Decolonizing “Culture”? Negotiating the Culture Concept at UNESCO, 1966–82

Debates about communications at UNESCO in the 1970s were always about more than the economic or technical aspects of the flow of information. The campaign for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) triggered wide-ranging debates that touched on issues related to the nature of sovereignty, the balance between state power and market forces, and the relationship between individual and collective conceptions of rights. Connecting many of these issues was a deeper clash over the meaning of “culture” itself. That concept had been a defining element of UNESCO’s mandate since the organization’s foundation in 1945. But the idea came under new pressures in the context of decolonization.

Taking advantage of the recent digitization of key UNESCO texts, this paper uses digital methods of text analysis to explore the changing relationships among some of the key concepts of UNESCO’s radical 1970s, centered around the changing uses of the culture concept. In particular, the paper presents findings from the comparison of textual trends in three bodies of UNESCO texts: the minutes of the meetings of UNESCO’s General Conference, the organization’s “standard-setting instruments” (conventions, declarations, and recommendations), and UNESCO’s journal Courier. These three collections reflect, respectively, UNESCO’s internal debates, the agreements it was able to reach, and the global conversations the organization hosted in its widely distributed monthly magazine. Exploring these three bodies of sources together allows for a systematic comparative measurement of how key concepts were used, what their relationships were to one another, and how these uses and relationships changed over time, as the NWICO debate roiled UNESCO internally and affected its stature internationally. The paper thus tests the theory that decolonization effected a transition away from colonial-era visions of “civilization” to more egalitarian models of “culture”—while also exploring the tensions surrounding the term’s new uses.