Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 63

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
areas. In effect, cultural policies that are threshed out by the National Advisory Board
leans more towards policies for contemporary arts. Despite their majority number, Savior
(2010) shares that a problem still exists on whether the voices of the representatives
from the south are accommodated by the traditionally dominant group that comes from
the National Capital Region.
Understanding cultural governance and the Philippine situation
The Philippine society is culturally strongly Euro-American having been under Spanish
and American rule for almost four centuries. But at the same time, it is culturally diverse
with more than a hundred ethnolinguistic groups. The indigenous peoples in the Philippines
have a very rich and diverse culture and cultural expressions from the Bontoc,
Ifugaos, and Kalinga’s in Northern Luzon to groups in the Visayas who have assimilated
and acculturated to Christian Filipinos to the Katawhang Lumads in the highlands of
Mindanao.
In understanding cultural governance in the Philippine context, one has to acknowledge
the prevailing debate between being ‘Manila-centric’ versus a push for regional cultural
governance and administration of public support for the arts. The geographic, the Philippines
is an archipelago with 7,641 islands, and cultural, has 182 living languages divided
into 17 regions�16 of which are Administrative Divisions and 1 Autonomous
Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), make-up of the Philippines heavily shape and
influence the said debate.
To understand cultural governance, one has to consider that the term itself is challenging
to define or elucidate because of the complexity of what is being governed, culture.
Culture is highly abstract, and its governance through certain policies does not take into
account its nature. More often than not, the conversation on cultural policy and governance
happens within closed doors among experts, and platforms for public dialogues
and debates are mere tokens of a democratic process. The Philippines’ concept of democracy
is borrowed from American democracy�the ideology “of the people, by the
people, for the people.” But is democracy in the Philippines truly democratic, wherein
the voices of many and the sentiments of the ‘publics’ are heard? To be democratic
means to be fair, equitable, proportional, and transparent in the representation of all in
the process of building a civic society. Graves (2005) warns us that, as coined from historian
and educator Benjamin Barber, empowering the merely ignorant and endow the
uneducated with a right to make collective decisions and what results is not democracy
but, at best, mob rule. Democracy is a sham unless everyone has an equal opportunity
to be heard, and the contributions of many are needed to find democratic solutions.
Cultural democracy offers a different paradigm, a system of support for the cultures of
our diverse communities that are respectful and celebratory, that gives voice to the many
who have been historically excluded from the public domain, and that makes no claims
of superiority or special status (Graves 2005).
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