Imagined culture and cultural imaging: Cultural implications of the USDA‐SCS “Harmony”; campaign

Abstract

From January, 1993, through April, 1994, the USDA Soil Conservation Service conducted a multimedia public education campaign titled “Harmony.”; The campaign utilized Native American spokespersons and constructed texts on Native American environmental ethics to raise public awareness of conservation and to motivate participation in various programs. Although successful in terms of generating public responses, Harmony's use of culture raises issues of representation, transference, and brokering of environmental value systems. Cultural representation is examined in terms of authenticity, historical reconstruction, and stereotyping of Native Americans. Transference issues include attempts to bridge Native American and Euro‐American assumptions about nature and human‐nature relationships. Cultural brokering has to do with the secularization and decontextualization of the Native American sacred cultural systems for purposes of wider public consumption. Although such campaigns may achieve positive public relations ends, they may not necessarily work to change patterns of behavior or the dominant cultural ethos underlying Euro‐American interactions with the environment.

Key words:

• culture
• environmental ethics
• Native Americans
• public relations and programs
• Soil Conservation Service (Natural Resource Conservation Service)
• symbols