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World Cultural Preservation: A Growing Imperative

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A conversation with the Smithsonian Institution’s Richard Kurin

How would you define culture and why is it important that the United States play a role in its preservation globally?

I define culture really as a way of life, as the things that are important to us, the values and beliefs that make life meaningful. Culture is expressed through song and dance, through architecture, through literature, through our aspirations, through our religions, through our craftsmanship and artistry. Culture is obviously important because it defines who we are in respect to our fellow human beings, to our neighbors, and indeed to people around the world.

We have a tremendous ability to learn each other’s cultures, to learn them the same way we learn languages. Now that said, we do speak a lot of different languages — some 6,000 on the planet right now. And, as we know, the planet has become a lot smaller. Our cultures are in much greater contact every day with each other. So it’s imperative that we, as citizens of a planet, understand each other. Maybe we do not need to speak each other’s languages, eat each other’s foods or sing everybody else’s songs, but we do need to taste them and experience them. And I think that this experience makes us rich as human beings and it increases our understanding of each other.

Can protecting culture play a role in advancing human rights, particularly for minorities and indigenous populations?

There is a long history of confrontation between cultures, and this confrontation continues in the present as well. In some cases, we see a lot of intolerance, where people look at other human beings and think, “Well, we don’t really understand their culture, we don’t believe in what they do and therefore they’re inferior.” But when anthropologists, historians and others look at the achievements of other cultures, they find not ignorance but often insight, understanding that brings benefit to their own culture as well.

At one time, everybody’s culture was innovative. It’s hard to say where the next insight will come from, where we’ll solve the problem of cancer, for example. It may happen in the medical laboratories of the United States, it may happen in the laboratories of China or India, but it also may be in the folk knowledge, of a healer, a practitioner from the Amazon rain forest or central Africa. So I think we have a great deal to gain from each other’s cultures. I look at culture like a living library — an archive of the past, but also a living laboratory for the exploration of creativity and innovation.

Has technology changed the way we approach cultural preservation?

There has always been an interesting relationship between the preservation of cultural heritage and technology. In the late 1870s, Thomas Edison developed the first sound recording machine. What was it used for immediately? Anthropologists from the Smithsonian went out to various Indian tribes and communities across the United States and Canada and recorded songs and stories because the new technology was viewed as a way of preserving that past and that heritage that would be important for people to know.

The Internet, for example, is a fantastic tool for people around the world to communicate about their culture. The interesting thing about the Internet is that you don’t need to have hundreds of millions of dollars to build magnificent museums. You can share your culture with people around the world in a matter of seconds. I think the Internet provides a way in which different minority populations, different small populations, can have their voice heard and can communicate with much larger populations.

What do you think we have to lose if we fail to protect our cultural heritage?

I believe that when people lose their cultural heritage they lose their moral grounding, their connection to their own past. If you look at populations that have been displaced by war, or refugee populations, or people that have been subjected to all kinds of intolerance and persecution, very often you see a draw to something that is theirs and that no one can take away from them, and that is their sense of history and a sense of who they are. People die over that. People have gone to the gallows and concentration camps over the issue of who they are. It’s very hard to take away their culture. But if you lose that, I think you lose a whole sense of self — individually, as a community and as a nation.

Read more: Celebrating Cultural Heritage.