About the Blogger:
I am a Graduate student at Goucher College where I am studying Cultural Sustainability. I have my Bachelor of Arts in Intercultural Studies with a History minor from Westminster College in New Wilmington, PA.
I hope through this blog to highlight the work I am doing in this program but also create a type of database to help others who are working in this field or who have an interest in it connect with others who have the same passion.
What is Cultural Sustainability?
This is a new Master of Arts program and a new idea that is beginning to gain momentum. Cultural Sustainability is
“actively identifying, protecting, and enhancing cultural traditions through activism, fieldwork, academic scholarship, and grassroots communications. It uses the tools of cultural and applied anthropology, folklore, ethnomusicology, history, communications, cultural tourism, and other traditionally separate disciplines to ask members of communities, “What is it that matters most to your community?” and then act on their response. The cultures, traditions, and communities we try to sustain could be any we actively and passionately care about: a neighborhood, an occupation, an art form, a skill, a village, a city, an ethnic group, a religious or spiritual group, a tribe, or any other community with shared traditions and values.”
While this is the definition as Goucher College defines it, this is a living subject and we are constantly refining and expanding what exactly the idea of Cultural Sustainability encompasses. I believe my classmate Susan Anderson summarized it best defining cultural sustainability as
“the on going spiritual, economic, and creative vitality of a community with shared purpose, understanding, and goals”
Our leader and visionary for the program Dr. Rory Turner has also created 8 Principles of Cultural Sustainability:
1. Community empowerment and leadership
2. Critical awareness of ecological and economic context
3. Rejection of logics of modernity and neo-liberalism
4. Making the most of available means
5. Openness to emergence and change
6. Use of ecological approaches- metaphors- understanding
7. Fieldwork as relationship building and cultural productions
8. Alliances, partnerships, and networks.
Be sure to check this section regularly as we further develop the idea of cultural sustainability.
