International Conference on Arts and Culture | 17 ART, CULTURAL POLICY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Heddy Shri Ahimsa-Putra Antropologi Budaya - Fakultas Ilmu Budaya - Universitas Gadjah Mada It is not easy to talk about cultural policy (kebijakan kebudayaan) in Indonesia, even-though the DPR had just agreed to release “Undang-undang Pemajuan Kebudayaan” (Regulations on the Advancement of Culture) a few months ago, mainly because cultu-ral policy -as far as I know- had never been thought of seriously, or had ever become a hot topic in discussions related to culture or cultural matters. Nevertheless, I would like to draw our attention to it for its significance for Indonesian cultural affairs in the future, especially on the role of the government - both at the national and regional level (kabu-paten level)- in advancing cultural activities, cultural products and cultural productions to strengthen and enhancing our national identities and national integration. Some the-oretical concepts need to be elucidated before we go further. SYMBOL, CULTURE AND ART Discussion on the concept of “culture” cannot ever be separated from the concept of “symbol”, since the definition of culture should be based on our philosophical concep-tion of man, and I will take Ernst Cassirer’s conception for our discussion here, which appeared in his An Essay on Man (1945). His analysis and interpretation of the results of research on the difference between man and animal done by scientists from various disciplines, led him to the view that man is both biological and cultural creature. Bio-logically man is part of what we call Animal Kingdom, but man is qualitatively different from other animals in that Kingdom. The qualitative difference is due to man’s capability to create, develop and use symbols as means of communication, as means to convey messages or information to the others. Thus, a man, a human being is basically an ani-mal symbolicum. Accepting Cassirer’s view, takes us to the question of “what is symbol?”. Various de-finitions have been given, but we can use the simple and the clear one, namely that a symbol is anything bestowed with meaning or anything that is given meaning (White, 1949).This means that a symbol has two aspects or dimensions, the aspect of meaning or the symbolized and the aspect of the symbolizer. The two aspects are related to one another, but the relation is arbitrary (cf. Saussure, 1966), which means that the mea-ning is not inherent in the symbol but is from outside. It is given or attached to the sym-bolizer by human being, because human being is the only creature that can symbolize, that is having capability to put certain arbitrary relation between meaning and its sym-bol, or between the symbolized and its symbolizer.