Introduction

Existing understandings of culture and creativity have been framed through particular tropes which dominate global understandings of cultural practice. This is a problem because it excludes people who do not conform to stereotypes of ‘cultural’ or ‘creative’ activity and whose interests lie outside those defined by existing cultural strategies focused on arts, music or theatre. Government strategies that promote ‘culture’ focus primarily on ‘the arts’ dominated by elite middle classes. How then should we reframe culture and creativity to accommodate plural interpretations and values? This chapter draws on local ethnographic work undertaken in Ordsall (an area in Salford, UK) to argue that an ecological approach to culture can transcend binaries between formal and informal cultural activities, between the economic and expressive. While national and local policies absorb economic rationales, with investments focused on supporting engagement in legitimated, recognised forms of cultural activity, our work illustrates how local people's ideas speak back and challenge narrow framings of the creative city and what constitutes cultural activity. The chapter argues that anthropological understandings of culture as webs of significance (Geertz, 1973) and the patterns through which people accommodate their daily activities (Douglas, 1966) can help support progress towards ‘cultural democracy’ (Jancovich, 2017).

Cultural values, cultural economy

Current dominant framings of the cultural economy demonstrate clear hierarchies in terms of what cultural activities count, and whose culture matters. The primacy of extracting economic value from cultural activity, prioritising high art over low, the economic over the expressive and the formal over everyday understandings has come to preoccupy cultural policy. International frameworks for action narrowly define (Nurse, 2007) and instrumentalise culture as a tool for achieving wider societal goals:

Explicit articulations of culture in the post-war period sought to acknowledge respect for difference. The 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights stated that everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community and to enjoy the arts. During the World Conference on Cultural Policies in Mexico City in 1982, culture was defined as not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs.