CULTURAL ECONOMICS

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• ECONOMICS 331

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• Cultural economist are aware of the importance of
  understanding economics and the economy of
  countries, regions, and the world.
• Economics, whether the formal or informal,
  analytical progress or empirical progress or
  both, theoretical or applied economics is
  important in public thought and debate.
• This state of affairs is likely both to
  exhilarate and to distress cultural economist who
  work on economy. It exhilarates because it points
  out the importance of what they study, which is,
  after all, economic life.
• It is likely to distress because the economic and
  cultural life that they see in their research
  often looks so different from the world construed
  by those theoretical, applied and popular
  economics.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• word world is not simple hyperbole, for
  economics, talk of economy, touches on and
  assumes so much about human life
• what it means to be a person,
• how people think and act,
• what value is and what is valued,
• how people relate to and deal with one another.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• the exhilaration outweighs the distress at the
  start of the century.
• The end of history that was foretold with the
  fall of the Berlin Wall has not come to pass.
• The economic policies and assumptions that came
  to predominate in the United Kingdom and the
  United States, and the Washington Consensus that
  sought to make those policies and assumptions
  global.
• The neoliberalism and free trade of the World
  Trade Organization, the World Bank and the
  International Monetary Fund attract significant
  dissent worldwide.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• cultural economists would have some hope that
  their view of the world might stimulate those who
  think not just about the wealth of nations
  (economics), but also about their health of
  nations (culture).
• In the past few years there has been a minor boom
  in works by economic anthropologists and cultural
  economists that, explicitly or implicitly,
  challenge not just specific elements of
  conventional economic thought,
• but also the fundamental ways that it construes
  economic life and social life more generally.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• sees and questions economic thought not as a
  self-evident truth or a valid statement about
  human nature, but as a rough model that seems to
  work in specific areas of specific people's lives
  and, moreover, that seems to do so for social and
  political reasons.
• is concerned not with the nature of economic
  thought and action in themselves, but with the
  place of economy in people's lives, environments,
  and thoughts.
• studies all aspects of social and/or economic
  life of individuals, groups, and societies.
• may lay out a coherent arguments in extended
  forms to study societies and the economic systems
  and it works on specific topics and in specific
  regions of the world.
• all revolve around cultural economics is an
  approach to economic life.
• is the description and analysis of economic life,
  using, an anthropological perspective.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• cultural perspective approaches and locates
  aspects of peoples individual and collective
  lives, their lives and societies, in terms of how
  these aspects relate to one another in an
  interconnected, though not necessarily bounded or
  very orderly, whole.
• The aspects of cultural economics can be
  different elements or fields of people's lives,
  such as religious belief, consumption,
  production, and allocation, household and
  business organizations, productive activities or
  the like.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• approaches and locates lives and societies, in
  terms of how these aspects relate to one another
  in an interconnected, though not necessarily
  bounded or very orderly, whole.
• aspects of cultural economics can be different
  elements or fields of people's lives, such as
  religious belief, consumption, production, and
  allocation, household and business organizations,
  productive activities or the like.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• cultural economist might want to study how
  household organization among a particular set of
  people or group is related to religious belief,
  legal systems, how they answer the basic economic
  questions and vice versa.
• In an ideal world that cultural economist would
  want to know how all the elements of people's
  lives and societies are related to one another.
• As this suggests then, cultural economists tend
  to want to see people's lives in the round.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• A different set of aspects of people's lives and
  societies is important as well, one that cuts
  across the sort of aspects such as religious
  belief, consumption, production, and allocation,
  household and business organizations, productive
  activities or the like.
• Cultural economists tend to want to know about
  the relationship between what people think and
  say on the one hand, and on the other what they
  do.
• These two aspects can have different labels as
  disciplinary interest and fashion
• but they can be cast as culture on the one hand
  and practice economics on the other.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• can be approached to see the extent to which
  economic practices shape culture and vice versa
  and how they do so.
• This can be part of an effort to understand, say
  , exchange practices affect people's
  understandings of the kin or unkin people
  involved in exchange (and vice versa), or
• how, say, economic practices in brokerage firms
  affect people's understandings of stock exchanges
  (and, once more, vice versa).

