nomic and administrative action’ Habermas, 1987.
Subsequent theorists
have stylised
modernity into a general model of evolutionary social development Coleman, 1968 in which the
core societal goal is economic growth rather than survival in harmony with natural surroundings,
and the dominant individual goal is achievement through income and consumption rather than
through moral standing. An inevitable character- istic of modernisation for both Weber and his
successors is the dramatic devaluation of tradition through universalisation of norms of action, gen-
eralisation of values, and individual-based pat- terns of socialisation. Tradition has become, at
best, a way of presenting the past as an increas- ingly scarce non-renewable resource and, at worst,
an impediment to progress.
Yet, an important postmodern insight is that tradition also concerns what Halbwach 1980
terms ‘pastness’ — a renewable resource of cur- rent validity Appadurai, 1981; Appadurai et al.,
1991. The human values embodied in tradition are not only the ‘scars of the past’ but also the
‘portents of the future’ Pulliam and Dunford, 1980. One might even define postmodernity in
terms of its separation of the cultural premises of modernity from its functional consequences; by
challenging the validity of the former, post- modernity de-emphasises instrumental rationality
and brings a shift in basic values towards what Inglehart 1997 calls ‘existential security’. The
postmodern emphasis on subjective well-being, environmental protection and other quality of life
concerns has led to a re-evaluation of tradition, reinforced by a tendency towards the removal of
the artificial structures of nation-states in favour of more natural ethnic or spatial communities
within a pluralist framework see Jones and Keat- ing 1995, for the case of the European Union.
Despite the universalising tendencies of mod- ernisation, EU marginal areas retain traditional
cultures
1
, exhibiting varying degrees of vigour, which potentially represent resources for alterna-
tives to the modernist cosmopolitan mode of eco- nomic development. Yet, social analysis has
largely been dominated by rational behaviour models which abstract economic action from its
historical and cultural contexts. Even in early political economy, opinions on cultural diversity
were ambivalent. J.S. Mill, for example, recog- nised Europe’s indebtedness for its ‘‘progressive
and many-sided development’’ to the ‘‘plurality of paths’’ resulting from its cultural diversity Feyer-
abend, 1987, p. 33; yet Mill also assumed that it would be unequivocally beneficial for minorities
in Europe to be brought out of their own ‘‘little mental orbit … into the … current of the ideas
and feelings … of more civilised and cultivated’’ majorities Kymlicka, 1995, p. 5. Furthermore,
the importance of deciphering the structures and processes of the local and the temporal is an
article of faith for postmodernism.
The rest of this paper is in four sections. Some of the links between traditional cultures, territori-
ality and sustainability are considered in Section 2. A powerful reason for the neglect of traditional
cultures may lie in the absence of well-developed theoretical approaches to assessing their role, eco-
nomic potential and policy implications, and one such approach is explored in Section 3. An alter-
native to the direction taken by current EU agri- cultural policy is proposed in Section 4. Section 5
draws some conclusions.
2. Traditional cultures and sustainable development
In modern social analysis, attempts to take account of ‘culture’ have largely been confined to:
i assuming that traditions inhibit entrepreneur- ship and constrain developmental economic activ-
ity Hoselitz, 1952; Hagen, 1980; ii relating economic outcomes to societal or civic character-
istics assumed to be the result of an historical accumulation of social capital Ishikawa, 1981;
Putnam, 1993; or iii disentangling the complex interaction between economic performance and its
cultural context as revealed in people’s attitudes and values Bauer, 1984; Inglehart, 1997. Never-
1
Although not all European regions contain thriving and distinctive traditional cultures, the strength of regionalism is
considerable. An
Assembly of
European Regions
was launched in 1985 with 107 members, and subsequent develop-
ments include the 1994 formation of a Committee of the Regions.
theless, ‘‘the conviction that ‘culture matters’ re- mains pervasive in the underworld of develop-
ment thought and practice’’ Ruttan, 1988, p. 56, and its treatment on an intuitive rather
than analytical level is ‘‘a deficiency in develop- ment practitioners’ professional capacity rather
than …, evidence that culture does not matter’’ Ruttan, 1988, p. 256. A persistent view among
economists is that culture can be subsumed in ‘tastes’ which are treated as given and outside
the frame of economic analysis; that cultures are somehow separate from, and unaffected by, de-
velopment values; and that cultural diversity is of no economic importance. Although the mod-
ernist assumption of the cultural neutrality of progress has now been comprehensively under-
mined by anthropological and historical research Toulmin, 1990, suggestions for relating cultural
endowments to resources, technology and insti- tutions e.g. as in the induced innovation model
of Hayami and Ruttan, 1985 tend to be illus- trative and preliminary.
