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This chapter examines the modes of constructing alternatives to the tradition of cultural authoritarianism and neoliberalism by focusing on institutions that try to offer permanent life spaces for the ‘cultures of anyone’. It considers the cultural and political project Trafiantes de Sueños (TdS), which belongs to the Fundacón de los Comunes network, to highlight the successes achieved by self-managed spaces that base their ability to decommodify and democratize meaning production on the daily support of communities. It also looks at a public institution, such as Medialab-Prado, and the harassment it suffers, showing that such harassment is contrary to the growing civic interest in bringing the logics of democratic self-management to the public sphere. Finally, it discusses the Plan Estratégico de la Cultura de Madrid (PECAM) and the role of experimentation in constructing truly democratic cultures in cultural institutions.

This chapter reinterprets the origins of modern classical archaeology by examining the founding of the first archaeological institute, the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica. Understanding the Instituto within its Italian contexts reveals the importance to this process of Magna Graecia its material culture and its scholars and simultaneously explains Magna Graecia's subsequent marginalization. The work and life of the institute's founder, the German Eduard Gerhard, are shown to be indebted to Neapolitan cultural institutions and antiquarianism, the richness of which is evinced through the scholarship of Andrea de Jorio. Analysis of the debate on the provenance of painted vases within the Instituto's community illuminates the emerging predilection of the new archaeological discipline for mainland Greece rather than Magna Graecia. The provincialization of South Italian scholarship accompanying this process of archaeological professionalization is explored through the relationship of the Calabrese scholar Vito Capialbi with the new archaeology promoted by the Instituto.

Jorge Duany examines the shifting cultural ties between Cuba and the United States since 1959, and how they have reframed relations between Cubans on and off the island. Duany argues that the cultural politics of Miami’s Cuban community have changed substantially because of demographic and generational transitions over the last three decades. Until the 1980s, Cuban artists and other intellectuals in the United States had limited contact with their island counterparts. However, it is now customary for U.S. museums and galleries to collect and exhibit artworks produced in post-1959 Cuba without much protest or opposition from Cuban Americans. Although some exile artists and critics still believe that U.S. cultural institutions should not display such artworks, the fault lines between Cubans residing on the island and abroad seem more porous than in the past. The author concludes that the visual arts may serve as cultural bridges across the Florida Straits.

This chapter explores how convergent new media technologies can connect cultural heritage institutions to new audiences through community cocreation programs using a framework called “Digital Cultural Communication.” It argues that this connection requires not only the provision of convergent technology infrastructure, but also that cultural heritage institutions take into account the audience’s familiarity with new literacies, along with supply and demand within the target cultural sector. To establish this framework successfully, the chapter looks at how cultural heritage institutions can seek to expand curatorial missions from exhibitions of collections to the remediation of cultural narratives and experiences.

This chapter explores a series of continuities across a period of time—the sixth through the ninth centuries—that witnessed some of the most consequential changes in the late ancient world. In the seventh century, members of the dissident Miaphysite church were engaged in sophisticated translations from Greek into Syriac of a number of texts. These cultural efforts were undertaken apart from the Roman state. The development of cultural institutions among Middle Eastern Christian communities that existed and persisted independently from the state, and, even despite it, provided paths by which sophisticated ideas and cultural practices might be transmitted across centuries of great military upheaval and political discontinuity. What resulted is a non-state dependent bridge between the world of the late antique Roman-ruled Middle East and the world of medieval Abbasid Baghdad.

Ethnicity is produced by socio-political orders that are stratified by associations of certain regions and certain cultural institutions with the “normal,” “classic,” or “formal.” The importance of being precise in the use of these terms becomes clear when one turns to the period between 1600 and 1800. The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1636–1912) empires were profoundly different with respect to their perceived structure of national and ethnic populations. In the Ming period, a national group within the empire happened to be very clearly defined, usually by culture, but in some instances by genealogy. The Qing structure was quite different, particularly before the nineteenth century. The lingering centralities and marginalities of the Ming period remained identifiable, and many regions vigorous, beneath the formal, newly historicized hierarchies of the Qing conquest.

This book examines how museums create diverse communities both within and beyond their borders. Drawing on first-hand conversations with curators, policy makers, academics, museum directors, and educators in seven cities around the world between 2009 and 2013, the book looks at the kinds of citizens that museums are creating. It also considers how nationalism and cosmopolitanism get intertwined in museums in different cities and nations, and especially how the tension between globalism and nationalism plays out outside the West. By profiling art museums, ethnographic museums, constituency museums (institutions that focus on particular groups), and cultural history museums, the book highlights different stances along the nationalism–globalism spectrum. It argues that cultural institutions do not compete but instead fall along a continuum of cosmopolitan nationalism whose two constantly changing parts mutually inform and transform each other.