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• However, there is another way that culture and
  practice can be approached
• the differences between them can be important for
  helping the researcher to achieve a deeper
  understanding of the lives of the people being
  studied.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• For instance, if we talk to those who manage
  pension funds, we may hear them say that they
  evaluate investment firms carefully in terms of
  their performance before deciding whether to use
  them to invest a portion of the pension's funds.
• From this, we may conclude that fund managers are
  relatively rational calculators who use objective
  data to reach their decisions after all, that is
  what they tell us, and it makes sense in terms of
  what everyone knows about investing money.
• However, we may observe that, once hired by fund
  managers, an investment firm is almost never
  fired, even if its returns are poor.
• This anomalous relationship between what people
  say and what they do can offer the researcher an
  insight into the nature of fund management that
  is more rewarding than is available if we attend
  only to what managers say or what they do.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• has two further features
• 1. the perspective is fundamentally empirical
  and naturalistic.
• It rests on the observation (empirical) of
  people's lives as they live them (naturalistic).
• 2. the concern to approach people's lives in the
  round, modern cultural economics is reluctant to
  think in terms of social laws and universals.
• Cultural economists have studied a large number
  of societies in different parts of the world, and
  have come up with almost no social laws that
  apply throughout specific regions, much less that
  apply globally.

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EMPIRICAL AND NATURALISTIC CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• rests on the observation (empirical) of people's
  lives as they live them (naturalistic).
• The discipline emerged in the person of Bronislaw
  Malinowski, who taught at the London School of
  Economics early in the twentieth century.
• He is the origin of modern cultural economics
  because he carried out, and demonstrated the
  significance of, extended fieldwork in his case,
  several years living in the midst of a set of
  people in what is now Papua New Guinea, observing
  and participating in their lives.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• Empirical naturalism has come to define the
  field.
• Thus, cultural economists are uneasy with the
  sort of experiments that have been common in
  social psychology, are found to a lesser degree
  in sociology, and that appear from time to time
  in economics.
• People in an experimental setting are willing to
  spend surrogate tokens of wealth to reduce the
  token holdings of some of their fellow
  experimental subjects.
• Given that it is based on experiment, this
  finding is empirical. However, because the
  experimental setting is precisely not
  naturalistic, modern cultural economics would be
  likely to take it as little more than an
  interesting idea that could be investigated
  through fieldwork.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• The second feature is places importance on
  participant observation and it is concern to
  approach people's lives in the round, modern
  cultural economics is reluctant to think in terms
  of social laws and universals.
• Cultural economists have studied a large number
  of societies in different parts of the world, and
  have come up with almost no social laws that
  apply throughout specific regions, much less that
  apply globally.
• cultural economics tends to be an idiographic
  (representation of ideas by graphic symbols) or
  particularizing discipline, rather than a
  nomothetic (related to abstract, general or
  universal statements or laws) or generalizing
  one.
• As this might suggest, cultural economists tend
  to be unhappy with things like the assumptions
  that underlie the idea of utility maximization.
• They are even unhappy with things like Adam
  Smith's famous assertion that there is a certain
  propensity in human nature ... to truck, barter,
  and exchange one thing for another.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• cultural economists would agree that people
  transact things, and indeed the study of such
  transactions is a central aspect of a great deal
  of cultural work.
• However, cultural economists might well point out
  that this work indicates that people in different
  situations in the same society, not to mention in
  different societies, transact in different ways
  and understand what they are doing in different
  ways.
• Consequently, while they might well see the logic
  and attraction of generalizations and even
  universal laws, they would be prone to think that
  these are of little use in the practical
  disciplinary task of seeing how people live their
  lives. T
• They would have to be qualified and elaborated so
  much in terms of local context that they would be
  almost unrecognizable as universals.
• cultural economists generally view economic life
  through the pertinent features of the cultural
  perspective.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• Definition of common economic life in cultural
  economics
• Economic life is the activities through which
  people produce, distribute, exchange, circulate,
  and consume things, the ways that people and
  societies secure their subsistence (sustenance)
  or provision themselves.
• things is an expansive term, which includes
• material objects, but also includes the
  immaterial or abstract labor, services,
  knowledge and myth, names and charms, and so on.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• In different times and places, different ones of
  these will be important resources in social life,
  