Anthropology is the social science for which ‘culture’ is the central, albeit disputed, analytical
concept. Early anthropological definitions took a bounded and locational view of culture, stress-
ing its behavioural, perceptual and material as- pects
and, above
all, its
territoriality and
association with specific communities Milton, 1996. With few exceptions, anthropologists have
studied culture and its context at the local level, seeing the world as a ‘cultural mosaic’ Han-
nerz, 1992 of traditional cultures and inherited values
— a concept echoed in Norgaard’s
‘patchwork quilt’ view of cultures Norgaard, 1994. However, the greatly reduced importance
of territorial boundaries in an age of increas- ingly available international communication has
prompted post-structuralist anthropologists to abandon the traditional locational model and to
see culture in unbounded and de-territorialised terms. This approach distinguishes culture’s non-
observable elements perceptions, values, ideas and knowledge which colour people’s under-
standing of experience from observable social processes and structures, and it focuses attention
on
the fact
that culture
is communicated
through relationships rather than inheritance Hannerz, 1990. The result has been an exten-
sion of the concept of culture to include hybrid cultures e.g. imported religious practices and
beliefs that have merged with indigenous ones, de-contextualised cultures e.g. the vestiges of
cultures retained by emigre´s and, most impor- tantly, ‘trans-national culture’ e.g. ‘Western’ or
‘modernist’ culture and cultures reflecting com- munities of interest e.g. the ‘cultures’ of inter-
national bankers or academics. This shift to approaching culture in interpretative terms in re-
sponse to the diminished importance of territo- rial boundaries has freed anthropology from its
territorial focus and allowed it to consider cul- ture in a global context. It has, however, caused
two important difficulties in a postmodern con- text in which tradition is being re-evaluated. The
first is that the separation of knowledge from action recalling the Cartesian duality of mind
body and humanitynature contrasts with much empirical observation, creates difficulties for so-
cial science modelling of the links between cul- tural endowments, resources, technology and
institutions, and is anathema to the philosophi- cal bent of many environmentalists. The second
is that the de-territorialisation of culture ob- scures anthropological insights into the purpose
of traditional cultures. To illustrate this, it is useful to examine the association negative or
positive of culture with sustainability.
Traditional, vernacular or territorial cultures are often perceived as positively associated with
sustainable development for two sets of reasons. The first relates to the pervasive assumption of
the existence, in non-industrial societies in partic- ular, of what Milton 1996 terms ‘primitive eco-
logical wisdom’. Such wisdom is often assumed to vary inversely with the extent of traditional soci-
eties’ external links. Dasmann 1976, for exam- ple, contrasted ‘ecosystemic’ societies living within
a narrow range of ecosystems upon which they depend for survival and towards which they are
presumed to behave responsibly, and ‘biospheric’ societies linked into global technological and
trade systems and therefore less constrained to sustainable behaviour. The assumption of a causal
link between ecosystemicness and sustainability has come to be associated with anti-industrial
sentiments and feelings of sympathy for ‘back- ward’ indigenous populations under pressure
from more ‘advanced’ majorities. It may also be the result of the casual observation that ‘ecosys-
temic’ populations do not radically modify their environments over time, and of the desire for
model
solutions to
sustainability problems.
Clearly, primitive ecological wisdom is difficult to associate with non-traditional cultures, and mod-
ern anthropology has sought to undermine it on the grounds that humans ‘‘have no natural
propensity for living sustainably with their envi- ronment’’ Milton, 1996, p. 222. Rather than a
cultural goal, ecological benignness may be an incidental outcome of factors such as low popula-
tion density, remoteness, or lack of access to trade and technology. Nevertheless, for a significant
proportion of humanity until comparatively re- cently, traditional practices appear to have led to
a long-standing, yet highly productive, relation- ship with the land see King, 1933, for the exam-
ple of East Asia.
