Publisher's Synopsis
This text traces how culture functions in debates about national integration and identity, socioeconomic development and underdevelopment, tradition and modernity. Each contributor seeks to denaturalize discourses of culture and cultural policy and represent culture as a social discourse and a shared social practice.;Essays in this volume focus on Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and China as states rife with discursive complexity. From small to large, young to old, former colony to former colonial power, these six examples represent situated vioces and cultural values meted out in a larger "global" sphere.
