Paradigms of participation in the National Council for Culture and Arts: challenges on representation, recognition, access to creation and reception in post-dictatorship Chilean public cultural policy

Abstract

The National Council for Culture and Arts (NCCA) is the public agency responsible for the implementation of cultural policies in Chile. It was created in 2003 as part of a group of public organisms designed to promote democracy in post-dictatorship Chile, and its objectives include the encouragement of citizen participation in the national culture. This paper aims to call into question the scope and limits of citizen participation in the Chilean cultural field, through a systematisation of paradigms implicitly developed by the NCCA. Those paradigms include participation on the political level, the creation of symbols, recognition of cultural manifestations and access to reception and symbolic appropriation. It identifies challenges of these paradigms regarding representation, recognition, access to creation and reception of cultural manifestations.

Keywords:

• participation
• post-dictatorship
• National Council for Culture and Arts
• Chile

Notes

1. Responsible – through the systematic violation of the human rights of opponents of the regime – for the atomisation of social relations in Chile during the 1970s and the installation of a neoliberal economic model during the 1980s.

2. A recent study of the University of Chile and University of Maryland (López et al. 2013) reflects an important concentration of income and capital in what the researchers call the ‘super-rich’. Indeed, from 2005 to 2010 the 0.01% richest portion of the population earned income and capital revenues on average 1238.4 times the income of 99.99% of the national population.

3. At the same time, it is an indicator of the limits of the measurement instruments used. By emphasising the study of practices related to the arts, high-brow intellectual activities and cultural industries, cultural consumption surveys tell us little about local and community practices, such as those related to Chilean intangible cultural heritage.

4. Kohlbacher explains that discourse analysis can be applied to different kinds of recorded communication, including written documents in general (2006).

5. Whenever the source text is in Spanish, the translation is ours.

6. ‘Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits’.

7. FONDART has existed since 1992 as a programme of the Division of Culture of the Ministry of Education, and in 2003 its administration became regulated by a specific law.

8. French Ministry of Culture, British cultural institutionality and the National Council for Culture and the Arts of Mexico (CONACULTA) are particular examples that influenced the creation of Chilean NCCA. The formation in 1989 of CONACULTA and its National Fund of Culture and Arts (FONCA) were regional milestones that established a precedent for linking the private sector to the cultural sphere (Miller and Yúdice 2002), that was subsequently closely followed by the Chilean State’s model.

9. The functioning of the Sectorial Councils is also regulated by specific laws of promotion in their respective cultural domains (National Congress of Chile 1993a, 2004a, 2004b) We use the term ‘domain’ to refer to different sets of cultural goods, services and activities that ‘encompass artistic, aesthetic, symbolic and spiritual values’ (UNESCO 2009, p. 22).

10. The information regarding organisation and programmes of NCCA are based on descriptions available to the public on the web site of the institution: www.cultura.gob.cl. It is worth mentioning that until 2014 only the Department for Promotion of Culture and Arts and Department of Cultural Citizenship existed (although under different names). The three other departments were created during 2014 and 2015 from units and programmes dependent on previously-existing departments, and sought to develop specific plans for their respective domains.

11. It is necessary to clarify that the design and execution of cultural policies in Chile is part of the functions of NCCA as a public service, as defined by Law 19.891. To do so, NCCA relies on different sources of information, some of which are dependent on the executive power (such as the Annual Presidential Discourse of May 21st and the Annual Ministry Account) and other mechanisms that allow citizen participation. The participation of the artistic community is achieved through methodologies such as online consultations, focus groups with specialists, National and Zonal Conventions, and the specific recommendations made by non-government organisations (by instance, the National Union of Artists – Unión Nacional de Artistas). Those sources are then systematised in final cultural policy documents and subjected to final approval by the National Board of Directors and the Minister, as done with the current Política Cultural 2011–2016 (NCCA 2011c).

12. The label ‘D Days’ is a word play that relies on the Spanish grammatical structure of the sentence ‘Día de la fotografía’ or ‘Día de la danza’. In Spanish, the preposition ‘de’ is pronounced equally to the letter ‘D’, which makes the label ‘Día de …’ a reference to Normandy landings during World War II, emphasizing the importance of the event.

13. Actually, in the planning documents of the funding initiatives (prepared for the economic evaluation of public institutions made by the Ministry of the Treasury) it is stated that its objective is to solve market failures in arts and culture (Saborido 2008).

14. Prepared annually in collaboration with the National Institute for Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas – INE).