The second, more persuasive, set of reasons for viewing traditional cultures positively in the light
of sustainable development results from the per- ception of such cultures as established ‘‘systems
of values, beliefs, artifacts and artforms which sustain social organisation and rationalise action’’
Norgaard, 1994, p. 90. The systems view goes beyond cultures as collections of separable be-
havioural, perceptual and practical phenomena and highlights their self-organisation and struc-
tured and bounded relationships. General systems theory defines a system as a ‘‘complex unit in
space and time whose sub-units co-operate to preserve its integrity, structure and behaviour’’
Weiss, 1971, p. 99. Individual systems are dedi- cated to the maintenance of the larger systems of
which they are part and the smaller systems which comprise them as a pre-requisite for the preserva-
tion of their own integrity and stability von Bertalanffy, 1962. The ‘integrity’ and ‘stability’
concepts strongly recall the Leopoldian ‘land ethic’ Leopold, 1994, while relations between
sub-systems are of particular interest in the con- text of minority cultures — i.e. sub-national cul-
tures of numerically weak populations within nation-states, usually located within specific geo-
graphical regions, and frequently retaining their own language Eliot, 1948. When applied to cul-
tures as systems, the systemic characteristics of self-preservation over time and dynamic inter-sys-
tem relationships tend to have important implica- tions. These include implications for resource use
materials recycling and cyclic food chains tend to be built into traditional cultures; social organisa-
tion ties, relationships and obligations tend to be more important than individualism in societies
with strong traditional cultures; external relations dependence on outside forces tends to be limited
in a strategic attempt to maintain systemic homeostasis
2
; and sustainability policy a cultural component cannot be removed from its context
without disrupting the set of relationships within which it is embedded, nor imported into another
context without disturbing the new surroundings.
By contrast, de-territorialised non-traditional cultures generally have negative associations with
sustainability because of their shortcomings as systems.
The trans-national
‘culture of
modernity’, in particular, although defended by some social philosophers such as Habermas Out-
hwaite, 1996, has been savaged by many others such as Giddens 1990.
3
Their attack is largely centred on its technocratic, e´litist, and inherently
globalising Cartesian tendency to replace a diver- sity of traditional ideas with the uniformity of
cultural universals, and its assumption that people
2
The ability to maintain stability in the sense of both resistance and resilience by their own efforts Odum, 1969. A
weakness of general systems theory in this context may lie in the presumption of systems’ homeostatic equilibrium with
their environments, a presumption which, when applied to cultures, may fail to account for cultural change Norgaard,
1994. However, a co-evolutionary progression of social and environmental systems does not seem to preclude a dynamic
equilibrium between a culture and its environment.
3
An argument is often made for a cosmopolitan alternative to cultural navel-gazing in a world of widening horizons,
whereby individuals choose from a variety of ethno-cultural sources whilst avoiding dependence on any particular one
Rushdie, 1991; Waldron, 1995. The argument seems spurious since such cosmopolitanism presumably relies on the existence
of cultural diversity.
from all traditions have access to the same cultur- ally-neutral basic conceptual framework. The cul-
ture of modernity has become the third pillar alongside economics and politics in the ‘unholy
trinity’ of mechanisms that integrate world sys- tems at a global level Wallerstein, 1990 without
regard for local specificities. It is seen as a me´lange of disparate, contextless components
with neither temporal nor locational foundation, where collective memories and generational suc-
cession are unimportant, where no ‘sacred land- scapes’ or ‘golden ages’ are available for use as
reference points Smith, 1990; Hamilton, 1994, and where reliance is placed on overwhelming
technological and institutional force Jenkins, 1998. Under this view, the flows and relation-
ships associated with the culture of modernity are the uni-dimensional ones of economic exchange
and innovation, and its competitive success is associated with the high value attached to short-
term rewards without regard for long-term conse- quences recalling the ‘defective telescopic faculty’
attributed to modern humanity by Pigou. In system terms, the culture of modernity suffers
from lack of context and of sensitivity to its systemic environment, uni-dimensionality, uni-di-
rectionality, and short-sightedness.
