Cultural Exchange vs. Cultural Tourism

This essay by James Bau Graves, director of the Old Town School of Folk Music, in Chicago, Ill., is part of a report by on the school’s international exchange programs, 2007-2009. The school sent 36 performing artists to nine countries, where Old Town School faculty offered workshops in American vernacular music and dance styles, performed in foreign schools and concert facilities, met and collaborated with foreign musicians, and forged a series of relationships with organizations that now form the basis of a nascent international network. The report may be downloaded here. (pdf 1mb)

"Cultural exchange" is often cited as one of the few tools for dismantling tensions with other countries that doesn't involve force or coercion. The arts can bridge misunderstanding where military adventures and the flood of consumer goods usually just make matters worse. It is assumed that the power of art is attached to universal human values, and that the sharing of these distillations of meaning from disparate communities will reveal our commonalities. It's a small world after all, and all you've gotta do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar.

Musicians from Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music performing in Finland

Anybody who has traveled abroad will find this assertion self-evidently valid. When you encounter another culture, even on a very cursory level, abstract foreign-ness becomes human and personal. Distant, amorphous categories — the Chinese; Africans; Arabs — suddenly have an individual face, the man whose home you visited, the woman who made a special effort to accommodate you in her country. Direct, personal encounters inevitably color our impressions of entire nationalities. The more intensive the interaction, the more aware we become of the nuances of another community's modes of life and thought, the more secure we feel in our comparative assessments of the Other, and the less prone we are to inaccurate generalizations and stereotype.

Because they work at the expressive edge of every culture, artists abroad are cast as representatives of their nationalities in a way that traveling bankers or scientists usually are not. Every artistic encounter carries a magnified charge of meaning — in another country, a performance that would have been just another gig back home is suddenly a stand-in for the entire United States of America. Conversely, foreign artists, whether they are encountered through carefully planned residencies or met through happenstance, implicitly become representatives of their whole civilizations.

When artists meet, and especially when they collaborate, the give and take of aesthetic content feels like a substantive interaction. Anybody can "experience" another culture by eating in an ethnic restaurant. But learning to feel the pulse of somebody else's rhythm, making your voice articulate a different set of pitches, casts you into another culture in a manner that goes beyond voyeurism. This is more than absorbing the technical content of a different artform; it is about the intensity of the personal connection that has to exist among artists to allow that exchange to happen. For a time, you've got to get inside each other's heads.

Artists who have the good fortune to spend extended periods abroad, or to host visiting artists to our country, find the deepest satisfaction in these reciprocal relationships. But such reciprocity rests on an assumption of equity among participants. The extreme disparities of income and status between many artists from North America or Europe and their counterparts in the global South intrude into this relationship. The exchange between an artist from California and one from Italy feels like a meeting of equals, unencumbered by economic considerations (despite all the vagaries of funding for international work). That same artist, traveling in many developing countries, confronts artists who desperately need their money, for whom the encounter is a rare economic opportunity. The unequal circumstance of the participants can render the artistic exchange as a commercial transaction.

This can present ethical soul searching among First World travelers. We long for those moments of connection with our foreign counterparts and we bring our expectations of how an exchange should unfold with us. One of these expectations is that the host artists are motivated by the same sense of ecumenical togetherness that provides the context for our journey in the first place. The uncomfortable realization that our hosts are not there to find a common ground or explore the commonalities of art across cultures — but to make a buck — casts the whole encounter in a very different light. This is not an "exchange," which implies traffic in both directions, but a performance for money. It is cultural tourism, just like the packaged tours that bankers and scientists might buy.

In late 2009, I led a group of musicians and dancers from Chicago on a trip to India. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council, the trip was explicitly intended to seek out relationships with Indian performing artists and arts institutions that could form the basis for future long-term exchanges. As is so frequently the case for American artists traveling abroad, we encountered exceedingly gracious hospitality from many Indian musicians who opened their homes to us, feasted with us and offered a guided tour through their culture. We were fortunate to have an invitation from Darpana Academy in Gujarat, which allowed our group of artists to actively collaborate with a very high-level group of Carnatic musicians to prepare a joint performance. Although the time was far too short, the connection forged among the performers was powerful, the performance infused with the energy of discovery.

Our interactions with some other musicians on the trip were more challenging. As an introduction to Rajasthani traditional culture, several private performances were organized for our group. While the performers were excellent, these encounters were a little bewildering for the artists from Chicago: in this case the Indian artists had been engaged to offer a showcase performance, and they didn't pretend to have much interest in "exchange." Attempts on the part of the Chicago musicians to engage them in a give-and-take were met with indifference. A part of this was surely due to our struggles to overcome the language barrier. But it became clear that the kind of exchange that we'd anticipated was preempted by the commercial transaction — they wanted to play the gig, get paid and go home. This might not have amounted to anything except as we traveled through Rajasthan, word spread through the artist grapevine that there was a group of well-funded Americans on the loose. Musicians who hadn't been invited to play for us felt that they had missed their golden opportunity and sought us out at our hotel to offer private concerts, sitting outside restaurants for hours waiting for us to emerge in the hope of engaging us for a few rupees. The performances that had seemed enchanting at first ultimately came to feel debased. The music that we had traveled halfway around the world to experience was reduced to a tourist commodity.

There are significant debates about the ethics of cultural tourism, the distortions that the tourist market imposes on regional and ethnic communities, and how/whether communities can use the influx of tourist dollars to sustain their heritage. This discussion turns on the gross disparity of resources between wealthy travelers and the impoverished communities that they pay large sums to visit. It is a profoundly unequal relationship, with all of the economic power vested in the tourists and the desperate poverty of the locals demanding that they do almost anything to gain a piece of the windfall. And who can blame them? Western artists traveling in the developing world are necessarily implicated in this dance. By virtue of the fact that they are there at all, they are perceived as rich tourists who need to be relieved of their cash, and they can be viewed this way by local artists as much as shopkeepers and beggars. Is real cultural exchange possible under such inequitable circumstances?

Perhaps, but it is not likely to bridge any cultural gulfs unless the economic realities and mutual expectations are addressed upfront. Artists need to be compensated for their work, in this country as well as in India. We would not expect an American musician to perform for free just because the audience happened to be from Ghana. The residency at Darpana worked superbly, but the backstory was that our Indian colleagues were paid for their time by the Academy, just as the US-based artists were paid through our grant funding. The whole encounter rested on a series of monetary transactions, but those transactions were not foregrounded in the artistic encounter. Money facilitated the exchange, but it was not the point of the project. When the financial exchange becomes the content of the encounter, rather than the context that allows it to happen, art is reduced to a commodity.

Financial transactions between unequal parties present ethical minefields, and artists need to navigate through them with care. In international cultural exchange, it should be recognized and accepted that the relative economic capacities of both parties demand that the bulk of the funding will need to come from those with access — Americans and Europeans. At the same time we must guard against allowing that disparity of resources to translate into a disparity of control over the artistic process. Collaborating artists need to enter into the relationship as equals, regardless of where the funding is coming from. If we assume that control over the finances allows us to dictate the terms of the engagement, we are likely to live forever in the world of cultural tourism. Exchange implies a recognition that there are some things the dollar cannot buy.

James Bau Graves is director of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, Ill.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2010