Editing Alan Lomax (section)

==Cultural equity==
{{blockquote|The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_about_ce.php| title = About Cultural Equity| access-date = August 14, 2011| publisher = culturalequity.org| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110930225753/http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_about_ce.php| archive-date = September 30, 2011| url-status = dead}}</ref>}}

{{blockquote|Folklore can show us that this dream is age-old and common to all mankind. It asks that we recognize the cultural rights of weaker peoples in sharing this dream. And it can make their adjustment to a world society an easier and more creative process. The stuff of folklore—the orally transmitted wisdom, art and music of the people can provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, "You are my brother."<ref>[America Sings the Saga of America" (1947)]</ref>}}

As a member of the [[Popular Front]] and [[People's Songs]] in the 1940s, Alan Lomax promoted what was then known as "One World" and today is called [[multiculturalism]].<ref>Ironically, perhaps, the phrase originated in an [http://www.usfamily.net/web/timwalker/sitedocs/1world.html article] {{webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20120913191212/http://www.usfamily.net/web/timwalker/sitedocs/1world.html |date=September 13, 2012 }}, later a best-selling [[One World (Willkie book)|1943 book]] by Republican candidate [[Wendell Willkie]].</ref> In the late forties he produced a series of concerts at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall that presented flamenco guitar and calypso, along with country blues, [[Appalachian music]], Andean music, and jazz. His radio shows of the 1940s and 1950s explored musics of all the world's peoples.

Lomax recognized that folklore (like all forms of creativity) occurs at the local and not the national level and flourishes not in isolation but in fruitful interplay with other cultures. He was dismayed that mass communications appeared to be crushing local cultural expressions and languages. In 1950 he echoed anthropologist [[Bronisław Malinowski]] (1884–1942), who believed the role of the ethnologist should be that of advocate for primitive man (as indigenous people were then called), when he urged folklorists to similarly advocate for the folk. Some, such as [[Richard Dorson]], objected that scholars shouldn't act as cultural arbiters, but Lomax believed it was unethical to stand idly by as the magnificent variety of the world's cultures and languages was "grayed out" by centralized commercial entertainment and educational systems. Although he acknowledged potential problems with intervention, he urged that folklorists with their special training actively assist communities in safeguarding and revitalizing their own local traditions.

Similar ideas had been put into practice by [[Benjamin Botkin]], Harold W. Thompson, and Louis C. Jones, who believed that folklore studied by folklorists should be returned to its home communities to enable it to thrive anew. They have been realized in the annual (since 1967) Smithsonian Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. (for which Lomax served as a consultant), in national and regional initiatives by [[Public folklore|public folklorists]] and local activists in helping communities gain recognition for their oral traditions and lifeways both in their home communities and in the world at large; and in the National Heritage Awards, concerts, and fellowships given by the NEA and various State governments to master folk and traditional artists.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/allheritage.html |title=National Endowment for the Arts, National Heritage Fellowships 2008 |year=2008 |access-date=August 14, 2011 |publisher=www.nea.gov |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110719222738/http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/allheritage.html |archive-date=July 19, 2011 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In 1983, Lomax founded [[Anna Lomax Wood#Association for Cultural Equity|The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE)]]. It is housed at the Fine Arts Campus of Hunter College in New York City and is the custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive. The Association's mission is to "facilitate cultural equity" and practice "cultural feedback" and "preserve, publish, repatriate and freely disseminate" its collections.<ref name=ace-about>{{Cite web|url=http://www.culturalequity.org/ace/about-ace|title=About The Association for Cultural Equity {{pipe}} Association for Cultural Equity|website=The Association for Cultural Equity}}</ref> Though Alan Lomax's appeals to anthropology conferences and repeated letters to UNESCO fell on deaf ears, the modern world seems to have caught up to his vision. In an article first published in the 2009 ''Louisiana Folklore Miscellany'', [[Barry Jean Ancelet]], folklorist and chair of the Modern Languages Department at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, wrote:

{{blockquote|Every time [Lomax] called me over a span of about ten years, he never failed to ask if we were teaching [[Cajun French]] in the schools yet. His notions about the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity have been affirmed by many contemporary scholars, including Nobel Prize-winning physicist [[Murray Gell-Mann]] who concluded his recent book, ''The Quark and the Jaguar'', with a discussion of these very same issues, insisting on the importance of "cultural DNA" (1994: 338–343). His cautions about "universal popular culture" (1994: 342) sound remarkably like Alan's warning in his "Appeal for Cultural Equity" that the "cultural grey-out" must be checked or there would soon be "no place worth visiting and no place worth staying" (1972). Compare Gell-Mann:

<blockquote>Just as it is crazy to squander in a few decades much of the rich biological diversity that has evolved over billions of years, so is it equally crazy to permit the disappearance of much of human cultural diversity, which has evolved in a somewhat analogous way over many tens of thousands of years...The erosion of local cultural patterns around the world is not, however, entirely or even principally the result of contact with the universalizing effect of scientific enlightenment. Popular culture is in most cases far more effective at erasing distinctions between one place or society and another. Blue jeans, fast food, rock music, and American television serials have been sweeping the world for years. (1994: 338–343)</blockquote>

and Lomax:

<blockquote>carcasses of dead or dying cultures on the human landscape, that we have learned to dismiss this pollution of the human environment as inevitable, and even sensible, since it is wrongly assumed that the weak and unfit among musics and cultures are eliminated in this way...Not only is such a doctrine anti-human; it is very bad science. It is false Darwinism applied to culture – especially to its expressive systems, such as music language, and art. Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative, even though they may symbolize technologies of different levels...With the disappearance of each of these systems, the human species not only loses a way of viewing, thinking, and feeling but also a way of adjusting to some zone on the planet which fits it and makes it livable; not only that, but we throw away a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need. The only way to halt this degradation of man's culture is to commit ourselves to the principles of political, social, and economic justice. (2003 [1972]: 286)<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/LFMlomax.html |title=Lomax in Louisiana: Trials and Triumph |publisher=Louisianafolklife.org |access-date=2015-09-08}}</ref></blockquote>}}

In 2001, in the wake of the attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, UNESCO's Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity declared the safeguarding of languages and intangible culture on a par with protection of individual human rights and as essential for human survival as biodiversity is for nature,<ref>On the vital connection between biological diversity and cultural diversity, see Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin, "Scientists Offer New Insight into What to Protect of the World's Rapidly Vanishing Languages, Cultures, and Species" in [https://web.archive.org/web/20090327204519/http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/in_defense_of_difference/  ''In Defense of Difference: Seed Magazine'' (Oct. 2008)]: "Last October, when United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released its Global Outlook 4 report, reiterating the scientific consensus that, ultimately, humans are to blame for current global extinctions, UNEP for the first time made an explicit connection between the ongoing collapse of biological diversity and the rapid, global-scale withering of cultural and linguistic diversity: 'Global social and economic change is driving the loss of biodiversity and disrupting local ways of life by promoting cultural assimilation and homogenization,' the report noted. 'Cultural change, such as loss of cultural and spiritual values, languages, and traditional knowledge and practices, is a driver that can cause increasing pressures on biodiversity...In turn, these pressures impact human well-being'".</ref> ideas remarkably similar to those forcefully articulated by Alan Lomax many years before.