Would it matter if the Philippines had a Department of Culture instead of just a commission like the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA)? This was the subject of our idle talk as we left Maasin City yesterday on our way to Hilongos to catch the fast craft back to Cebu.
I was in quite remarkable company. We were all members of the different national committees of the Subcommission on Cultural Heritage (SCH) under the NCCA (often misprinted as NCAA, the annual basketball tournament which in itself speaks volumes!).
We had just spent the whole day last Monday in Magallanes, Limasawa Island, to mark the 493rd anniversary of the first mass in the archipelago by the Magellan expedition. NCCA was taking the opportunity to inaugurate the 2014 Taoid National Heritage Month right in Limasawa, an event that will eventually culminate with all the committees under SCH headed by Fr. Harold Rentoria, OSA, in Sorsogon and Masbate next month.
The 45-minute ride to the port of Hilongos was a good time to see the pros and cons of a Department of Culture. The cons talked about the expected politicization of culture and how culture can end up becoming a tool to forward political ends.
The pros talked about how little impact the NCCA has made such that even its acronym is mispronounced. Despite all its laudable programs over the years, it does not even have name recall at all in every municipality in the country.
In towns and cities nationwide, in fact, it is the tourism officers, mandated under the National Tourism Law, who are given the added task of handling the work of cultural heritage even if many of them do not have either degrees in tourism nor in any aspect of heritage (museology, architecture, archives management, archaeology, history, art conservation, etc.) to begin with.
No offense meant to tourism officers in Cebu who I must assert have had training in cultural mapping and in cultural heritage management in the past and have used these in their jurisdictions with varied levels of success.
I took the pro side obviously. After all, everything in this country is politicized. Even pet dogs and cats end up in the ideological and propaganda wars as so poignantly shown in the recent capture of the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines or whatever is left of it.
More to the point, the Philippines seems to be the only country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which still relegates culture into the back burner, where no portfolio position at the level of a cabinet secretary is present to represent culture and its multifarious concerns in weekly cabinet meetings. This may be one of the main reasons why it is difficult to locate funds within the government coffers to help restore the ruined churches and other heritage structures in Bohol and Cebu, a task the government is utterly mandated to carry out under the National Cultural Heritage Law.
Incidentally, Thailand passed theirs 20 years back while it took us this long to make a law that many grumbled about as limited in scope if not utterly flawed. (The response from the framers of this law was this: It’s better to get the law passed first after over 20 years of lobbying for it, and then work on amendments later on, to which I agree.)
I contest the notion that there will be no more private sector consultations and representations should a Department of Culture be finally included in the cabinet portfolio of this country.
This is one fear often dangled by people who want the NCCA to remain as such, a mere consultative body with very little powers of persuasion to convince department secretaries like those of public highways, budget and management, education, etc. to immediately address issues concerning the erosion and erasure of various aspects of our tangible and intangible heritage.
Then there is the fear that a sitting president can dictate his or her desires as to what cultural facet or aspect can be strengthened and promoted. Of course that is to be expected. But I can accept that over the non-presence of culture in the presidential agenda in this country. Of course, we balk at Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo building a huge alternate airport at Clark, right in her province, even naming it after her father. But are we suffering for it? Do we lose our other airports as a result?
Presidents come and go with their favorite pet projects in their favorite province or province but that does not end the world, does it?
Culture cannot continue to be in the back burner no more. The Culture Ministry of both France and Japan spend a large percentage of their per capita on funding museum exhibitions and sending their best talents to perform abroad as a concrete sense of their pride of place and of their culture.
In the Philippines au contraire, we cannot even fund a single museum to change its exhibition at least once a year without securing private or external funding. Nay, we cannot even fund government museums–except for the National Museum, of course–to stay afloat and be the best!
Clearly, the time for a Department of Culture is long overdue.
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