The articulation of a liberatory praxis around ‘culture’ warrants sensitivity and empathy to perspectives of the marginal communities, for whom culture is neither a luxury nor only a value but relates to the totality of all practices and experience embedded in the material reality of their everyday existence. In fact we prefer to use the term cultural practices rather than ‘culture’ alone as it allows us to move beyond the restricted sense in which ‘culture’ is usually deployed as ‘high culture’, ‘heritage’, ‘individual excellence / creativity in art/ craft’- and bring into focus rustic and earthy notions of cultural practices as ‘concrete and real philosophies of life’ of not just individuals but better understood as belonging to communities as a whole. In fact it is this notion of community traditions that is sought to be invoked in many articulations of sustaining ‘living heritage’ of folk / tribal communities. But since most of these articulations predicate on an understanding of culture as heritage, and not as practice rooted in the material reality, they tend to ignore the holism and dynamism of these cultural creativities and end up freezing them in museum boxes or representing them as essentiallized genres.
‘Culture’ as embedded in this context of ‘practices’ is the site of local knowledge based on and nurtured by everyday practices of communities. It is this epistemic inventory that is the source of resilience for survival- expressed differently as to inherit; to adapt / adopt invent- demonstrated by the local communities to negotiate new challenges of life. Such a perspective conceives of the relation between humans and nature as a complex web of inter-relationships, a ‘community of beings’ worldview- the fuller meaning of which is intelligible not only through rational cognitive abilities alone but through experience (having deep veneration and a ring of spirituality) as well, ecological practices in this worldview become bio-cultural regenerative practices in the genuine sense
Although this cultural capital is conceived as part of capability, one of the key concepts on which sustainable livelihoods approaches are based, in practice, it has been often observed that “…the implications of the role of culture on capability have not been fully appreciated”. Sustainable livelihoods frameworks do not explicitly integrate the exploration of cultural variables, such as worldviews, beliefs, traditions and the historical experiences that shape people’s livelihoods.
Cultural practices are not easy raw material to be tailored to market needs. At the same time there is a critical need to engage with the realm of the ‘intangible assets of our living cultural heritage’ and its ‘incredibly diverse service providers’ in a manner as culture doyen Rajjev Sethi argues ‘to benefit the more than 250 million craftspeople in India in a meaningful and transformative manner’. In order that this passionate call for an engagement with the living cultural traditions does not degenerate into an elitist rhetoric, it requires transcending not only the dissipative bureaucratic dispensations but listening to and including the voices of the communities of rural creators as central to our planning processes.
A radical demystification of the framework for culture necessitates asking questions like what constitutes and reinvigorates creativity as a community practice, how is it related not only to enhancing incomes and opening market opportunities but equally to notions of well being, dignity and happiness; what are the processes that need to be followed for integrating the voices of the rural creators in constituting decentralized and self sustaining cultural / creative industries that situate their existence not as subservient to the logics of elite perspectives and market but to perspectives of realization of self rooted in local tradition and community; what is the potential and legitimacy of the meanings inherent in the cultural practices of the rural creators in not only generating knowledge from below but embodying it to constitute and represent empowering processes and institutions; advocating for the inclusion of oral testimony and voices of the marginal in understanding and constituting development practices and policies; how can the reality of multiple
options of the livelihoods cycle of the marginal communities in the rural areas be understood in a holistic manner to facilitate planning of interventions that have an integrative rather than a dissipative logic, trying to move away from simplistic ways of seeing reality of the marginal as divided into on farm and non-farm categories; how can the concepts of resilience, interdependence and diversity inherent in the holism of sustainable livelihoods approach be integrated into our development practice with reference to the marginal communities.Read more on cultural perspectives on rural livelihoods, position paper
Photo Credits:
Shaitan bhat displaying his skills,Nagore, Rajasthan, By Swasti Singh
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