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AFSNews December 1997 (Part Six) |
Washington Update
September 10, 1997
Bravo to Arts Advocates across the Country . . . NEA Wins Key Vote." What a refreshing change to be greeted by such a headline the day after U.S. House and Senate conferees met to resolve differences in the Fiscal Year 1998 Interior Appropriations Legislation.
After months (or has it been years?) of trying to persuade conservative lawmakers that the public does support federal funding for the arts, the message has been heard. There will certainly continue to be critical voices, but the senators and representatives present at the conference made it clear that they are ready to resolve their differences regarding the embattled National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
The funding victory, $98 million for the NEA and $110 million for the NEH, extracted concessions on behalf of the agency. The $2 million reduction over the Senate-passed level was considered a small price to pay, given the complete absence of funding in the House passed measure. That $2 million was a compromise on a proposal to reduce NEA funding by $10 million, offered by Representative Nethercutt (R-WA). He quoted a report from the Committee on Education and the Workforce that said in 1996, 18.5 percent of the federal appropriation was spent on agency administration. Along with the slight cut, administrative costs cannot rise above the 1997 level, now estimated at 16 percent.
A major stumbling block to House consideration of funding the NEA was the fact that authorizing legislation had expired. Rather than adopting the Senate's Jeffords-Kennedy reauthorization proposal for the Endowments, the conferees negotiated a select list of amendments that will take effect for the coming fiscal year. These provisions include:
1. Increasing the NEA state grant program (basic grant allocation to states and the rural/underserved set-aside) to 40 percent, up from the current rate of 35 percent. During the Senate floor debate in early September, many variations on this amount, including one that would have block granted the entire appropriation, were offered and defeated.
2. Capping the funding to a single state at 15 percent of the overall amount of funding. An important exclusion from this cap is funding in support of grants to institutions of national significance and grants for touring. The cap is not likely to effect funding for any state, given these exclusions.
3. Requiring that priority consideration be given to grant applications that encourage public knowledge, understanding and appreciation for the arts. Additionally, priority must be given to grants benefiting underserved populations.
4. Changing the make up of the National Council of the Arts to include 6 members of Congress (3 from the House, 3 from the Senate) and reducing the size of the council from 26 to 20 members. In spite of constitutional challenges, this item was adopted with the understanding that the congressional members would play a role similar to their positions on the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian Boards.
5. Granting the endowments the authority to solicit and invest private funds. Report language stipulates that fund-raising activities that compete with other art organizations will be avoided.
6. Requiring assurances that nonprofessional groups are eligible to receive funding from the endowments.
These adjustments were negotiated with those senators and representatives who have been most supportive of the agency. To date, the arts community has indicated that these are all provisions that were either included in the Jeffords-Kennedy reauthorization plan or modifications they will endorse.
The conference agreement must still be approved by the full Congress and then be sent to President Clinton for his signature. If it reaches the President's desk in its current form, it is safe to assume that this will occur before the end of October. Though conservatives will not be satisfied by this or any compromise that fails to call for the elimination of the agencies, moderate Republicans and the majority of Democrats are very satisfied with the conference agreement. As Senator Slade Gorton said to the press following the announcement of an NEA compromise, "I've always thought the NEA needed delicate surgery, not death." Most would agree that the patient is now likely to survive.
Ellin Nolan
INTERNATIONAL NOTEBOOK
The International Notebook welcomes a thoughtful contribution from Lee Haring on folklore research in the islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean, drawn from a paper he gave at the Conference on the Cultural Heritage of Islands and Small States, held in Malta in May 1997. Haring describes a world in which folklore is anything but academic, documented by politicians and entrepreneurs, decried or celebrated according to shifts in the relations between the local and the global. At the end, Haring raises the tricky question of regional cooperation. Clearly desirable from the scholar's point of view, it is not always politically or economically feasible, since both new nation-states and their heritage industries need to emphasize the uniqueness of their cultural resources. Does the end of colonialism spell the end of comparativism? Send me your thoughts for the next column to noyes.10@osu.edu.
Dorry Noyes Ohio State University
Folklore Research in the Southwest Indian Ocean
The multilingual folk cultures of the Southwest Indian Ocean are, as Kamau Brathwaite has said of the Caribbean, the one indisputable possession of the people. In Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, Seychelles, even in the totally Islamic Comoros, storytelling, music, dance and folk cookery are practiced by individual artists of widely differing origins, who move with ease among each other's traditions despite their differences. At this point in history, these islands need accurate recording and comparative analysis of their oral and written cultures. The observation and recording of these cultures is under the control of governments with widely different agendas and priorities. Research in this region's cultural heritage presents a varied picture.
