Culture is not a product. It is a set of feelings and beliefs through which we make sense of our experience as human beings and through which we transmit this understanding to others. And it was we, or rather our ancestors, who invented it for that purpose. They had no ?disposable income? to buy cultural product in order to fill their leisure time. Rather, what we now call culture was one of the four essentials of life into which they put their efforts. The need for food, shelter, procreation and culture is what drove their lives. It is therefore not surprising that culture is being rediscovered as a way to improve dysfunctional communities and individuals.

But therein lies a great danger. As policy makers use the practice of culture as an instrument for social good, they also lose sight of the fact that it is participation in communities that produces the benefits. Because that is the way that human beings designed it. Doing an arts project may look like exercising your culture through creativity, and a good project may satisfy some part of that objective, but to separate the practice from its social context makes no sense. Applying an arts project to a social problem like a dollop of Clearasil encourages mere skin-deep instrumentalism.

As our lives take place in a bigger, faster arena that is increasingly governed by structures distant from our local communities, we feel threatened. One response to this is ultra-nationalism, where people can conveniently blame all their troubles and fears on outsiders, which in turn can lead to xenophobia. It is true that small, inward-looking groupings do accrue the benefits of bonding social capital, but by doing this they also experience a huge decline in bridging capital. However, when people feel secure enough to exercise their culture freely, they begin to unclench their fear. And once they know that their cultural aspirations are respected, they in turn respect their neighbours? aspirations. This makes everyone more likely to be open with each other and to express both individuality and difference. Thus the simple measurement of the number of opportunities to exercise our right to be a voluntary artist becomes a key indicator of the health of the community we live in. The voluntary arts have real strength in allowing people to have their own voice.

The universal

In the wider sphere too, the voluntary arts have a major role to play. The arts use a language that all humans can understand. Even under extreme and divisive conditions, voluntary arts groups continue to organise arts activities, exchanges and events, thereby making connections with people whose language, culture and daily lives are very different. Now is the time, with changes across Europe and the increasing interaction between different nations across the globe, for the voluntary arts sector to play its part in increasing interaction and understanding and defeating xenophobia and racism. This could be a very cost-effective investment for governments to make.

Ginny Brink is Core Services Co-ordinator at Voluntary Arts Network.
t: 029 2039 5395; e: info@voluntaryarts.org
To address some of these issues and to start building a European network for the voluntary/amateur arts, Voluntary Arts Network is holding an international conference in Cardiff in November. w: http://www.voluntaryarts.org/europe/conference