Políticas culturais: caminhos trilhados

Abstract

This article aims to propose a theoretical reflection around two terms: culture and cultural politics. In order to promote this reflection on the first concept, culture, I base my analysis on three specialists: Raymund Williams (1992), Zygmunt Bauman (2005) and Brant Leonard (2009). The first one, Raymond Williams (1992), elaborates his own idea about culture from the original comprehension of this word which came from the biological field: culture as vegetable cultivation or animal cultivation (breeding and reproduction): by extension, culture (active cultures) is also comprehended as cultivation of the human mind and finally, in a anthropological sense, culture is understood as a particular "global way of life," as a "systemof meaning" well defined, essentially involved in all forms of social activity. To the second researcher, Zygmunt Bauman (2005), culture is understood as the antonym of "nature", denoting that human characteristics, in clear opposition to the stubborn facts of nature, are products, residues or side effects of human choices. And to the third specialist, Brant Leonard (2009), culture is not limited to artistic or economic and social aspects, but it covers the combination of all these fields; as he proposes, culture is a fundamental key to the human development in all its aspects. Aiming to raise a refletion over cultural policies, I bring some analysis proposed by Alexandre Barbalho (2008), who defends that the cultural policies are not inserted into a specific knowledge. According to this brazilian researcher, cultural policies does not belong to a particular scientific field called Cultural Politics; instead of this comprehension, Barbalho belives that cultural politics deal with the ciples, means and purposes of human action, which is different from what is cultural management. To introduce the analysis on cultural policies in Brazil, I present a brief history about the formation of these policies along the tenures from Geisel to Lula. From the theoretical reflections presented, this study points out to another comprehension of culture: herein, culture is understood as a mobilizing, articulating and aggregating tool of people and ideas. Then, I also intend to identify the relation between education and culture in the cultural policies in Fortaleza along the period from 2007 to 2010. In order to do so, first, I examine some official documents produced in the three Cultural Conferences promoted by the municipality of Fortaleza, which main goal was to define its cultural policies; and after this preliminary analysis, I compare these local documents to a national one, the national Culture Plan: general guidelines (2008). Finally, I still analyse the Municipal Education Plan (2007), prepared for a period of 10 years,in order to identify the interfaces created among all these policies, without forgetting the historical contexts that they have been formulated.