• and when they are important they come within the
  purview of cultural economics.
• In other words, where some economists have
  identified economic life in terms of the sorts of
  mental calculus that people use and the decisions
  that they make (for example, utility
  maximization), which stresses the form of thought
  of the person being studied,
• most cultural economists would identify it in
  terms of the substance of the activity.
• This substance includes markets in the
  conventional sense, whether village markets in
  the Western Pacific or stock markets in the First
  World.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• markets are only a sub-set of economic life, and
  in accord with their tendency to see the
  interconnections in social life,
• cultural economists tend to situate things like
  markets or other forms of circulation, or
  production or consumption, in larger social and
  cultural frames in order to see how markets
  affect and are affected by other areas of life.
• cultural economists recognize the growing
  importance of the economy in how people in
  Western societies understand their world over the
  past couple of centuries,
• they would not take the nature of the economy
  as given or its growing importance as
  self-evident but influence by culture.
• This indicates that it is not just economic life
  that merits investigation.
• So too does the idea of economy, its contents,
  contexts and saliencies, and the uses to which it
  is put.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS Approaching economic life

• Main features of the ways that cultural economics
  approaches economic life, the concern to place
  people's economic activities, their thoughts and
  beliefs about those activities and the social
  institutions implicated in those activities, all
  within the context of the social and cultural
  world of the people being studied.
• Assumption economic life cannot be understood
  unless it is seen in terms of people's society
  and culture more generally.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• the sub-discipline's approach to economic life
  has more aspects than just the conceptual.
• One aspect is called methodology.
• Cultural economists approach the relationship
  between economic life and the rest of social life
  in different ways, but these can, without too
  much distortion, be reduced to two broad types
• 1. the individual and
• 2. the systemic
• Their visibility has varied historically and, to
  a degree, it has varied among different national
  cultural traditions.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• 1. The cultural individualist methodology
• approaches the relationship of economic and
  social life through the study of the beliefs and
  practices of individual members of the group
  being investigated.
• This cultural individualist method is old, the
  founder of modern cultural economics and
  anthropology, Malinowski.
• His book is Argonauts of the Western Pacific
  (Malinowski 1922)
• its focus is economic life, exchange in the
  Trobriand Islands of eastern Melanesia. through
  it Malinowski sought to challenge important
  elements of popular economic thought in his day.
  
• Malinowski's methodology in Argonauts was
  individualistic is not to say that he described
  Trobriand islanders independent of their society
  and culture.
• His methodology as individualistic is the way
  that he portrays the focus of the ceremonial
  exchange of valuables called the kula exchange,
  the typical activities that make up the typical
  stages of the typical kula exchange, and this
  typicality is cast as what the typical kula
  exchanger does.
• Trobriand economic life and its relationship to
  society more generally, are construed and
  presented in terms of the individual islander
  writ large.
• Argonauts the kula exchange system is presented
  in terms of what are essentially dyadic
  transactions between self interested
  individuals, and as premised on some kind of
  balance .

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• 2. the systemic cultural methodology (Smile
  Durkheim 1965. )
• Durkheim established sociology as an academic
  discipline in France, he argued that society is
  more than just a collection of individuals (or
  even Malinowskian individuals writ large).
• Rather, he treated society as a super-ordinate
  system or set of inter-related parts, with
  properties of its own.
• He challenged the important elements of the
  popular economic thought of his day, though he
  did so in a very different way.
• His methodology, like his challenge, is most
  apparent in The division of labor in society
  (1984). The title says it individuals do not
  have a division of labor, groups or societies do.
• Durkheim classified societies in terms of the
  degree of their division of labor, which he
  related to a range of other societal attributes,
  especially their legal, political, and economic
  systems.
• Durkheim's systemic methodology influenced
  cultural economics directly through his own
  works, and also through the writings of his
  nephew, Marcel (1990).
• A more recent, influential example of this
  methodology is in Maidens, meal and money, by
  Claude Meillassoux (1981).

