The Foreign Service Journal, March 2011

50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 1 ecently a new Foreign Service officer asked me what the cultural affairs sec- tion does. While I was glad to en- lighten him, his question made me realize that such uncertainty is wide- spread, possibly extending even to some of us who do it. So I offer this essay as an attempt to define cultural affairs, the least un- derstood of Foreign Service functions, and explain its im- portance. Most people understand what political officers do, even if they can’t distinguish between a demarché and the March Hare. Indeed, when the wider world thinks of diplomats (however rarely), it imagines political officers. Similarly, the work economic and management officers do is defined in the title they bear. And because most people understand visas and Ameri- can citizen services, they are readily able to form an accurate idea of consular work. Even the information officer func- tion is fairly well understood, for its tools — press releases, press conferences and, now, blogs, tweets and Facebook — are all in the public domain. But cultural affairs still seems to defy simple definition. Friends and family back home figure I must be a spy. After all, isn’t being the cultural attaché always the cover spies use in novels? Sorry to disappoint them, but I haven’t had a classified login for years, let alone a top-secret mis- sion. For their part, many of my colleagues think I make my living going to parties, receptions and performances. Ad- mittedly, going out is part of the job, but it is hardly the rai- son d’être. Building Bridges So what do we do? To paraphrase one definition, cul- tural affairs officers seek to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between the United States and our host country. Or, as one of the categories in the Mission Performance Plan puts it, we facilitate “mutual under- standing.” Put another way, CAOs use a variety of tools to build bridges between cultures, delivering information and im- pressions that help our target audiences better understand the United States. We try to do that by delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time and in the most efficient manner possible. More often than you might think, the tools we use to build the bridges are mistaken for the bridge. (And the bridge itself is sometimes confused with the destination.) It really is the tools that most often define what we do, but in actual fact that observation is no more useful than saying a carpenter is someone who uses a hammer. Even so, that is a good way to start defining cultural af- fairs work: the use of culture as a tool to span the chasm be- tween countries. But just as a hammer isn’t the right tool for every carpentry job, neither is there any one program that can always be used to build bridges. W HAT I S C ULTURAL A FFAIRS ? A PRACTITIONER OFFERS AN OVERVIEW OF A F OREIGN S ERVICE FUNCTION THAT DESERVES TO BE BETTER KNOWN AND APPRECIATED . B Y M ICHAEL M ACY Michael Macy joined the Foreign Service in 1994 and has served in London, Bamako, Valletta, Riyadh and Kabul as a cultural affairs or public affairs officer. He is currently the cultural affairs officer in New Delhi. R