A fundamental anthropological contention con- cerning the purpose of traditional cultures is that
culture is interposed by humanity between itself and its environment in order to ensure its security
and survival Carneiro, 1968 and to preserve lasting order Gans, 1985. The criterion for cul-
tural ‘success’, therefore, can be seen in terms of what Rappaport 1971 terms ‘adaptive effective-
ness’, under which cultures ensure adaptive hu- man
behaviour in
relation to
a societal
development path sanctioned by the collective conscience Harrison, 1927. Durham 1976, p.
101 suggests that cultural and biological traits co-evolve to enhance the ‘inclusive fitness’ of hu-
manity in its environment: ‘‘By providing a means of adaptation which is both … constant in stable
environments and … flexible in changing environ- ments, culture can … greatly enhance the ability
of social behaviour to track environmental condi- tions’’. As a result, the evolutionary advantages of
cultural diversity have received particular anthro- pological recognition Milton, 1996. Natural di-
versity means diversity in the gene pools of species, more probability of adaptation to chang-
ing conditions, and hence species’ survival under a wide variety of conditions. Cultural diversity
strengthens natural diversity by enabling diverse ways of comprehending experience and interact-
ing with environments, providing different possi- bilities
for human
futures Keesing,
1981, allowing more flexible use of global resources
Jacob, 1982, and potentially leading to a variety of sustainable societies IUCN et al., 1991. Cul-
tural diversity is also akin to intellectual diversity and multi-disciplinarity, the value of which is
based on the assumption that understanding is increased when issues are viewed from different
perspectives.
In addition to servicing systemic reproduction and providing humanity with the behavioural
means to evolutionary advantage, cultures have two more contentious instrumental roles. The first
lies in their potential for mobilising collective energies
4
, emphasised in Weber’s 1976 focus on the ‘motivational’ aspects of culture for economic
development. The second lies in their production of a sense of common destiny Smith, 1990 which
underwrites social integration Bauman, 1989. This has led some to argue for culture as a ‘basic
need’: ‘‘Among elementary human needs — as basic as those for food, shelter, security, procre-
ation, communication — is the need to belong to a particular group, united by some common links
— especially language, collective memories, con- tinuous life upon the same soil, … a sense of
common mission’’ 18th century historian Johann Gottfried von Herder, quoted in Berlin, 1980, p.
252, 257. It also leads to the ‘social capital’ view of culture i.e. the importance of networks, trust
and association derived from Alexis de Toc- queville Putnam, 1993; Day, 1996 which sug-
gests
that local
cultures are
important mechanisms in the dispersion of economic control
and in increased local autonomy, both supported
4
Not necessarily benevolent ones, as the Nazi period in Germany Bramwell, 1989 and recent events in the former
Yugoslavia have shown.
by sustainable development theorists and the logic of Agenda 21, and facilitated by increasingly so-
phisticated information technology. Both the mo- tivational and social capital roles of cultures
resurface in current discussion of the economic position of disadvantaged regions in an increas-
ingly competitive EU Committee of the Regions, 1996. In particular, it is argued that socially,
cultural rootedness is based upon belonging rather than upon accomplishment and therefore
forms a secure plank in the platform of human self-identity; politically, cultural vibrancy can be a
stimulating source of cohesion and of long-term confidence that the networks involved are sustain-
able over time; and economically, cultural assets are exploitable through product differentiation in
the quest for market share. These can be signifi- cant factors in development, leading regions to
make long-term investments and to forge eco- nomic relations with the outside world Bassand,
1993.
In view of these important claims regarding the purpose and potential of traditional cultures, a
culturally homogenous world appears unattractive in sustainable development terms. Although the
continuing existence of traditional cultures in rural areas guarantees neither sustainability nor
economic vibrancy, such cultures have character- istics which improve the probability of sustainable
ways of living and developing. The sustainability debate has taught that economic, social and envi-
ronmental problems and, more importantly, their solutions are as much cultural as technological
and institutional. Cultural diversity, therefore, of- fers humanity a variety of ways of developmental
interaction and avoids the difficulties associated with any monoculture — namely, a loss of mate-
rial for new paths of economic, social and envi- ronmental evolution, and a danger that resistance
to unforeseen problems is lowered. A policy re- quirement of cultural diversity seems justifiable,
therefore, in general sustainable development terms; taking a Hicksian view of sustainability,
cultural diversity increases the probability that human societies develop without undermining
their economic, social or environmental capital bases.
3. Traditional cultures and endogenous development