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• Maidens, meal and money, by Claude Meillassoux
  (1981).
• addresses, among other things, the question of
  the nature, of village societies in colonial
  Africa, societies that he views as systems and as
  explicable in terms of their relationships with
  other systems.
• He argues that the village and the colonial
  orders are in a symbiotic relationship.
• In other words, it is the interest of colonial
  governments and firms in inexpensive labor of a
  certain sort that leads to a relationship between
  urban and village sectors in colonial Africa.
• This looks very close to the creation of
  traditional villages, with their kinship and age
  structures, exchange systems and the like (a
  similar argument is in Carrier and Carrier 1989).

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• The individualist and systemic methodologies vary
  in their visibility in cultural economics.
• This variation is a consequence of the fact that
  cultural economists are affected by larger
  currents within culture and the larger world.
• Broadly, though, American cultural economics has
  tended towards the individualist pole (self
  interest).

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• British cultural economists, more heavily
  influenced by Durkheim, tended towards the
  systemic pole until the 1980s.
• There have been differences among different
  schools of culture structural functionalism,
  Britain and American, tends to a systemic
  approach, as do the Marxist and political-economy
  schools within the sub-discipline.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• Cultural economics is based on the empirical
  naturalism of sustained fieldwork.
• Historically, this has been expressed in the
  ethnographic monograph, of which Malinowski's
  Argonauts is an excellent example, in which the
  author presents a sustained and detailed
  description of the set of people being studied.
• Attention to local detail is expressed in
  descriptive ethnography to complement by a more
  encompassing concern with regional variation.
• How do these people resemble or differ from other
  people, whether near by or more distant?

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown laid out the difference
  between these two forms of cultural economics.
• He drew a distinction between ethnography and
  what he called comparative sociology a
  theoretical or nomothetic study of which the aim
  is to provide acceptable generalization
• While detailed ethnography may characterize the
  discipline in the eye of outsiders, the
  comparative element has always been present and
  influential.
• Comparative element often sits uneasy in a
  discipline the members of which establish their
  credentials through their ethnographic knowledge
  and publications concerning a place that is
  different from others.
• The discipline would fall apart, dissolving into
  groups focused on different parts of the world.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• The sub discipline is influenced by two different
  intellectual orientations
• One of these springs from the ethnographic
  context not just the particular place where the
  researcher has done fieldwork, but the
  ethnographic region where that place is located
  Lowland Latin Americans think about things
  differently from East Asians.
• The cause may lie in differences between
  different parts of the world alternatively, it
  may lie in differences in the interests and
  approaches of influential researchers and
  publications concerned with different regions.
• But whatever the cause, there are clear
  differences between the topics that are important
  in the cultural differences of regions.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• The second orientation, that is the intellectual
  models and arguments that become fashionable
  generally within the discipline.
• When the relationship between kinship and
  political influence, or the difference between
  gifts and commodities, is in the air, specialists
  in different regions can and do talk to each
  other about it, and ethnographic work on a
  particular region can cross the regional boundary
  and be read more widely.

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CULTURAL ECONOMICS

• Cultural economist are aware of the importance of
  understanding economics, economic systems,
  cultures, and the economy of countries, regions,
  and the world.
• Economics, whether the formal or informal,
  analytical progress or empirical progress or
  both, theoretical or applied economics, is
  important in public thought and debate.
• This state of affairs is likely both to
  exhilarate and to distress cultural economist who
  work on economy.
• It exhilarates because it points out the
  importance of what they study, which is, after
  all, economic life.
• It is likely to distress because the economic and
  cultural life that they see in their research
  often looks so different from the world construed
  by those theoretical, applied and popular
  economics.

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END ECON. 331
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