Memories, creative industries and national transformation (IV)

Definition of cultureDefining what culture means depends mostly on who is offering the definition. Many scholars have looked at culture from different prisms. This much was argued by Hartley (2002:51) who notes that getting a single definition of culture is practically impossible. According to him, “culture is the sphere of reproduction not of goods but […]

Definition of culture
Defining what culture means depends mostly on who is offering the definition. Many scholars have looked at culture from different prisms. This much was argued by Hartley (2002:51) who notes that getting a single definition of culture is practically impossible. According to him, “culture is the sphere of reproduction not of goods but of life… the term culture is multi-discursive; it can be mobilised in a number of different discourses. This means you cannot import a fixed definition into any and every context and expect it to make sense. What you have to do is identify the discursive context itself.” Let us look at a few of the definitions of culture and culture industries that may be germane to our discussion.
I have recently edited and published a book on culture, with Ahmed Yerima (2011) which examined culture in all its ramifications – economics, political, socio-logical and performative– with a summary that culture reflects, re-presents and refracts life and society in its productive, distributive and exchange imperatives.
Dominick (2009:45) defines culture as “a complex concept that refers to the common values, beliefs, social practices, rules, and assumptions that bind a group of people together”. He went further to state that it may be studied through its media content such as, “television programs, films, advertising, and books, or they can be things that do not fit into the traditional category; such as shopping malls, T-shirts, dolls, video games, and beaches.” People have always been a product of their cultures and that explains why they are so attached to it. The issue of culture is so pervasive and critical in human lives that it has been described as a way of life of the people. In reality, everything about human life is influenced by its cultural environment; hence, some have argued that culture determines the science and technology peculiar to a people. For example, the Americans have large space and wide roads, hence when they construct their cars, they are often big and long. Contrastively, the Japanese lack space and are constrained to construct small portable but efficient cars.
As human societies continue to expand, they become more complex and certain trends emerge. Today, culture has become a veritable means of determining the direction a society should go if it wants to grow and develop. Different aspects of culture have been developed as to become the determinants of the survival of societies; we can talk of a bourgeon industry known as Culture industry. Culture industry means different things and has many facets and perspectives, but we shall locate a platform and frame of reference for the purpose of this discussion.
In materialist terms, culture ramifies the production, distribution and exchange categories of social and relational existence of mankind. Culture, both of the material and ineffable kinds, offer a window unto the actual contribution of a people to human civilization. It also reflects and refracts the actual essence of a people. And if those people are Africans, and specifically Nigerians, whom centuries of systematic imperial subjugation and de-historicization have tended to neutralize and deculturize, a deliberate project of civilization-retrieval is always in place as a commodity of faith. We do not require either Fagg or Frobenious, or even Frank Willet, to inform us of the greatness of the Nigerian civilization, based, in part, on the artistic remains in Ife, Nok, Igbo-Ukwu and Benin. We know the desperate effort that Leo Frobenius in particular made, in 1910, to ferret out of this country, the prized antiquities which he had collected in Ife – because there was no legislation forbidding exportation of Nigerian antiquities at the time, and none was established until twenty-nine years later, (1939), but made retroactively operational from 1938 when the Colonial government passed an Ordinance which was to control the export of antiquities. We also know that the museums in Britain and France would be mere shadows of their present statures but for the acquired, mostly illegally, collections of paintings, sculptures, and other priceless antiquities of Nigerian origin.  It is incontestable that museums, galleries and archives reflect the material culture and civilization of any society, any people, and any nation. We know that this is why syndicates of plunderers make it an obsessive career to perpetrate cultural genocide of extinguishing African civilization – continuing the xenophobic project of Hegel and others of writing Africa out of the memory of history – by looting the cultural wealth of Africa, with particular focus on Nigeria, the richest cultural material reservoir of Black Africa.
Potentials of Revenue
Any country gearing towards development in the 21st Century must appreciate the imperatives of cultural industries as the hand-made of development. In the contemporary world, their link with the economy is becoming increasingly dominant. Hesmondhalgh (2005:155) observes that there is an increase in the relationship between entertainment and economics. According to him, “this interest derives not only from the increasing size and economic significance of the entertainment industries, though that is certainly a factor. It also stems from a view widely held in the social sciences in the 1990s that the cultural industries have certain characteristics which are becoming more and more a part of economic and organisational life generally.”