Commodification of Culture

Update: If you'd like to watch an accurate, funny, and brief take on Eco-Nihilism, please go to #wisecrack on Youtube: Did South Park Turn Anti-Capitalist, where the central argument from Eco-Nihilism is quoted at several junctures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_MglOKUFRg.

I may not have made South Park directly--but Wisecrack--close enough!!

Wendy Lynne Lee

This is the preface for Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield), February 2017.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739176887/Eco-Nihilism-The-Philosophical-Geopolitics-of-the-Climate-Change-Apocalypse.

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road,  tells the story of a dying father’s heroic effort to protect his child from starvation, violence, and disease as they struggle to cross the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what’s happened to bring about so tragic and terrorizing a circumstance, but we’re nonetheless drawn to the stark images McCarthy evokes and, though we work feverishly to deny that such a tragedy could befall us, we can imagine it.

Indeed, for Syrian refugees, Niger Delta villagers, Northwest Kenyan pastoralists, Chukchi Sea coastal fishermen, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, Mexican fishermen, Pennsylvania farmers, indigenous Sengwer, the citizens of Kiribati Island’s thirty-two atolls, and many more, fables like The Road reek of a reality already poisoned nearly beyond repair and foreshadow future crises—environmental, economic, geopolitical, social, and moral—for which the prospect of recovery seems little more than fiction.

Such crises are as predictable as are the implications of an economic system, namely, neoliberal or conquest capitalism, whose objectives and governing logic are, I’ll argue, inherently incompatible not only with the just, the good, or the beautiful—but with life itself. Conquest capital devours and digests values, ethical, civic, and aesthetic, reducing each to that single value without which it can neither replicate itself nor grow: exchange. In so doing it generates a state of affairs that can only rightly be described as pathologically nihilistic: capitalism destroys its own existential conditions through the wholesale commodification of the finite ecosystems upon which it depends. It cannot do otherwise and be capitalism. Hence, to continue down this road guarantees a future disfigured by the violence consequent on abject desperation and subjugation not only to domination by multinational corporations, but ultimately to more prosaic though terrorizing prospects—like thirst.

This paper addresses two significant features of increasing commodification of the life-style, environments and ceremonial events of rural people in post-colonial Vanuatu:  the growing economic importance of tourism, especially in Vanuatu; and the various and novel political and economic uses of island ‘kastom’. A short history of the development of tourism on the island of Tanna shows that even locally managed tourist activities can lead to division, instability and inequality of wealth among villagers. On Pentecost, the commercial exploitation of huge traditional ceremonies is even more deleterious since it contributes to the weakening of the people’s symbolic identification with their culture and to their traditions (kastom) becoming merely a saleable commodity. The monetisation of rural communities stands at the core of this transformation and degradation of traditional rural life, since it encourages land grabbing and wage employment and transforms peasants into impoverished workers in exile in their own lands.

In this paper I critically analyze the work of Shepard Fairey, the street artist better known as OBEY, as a multimodal discourse. After introducing the notion of street art, I analyze Fairey’s aesthetics, inspired in Pop Art and Soviet Constructivism, as well as his accounts on his own art, in order to unveil his ideology. I then discuss a particular case, concerning the pastiche of the Che Guevara’s image. I will show that the seemingly subversive nature of OBEY’s work, is nothing more than marketing. Consequently, by industrially (re)producing and commodifiying dissent, OBEY banalizes and deactivates it. According to the dichotomy between oppositional and emergent discourses, I conclude that OBEY enacts only an oppositional behavior. Moreover, by ‘manufacturing propaganda dissent’, OBEY performs protest, but in doing so he contributes to perpetuating the system he says he fights against.

This paper is a direct extract of my PhD thesis with the title "Commodification of Living Cultural Heritage in New Orleans. An Anthropological Case Study." It presents the chapter about the ethnographic methods that were used throughout the conduction of the fieldwork in the city of New Orleans. The final PhD thesis was submitted to the University of Vienna in August 2014.