Reunion, for instance, is an overseas department of France, where publication flourishes. But it is seldom publication of folklore. Since the island was departmentalized 50 years ago, its local culture has been continually downgraded in favor of the metropole. A very successful folktale project was carried out in the 1970s, but since then there has been no follow-up, and scholars of the Universite de la Reunion do not engage in fieldwork. In Seychelles, where the magnificent beaches attract many a tourist, the Ministry of Education and Culture takes responsibility for collecting and publishing traditional culture. One division, the Institi Kreol, encourages the writing of Kreol in all literary genres by sponsoring contests and the annual Festival Kreol. Another division, National Heritage, regularly employs researchers and support staff to pursue material culture, life histories, housing and folklife, as well as tales, proverbs, riddles and folksongs. These agencies fulfill important functions and should not be allowed to wither away. In Mauritius, the Mahatma Gandhi Institute and certain publishers have shown themselves remarkably open to recording the African and Indian traditions of the island. The Chinese and Franco-Mauritian communities await better documentation. In colonial Madagascar, of course, the long French occupation brought to light a great many texts of tales, proverbs and riddles of some (by no means all) of the 18 dialect groups. Nowadays Malagasy and foreign scholars mainly interest themselves in history, but a few do folklore research and publish their studies in Malagasy, English and French. And in the Comoros, despite poverty, neglect, and continual coups d'etat, the National Center for Scientific Research and Documentation carries out an ongoing program of collecting oral histories and folk narratives, as well as other forms of tradition.
The 5 propositions Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett set forth in "Theorizing Heritage" all find application in the Southwest Indian Ocean. (1) "Heritage is a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past." In Mauritius, singers and dancers are newly recruited, trained and rehearsed to perform Indian dance. Then they are taken on tour to India to demonstrate how well dance traditions from the past have been kept up. (2) "Heritage is a `value-added' industry"; that is, she says, it adds "the value of pastness, exhibition, difference, and where possible indigeneity." An outdoor museum that is being created by the National Heritage in Seychelles illustrates this idea, by implicitly acknowledging that country's involvement in the international trade and tourism that dominates its present and by exhibiting older ways of life associated with early inhabitants. (3) "Heritage produces the local for export." Documentary films about village life in Madagascar are shown on American television; these have little local appeal, as far as I know. (4) A hallmark of heritage is its "problematic relationship" between its objects, such as the performance of music, and its instruments, for instance the numerous CDs produced in the island of Reunion, which add value to music that would otherwise remain wholly local. Indeed, the CDs themselves, while seeming to be windows into the music, are really objects of value and aspiration in themselves. Finally, (5) "a key to heritage productions is their virtuality." Whether actualities are present or not, the heritage offers a virtual experience, as in the museum of immigration in Moka, Mauritius, where visitors see a few objects and many photographs from the period when indentured laborers were being imported. They are invited to imagine an actual experience that thankfully is forever past.
In all the islands, whatever languages are used for the publication of folktales, legends, customs and beliefs, cultural research dedicates itself to the assembly and dissemination of "facts" that are inescapably multilingual. Enlightened cultural policy in the islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean will depend in the future on regional cooperation. Lee Haring
People
Gladys-Marie Fry, professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, has received a 1997-98 National Humanities Center Fellowship for her research project "In Them Days Everyone Wore Beads," a study of slave dress and bodily adornment.
Jim Abrams, director of the Open-Hearth Education Project in Johnstown, PA, has been selected as the next executive secretary of Workers Education Local 189. WEL 189, founded in 1922, is the oldest association of labor educators in the United States. It sponsors educational activities and semiannual national conferences, provides a mailing service for members, publishes a Directory of Labor Education, maintains a web site and funds an annual scholarship. An associate chapter of the Communications Workers of America, WEL 189 serves the education needs of workers and unions across the United States and around the world.
Throughout its history, Local 189 has served as a forum for the exchange of ideas among labor educators and as a clearinghouse of information about resources and employment opportunities in the field. Its members are on the staffs of unions and community organizations, on the faculties of colleges and universities, with labor publications and in film- and videomaking and other media.
Abrams invites folklorists, anthropologists and cultural workers to participate in WEL 189 by contributing information from their research, life, and/or field experience that would be of interest to labor educators. Membership in WEL 189 includes a monthly mailing that is sent to hundreds of labor educators and organizations nationally and internationally. Contact: Jim Abrams, Executive Secretary, Workers Education Local 189, PO Box 1368, Johnstown, PA 15907-1368 (e-mail: jfabrams@twd.net).
Future AFS Annual Meeting Dates
1998 October 27-November 1 Portland, Oregon 1999 October 20-23 Memphis, Tennessee 2000 October 25-29 Columbus, Ohio
Funding Deadlines
Revolving/Assorted Center for Field Research (see August 1997 AFSN, p. 9) Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships (see story, pp. 22-24)
1997
December 1 AFS International Travel Grants (see June 1997 AFSN, p. 1); VFH Fellowships (see story, p. 21)
December 12 Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research (see story, p. 21), Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (see story, p. 21)
December 31 UCLA/Institute of American Cultures (Afro- American, American Indian, Asian American and Chicano studies, see story, p. 21)
1998
January 12 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (see story, p. 21)
February 1 Library Company of Philadelphia (see story, pp. 21-22)
February 28 Missouri Historical Society (see story, p. 22)