This chapter takes a look at the slow creation of new cultural institutions and policies. It studies the campaigns designed to bring culture and art more directly to the masses, the move toward more government oversight of the arts, and the creation of specialized art schools. The chapter outlines the broader social and political changes, and then discusses the centralization of cultural activities under institutions such as the Consejo Nacional de Cultura and the Ministry of Culture. It also documents the rise of the Amateurs' movement and discusses the formation of management agencies designed for the coordination of musical performance.

This chapter aims to do three things. First, drawing principally on Bourdieu's (1991) notion of symbolic power, it outlines what is entailed in thinking about policing as a cultural institution and performance, and begins to develop a theoretical lens that permits better sociological sense to be made of the social meanings of policing. Secondly, it sketches out a heuristic perspective that enables us to attend, in substantive terms, to the formation, effects, and trajectories of competing sensibilities towards English policing, and to their intersections with other key dimensions of post-war English society and culture. It concludes by outlining the methodological choices made in this study and setting out what, in research terms, the efforts towards a cultural sociology of post-war English policing actually comprised.

This chapter calls for further support for the United Jewish Workers' Cultural Society to develop Yiddish language and culture, in resistance to the general trend toward Americanization. It details the accomplishments and ongoing efforts of the Cultural Society from the past year, highlighting their goal “of preparing the warm sentiments needed for tackling our local cultural problems in their full depth and breadth, and for the creation of a beautiful, festive cultural atmosphere in our prosaic working-class life.” For its second year of activities, the Cultural Society proposes to build cultural institutions, such as schools, courses for adults, and the like, in the hopes that these will form the basis of the Society and the cultural activities of the working class.

Drawing on his own involvement over the past 20 years, in this chapter, the writer pinpoints the shifting dynamics between social movements, Cultural Studies and institutions. He argues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the driving forces and inspirations for Cultural Studies in Asia came from engagements in social and political movements; the institutionalization of Cultural Studies from the late 1990s onward has redefined the field as both an intellectual movement and a set of institutional practices.

This chapter examines how Singapore and Doha display the nation and the world through museums. New museums are on the drawing board in Doha as part of a strategic master plan to use cultural institutions, along with various other tools, to reposition Qatar as a regional, if not global, player. Singapore is also using cultural policies and institutions to solidify its place as a regional, if not global, economic power. Singapore is making museums part of a strategy to attract businesses and create national citizens with an Asian global outlook. This chapter considers how Singapore and Qatar express their respective approaches to cosmopolitanism through cultural heritage and museums such as the Asian Civilizations Museum and the Museum of Islamic Art, respectively.

This introductory chapter discusses the emergence of covert state agencies and the covert sphere. During the Truman administration in 1947, the National Security Act established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and placed it under the guidance of a new National Security Council (NSC) within the executive branch. In the next four years, the CIA's covert operations section grew by 2,000 percent. This led to the rise of the covert sphere, a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state. It is an array of discursive forms and cultural institutions such as novels, films, television series, and electronic games, through which the public can discuss or fantasize the covert aspects of the state. This book argues that the covert sphere inspired a large body of narrative and visual culture, generated cynicism about the government, raised skepticism about historical narrative, and contributed significantly to the rise of postmodernism.

Andrew Miles offers an empirical study of the cultural practices of Manchester’s contemporary population. His essay is a contribution to continuing debates about the relationship between culture, class and identity in Britain. His particular interest is in the ‘non-users’ of the city’s more high-profile cultural institutions. He suggests the limited nature of debates among politicians and policy-makers about the nature of cultural participation, and, based on 102 in-depth qualitative interviews, shows that there are many kinds of cultural participation not usually captured by the survey evidence (or by dominant models). His findings serve as important counter to the official model of participation, whose assumptions, processes and technologies obscure – and neglect – the realm of everyday participation and its significance.

This chapter considers the implications of the observance of international standards by museums and cultural heritage institutions. It describes a positive change in the social norms observed by museums and galleries. Museums are increasingly hesitant to acquire objects without a documented pre-1970 provenance. When objects are shown to have been illicitly excavated, nations are asking for their return, and in several notable cases, museums have been willing to return them. The next logical step should be an increasing acceptance of these norms by individuals.