There is no denying that cultural and national identities which have been cornered into seeing themselves in only one light - persecuted, discriminated, superior, inferior etc. - have, through violent and non-violent conflict with others, caused immense proportions of human suffering around the globe throughout history and into the present. The resulting ethnocentrism, or self-centered nature, of identities left with few or no alternative modes of thought or interpretation, often causes the more damage (if they are large industrialized societies) through lack of action, political or otherwise, to address the inequalities of nations and their peoples.

The OICD sees that it is the way in which cultural/national identity gets picked up in LOCAL contexts, (rather than cross-culturally), that affects the way that people feel inclined to be ethnocentric, or not, in their thinking. Therefore, the organization seeks to improve the quality of cultural education - increasing the number of choices people have within their cultures to ascribe themselves to certain ways of thinking - from within, intra-culturally. This process of supplying alternative models for one's cultural membership is what the OICD terms Intra-Cultural Development.

And just how do you go about attempting to achieve that?

Ask any marketing person worth their salt how ideas move in a society, and they you almost certainly, somewhere in their answer, talk about how ideas are introduced, amplified by the media, tailored to fit the perceived audience or market, and then picked up en mass. Ideas are like currency, introduced, copied and passed around the population, because like currency they serve a very distinct purpose - to bring us together in confederations of opinion and identity.

Long has the advertising world known about and tried to trace the flow of these currencies. Some very successful campaigns can even claim that they have determined the type of currency and the amount of it that people would demand once it became available. And indeed, the entire Public Relations industry attempts to control the flow of the currency of ideas, to direct opinion towards and away from what they are being paid to promote, protect, control or persecute.

The currency of ideas which fuels the opinions of people towards products, companies, politicians and initiatives, flows in the same way to give us our cultural and/or national identities. The conversations that we have with each other - which serve to encourage feelings of allegiance to our cultures and/or nation - work on the same principle of an exchange of ideas and opinions on ourselves and Others. We may perceive the results of our discussing cultural/national ideas as stronger and more set in to the clay of our social selves than our discussing Nike shoes, but the principles, anthropologically, are the same.

Thus if PR and advertising companies can influence the type of currency which flows between us in the mass media world, then it is fair to assume that similar marketing techniques can be used to alter, modify and influence the nature and flow of the currencies of cultural and national identity. This has been, of course, the nature of propaganda during war and peace time, and its effectiveness in engendering particular sorts of collective identity has been terrifying.

But if propaganda can be used to steer and stir identities into fervent nationalism, then it is fair to assume that the same techniques can also be used to move them towards peaceful and diversity-acknowledging states. This is the belief of the Organization for Intra-Cultural Development, and its main aim:- to inject multiple 'currencies' into 'circulation' to allow alternative 'discussions' on the nature of cultural and national identity.

Using a combination of social scientists and media-trained creative marketers, the OICD hopes to emulate the most effective forms of marketing and PR strategy, using a range of media. Go here to see how the commission for racial equality used a similar technique in a recent television advertisement. In doing so, the OICD hopes to:

>Provide alternative ways of thinking about national and cultural identity in all areas of the world through all forms of media.

>Become a research center for the study of national/cultural identity across the generations.

>Facilitate debate and political decision making which has the potential to decrease ethnocentrism in industrialized countries.

>Become a leading publisher of research on local-level experience and its links to nationalist activity in areas of conflict.

>Encourage, promote, publicise, and facilitate intra-cultural development and its potential to reduce violent and non-violent cross-border conflict.

>To provide alternative channels of expression of cultural/national identity in regions where an identity stressing ethnocentricity is predominant.

Please visit the OICD Directives to learn more about the OICD's general guiding principles.

Or learn in more detail how the OICD works to accomplish its aims through its research and campaign projects.

               GO to the OICD Directives.... 

GO to the OICD Projects...