This document discusses the parameters and definitions associated with the terms cultural and policy within South Africa.
This document discusses the parameters and definitions associated with the terms cultural and policy within South Africa. Due to the marginalization of rural areas from mainstream urban cultural initiatives, we focus specifically on elucidating the features of rural cultural and heritage initiatives in South Africa. We do this in two ways: we examine how cultural policies may feature within the public and developmental rubric of international, national, provincial and local arenas; and we analyze our data to extract specific aspects of provincial cultural and heritage practice that may be useful in the of cultural policies for rural zones in South Africa. This specifically contributes to the mapping of cultural and heritage resources by the South African Cultural Observatory.
Due to the inter-disciplinary nature of this enquiry, the first section of the paper assesses concepts that are integral to the definition and deconstruction of our subject matter. This ‘culture’, ‘heritage’, the ‘rural and urban’, and ‘policy’. We point out that cultural policy can be fundamentally understood through a mapping exercise, based on UNESCO’s cultural cycle, which is essential in providing more substance and bite to local constructions of policy. We then examine the international experience of cultural policy, and point out that although the rural element is difficult to locate, it is nevertheless a cross cutting theme common to all forms of cultural policy. We then focus on how South Africa has approached cultural policy in the three periods since 1994, and how and whether local and regional state entities have interpreted this. This section also extracts and reviews the characteristics of two important sectors: that of craft, which has resulted in huge gains for the cultural economy of Cape Town; as well as the general rural economy in South Africa.
