Cultural Manifestation

Culture is the human endeavor that par excellence produces feelings and imaginaries in society. It also reinforces the feeling of identity and citizenship. From the start, this concept supposes certain specificities in the American continent: the co-existence of cultural manifestations close to, what we can define as, traditional culture, which is product of a multiplicity of ethnic groups and subcultures that has participated in the construction of the identity and history of the region; and the manifestations closer to what we can define as modern culture or, further more, as industrial culture, which is also a characteristic of the contemporary continental culture. The sustainability of these cultural manifestations without exception is

Although early studies contributed pertinent elements for analysis of public investment in the cultural sector, they omitted the maze of cultural industries, and their impact on economic growth and on the way in which the public experienced new cultural manifestations. For its part, the point made regarding the important additional contribution of cultural industries to the productive system implied that cultural policy actions needed to cover a broader spectrum, but said nothing further regarding the survival capability of forms that did not necessarily find a market niche. Finally, the realities of a continent such as the American continent, where the development of the cultural industry have not entail the destruction of traditional cultures, although it has entail its transformation and rearrangement, sets a challenge in the conception of culture from a mere cultural industry stand point. The evidence of the production of culture from an industrial level cannot leave behind other sectors that have manage to subsist and readapt in this specific modernity of our continent, such as the hand crafted art or the immense intangible heritage generated by customs and knowledge particular to our richness and multiplicity of ethnic groups and

To paraphrase the economic impact study on Colombian cultural industries (Ministry of Culture of Colombia, Andrés Bello Convention, 2003), we may employ the UNESCO definition of cultural industry. In that definition, cultural industries have the following characteristics:

• Their raw material is a creation protected by copyright and set on a tangible or electronic support;

• Their products are mass produced and preserved, and distributed on a massive scale;

• They have their own processes of production, circulation, and social appropriation;

• They are organized based on the logics of markets and marketing, or have the potential to be