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The Cultural Wealth of Nations

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Figures.............................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.............................................................................................................................ixContributor Biographies.....................................................................................................................xiIntroduction: An Inquiry into the Cultural Wealth of Nations Nina Bandelj and Frederick F. Wherry..........................................11 The Political Economy of Cultural Wealth Miguel A. Centeno, Nina Bandelj, and Frederick F. Wherry........................................232 Bringing Together the Ideas of Adam Smith and Pierre Bourdieu Richard Swedberg...........................................................473 When Cultural Capitalization Became Global Practice: The 1972 World Heritage Convention Alexandra Kowalski...............................734 Selling Beauty: Tuscany's Rural Landscape since 1945 Dario Gaggio........................................................................905 Impression Management of Stigmatized Nations: The Case of Croatia Lauren A. Rivera.......................................................1146 The Culture Bank: Symbolic Capital and Local Economic Development Frederick F. Wherry and Todd V. Crosby.................................1397 Converting (or Not) Cultural Wealth into Tourism Profits: Case Studies of Reunion Island and Mayotte Madina Regnault.....................1568 Constructing Scarcity, Creating Value: Marketing the Mundo Maya Jennifer Bair............................................................1779 Creating and Controlling Symbolic Value: The Case of South African Wine Stefano Ponte and Benoit Daviron.................................19710 Cultural Brokers, the Internet, and Value Chains: The Case of the Thai Silk Industry Mark Graham........................................222Notes.......................................................................................................................................241References..................................................................................................................................247Index.......................................................................................................................................275

Chapter One

Miguel A. Centeno Nina Bandelj Frederick F. Wherry

Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the Ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult on the majesty of Nature. —J. G. Herder

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CULTURE AND THE ECONOMY—including its effects on economic development—has a long academic history and has been the subject of considerable study and debate in the past few years. We are still asking which shapes which. Is it, to use Marx's words, "the consciousness of men [sic] that determines their being" or, on the contrary, "their social being [involved in relations of production] that determines their consciousness" (Marx [1859] 1978: 4)? Does cultural wealth make economic capital accumulation more likely, or does economic accumulation provide the means for making the wealthy appear more attractive than the working classes?

We can conventionally date the start of such discussions to Weber's thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber [1905] 2002). Weber downplays the relations of production and the conflict between the propertied and the propertyless classes when he explains the rise of modern capitalism. Instead, Weber emphasizes the Calvinist ethic and worldview that led people to become dedicated to work and to engage in trade and investment. Although he is not the first to do so, Weber is credited with linking how people think about the world to how they act on its economies. Later analyses of the same ilk include the work of modernization theorists in the 1950s and 1960s (Apter 1967; Bellah 1958; Levy 1962) and arguments about how a civilization's culture accounts, or not, for its industriousness and potentially leads to the conflicts between nations (Huntington 1996). For instance, David Landes has argued that the "rise of the West" was intimately linked to the particular cultural characteristics (attitudes toward science, thrift, and industriousness) of the societies of Western Europe. It is these cultural advantages, proposes Landes, along with a hospitable climate and a more competitive political system, that explain why there is more economic wealth in the West and more poverty elsewhere (Landes 1998). Alejandro Portes and Patricia Landolt (2000) have critiqued this line of thinking for its circular reasoning: Industrious nations are hypothesized to do industrious things. Avoiding the truism requires a close engagement with how we define culture, what its material and ideational sources are, and how culture as a predictor is not merely a restatement of the cultural, social, and economic outcomes it is presumed to cause.

Immanuel Wallerstein (1990) launches a critique against cultural universalism from the political economy perspective. Wallerstein posits that the world system has existed for centuries and that the struggles for control over scarce resources have shaped the present-day advantages and disadvantages that countries experience in the global economy. For Wallerstein, culture is camouflage: The tactic of "creating a concept of culture as the justification of the inequities of the system, as the attempt to keep them unchanging in a world which is ceaselessly threatened by change ... therefore the very construction of culture becomes a battleground" (1990: 39). Universalist claims of cultural values and absolutes hide particularistic facts, and this occurs both globally and locally (where the particular "us" is turned into a universalistic "us" to disguise inequality). Because there is a hierarchy of states and a hierarchy within states, the ideology of universalism serves as a palliative and a deception. Wallerstein notes how such cultural arguments can be used to justify both outcomes that may result more from historical legacies as well as those resulting from current-day attitudes toward work, investment, and savings. The discourse on culture functions to "blame the victim" by assigning to the global losers a culturally generated "original sin." Thus, the development discourse wraps the world in universalistic legitimacy and then ascribes a particular position to failure in meeting universalistic criteria.

Like Wallerstein, Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1993a) is cognizant of the power hierarchies but provides an understanding of the links between the economic and cultural at the individual level and sheds light on how understandings of what is "universally" valuable set in. Bourdieu argues that the tastes people have for different types of cultural performances and products depend on the material and social conditions of their existence. The possession of economic capital (money, assets), but mostly cultural capital (educational background and ease with and knowledge of the higher...