Introduction : making culture

This collection of essays is an outcome of a multi-disciplinary research project 1 devoted to investigating the transformation of Australian cultural fields over the last two decades. While the larger project has mapped the changing dynamics within and across each field in order to provide a historicized account of the shifts, both general and detailed, in culture and policy over the period from 1994 to the present, this book has a more specialized focus. It is interested in one key shift in particular: an uneven but nonetheless incremental withdrawal from the policy approach that we refer to as ‘nationing’, the objective of developing a national culture through the deployment of policy. Such an objective had been an explicit component of Australia’s (and many other nation-states’) cultural and development policies for many years; the contributions to this book would suggest that this is no longer so clearly the case. They provide evidence of the part played in that policy realignment by a pervasive tendency towards the commercialization of national culture and by the increasing influence of globalism and/or transnationalism. Making Culture approaches these issues through case studies of selected cultural fields (the literary, sport, visual art, music, television and heritage) and analyses of certain influences active across those fields (Indigeneity, transnationalism, multiculturalism and the rise of the digital), as well as drawing from time to time on original survey data examining Australian consumers’ choices and preferences in cultural consumption. None of these influences, tendencies or political shifts is unique to Australia, of course, even though they have their own distinctive dynamics within that society, and these are our major concerns here. Indeed, they constitute a widespread complex of issues, contradictions and competing imperatives that must be dealt with by many, if not most, nation-states at the moment, as fundamental considerations in the design and management of national projects of economic modernization and cultural development.