Colonial photographic archives have, in recent decades, become increasingly accessible to a broader public, whether through the digitisation of archives and dissemination on the internet, or through the work of researchers, curators and visual arts practitioners. The democratisation of information has not only meant easier access to descendants, scholars and arts practitioners, but also to entrepreneurs who repurpose colonial photographs with the explicit aim of producing commodities and reproduce them to be consumed en masse.
The Cameo range of fabrics by South African company Design Team is one such example. The range features portraits of indigenous Southern African women photographed at the turn of the nineteenth century. These photographs reach a wider audience through the publication, Surviving the lens, photographic studies of South and East African people, 1870-1920, edited by Michael Stevenson and Michael Graham-Stewart (2001) and the exhibition of the same title.
In this paper, I explore the shifts in meaning and value that occur as these portraits are moved from the semantic space of the colonial anthropological archive, to that of glossy scholarly publication, and finally to the realm of home furnishings. Aimé Césaire's (2002:44) equation “colonisation = thingification” is deployed in examination the commodification of indexical signifiers of racial blackness within so-called ‘colonial style’ of interior design.

Citation: Conradie, A. 2017. Colonial specimen/neocolonial chic: commodification of archival portraits in South African textile design. In 'Critical Addresses: The Archive-in-Practice. edited by Leora Farber and Claire Jorgensen. Visual Identities in Art and Design Center (VIAD). University of Johannesburg. Auckland Park: Jacana Media

There is constant waste of fresh agric produce due to lack of processing facilities and infrastructure. The absence of a plan to showcase and brand the unique agro-products, natural tourist attraction sites, aquatic life, agro-based festivals, etc., makes it difficult to attract the international community. Tourism will, therefore, assist in removing existing stereotypes and misrepresentations of indigenous. Cross River State has a well structured global product as regards agri-tourism than Benue State. Cross River State has more active, globalized and commercialized agri-tourism and agribusiness commodities compared to Benue State. agro-based activities and culture have prominence for achieving international exposure, which is greatly enhanced through agro-tourism and agribusiness activities. There are positive aspirations towards agri-tourism in Benue and Cross River States. Natural attractions, ecological sites, parks and gardens should be advertised through the media and monies spent for the development of such agro-based sites so as to woe investors and increase international exposure.

This is a final draft. Please cite only the published  in Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson, Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics: The Betrayal of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 211-236.

Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating sp...

The commodification of Islamic antiques intensified in the late Ottoman Empire, an age of domestic reform and increased European interference following the Tanzimat (reorganisation) of 1839. Mercedes Volait examines the social life of typical objects moving from Cairo and Damascus to Paris, London, and beyond, uncovers the range of agencies and subjectivities involved in the trade of architectural salvage and historic handicraft, and traces impacts on private interiors, through creative reuse and Revival design, in Egypt, Europe and America. By devoting attention to both local and global engagements with Middle Eastern tangible heritage, the present volume invites to look anew at Orientalism in art and interior design, the canon of Islamic architecture and the translocation of historic works of art.

Festivals of Moors and Christians are celebrated in great profusion in Southern Spain. These festivals, combining religious ceremony and secular entertainment, are widely divulged in books, newspapers, on the Internet, and on local and regional television. The number of festivals is growing each year; celebrations fallen in disuse are revived and new ones are created. While continuing to rally the local population as a focus for the expression of identity, in the last few decades, many of these festivals have also become the object of processes of commoditization and heritagization, and a focus for identity politics. Based on fieldwork and literature research, the essay analyses the festival in its contemporary form, from the perspective of performance, arguing that the performative character of the celebration constitutes the foundation for both its marketability and its efficacy as an emblem of local identity.

In Egypt (as elsewhere), the late nineteenth century was a significant period for the demolition, fragmentation and re-use of historic architecture, as Cairo modernised rapidly under the Khedives, and a new self-conscious approach to the material past was emerging. This joint paper traces two major Cairo collections of art and architectural salvage, put on public display at the international exhibitions of 1867 and 1878 in Paris. The first was presented by the state architect Husayn Fahmi, and the second by the Khedive’s grand equerry, Gaston de Saint-Maurice. Both displays were included in Egypt’s national representation at these Paris events, part of a deliberate political programme to promote Egypt’s international profile and justify the rule of the Khedives over a rapidly modernising state. Both collections were purchased shortly thereafter by the South Kensington Museum (today the V&A). This presentation is part of an extensive research project into 19th-century collecting in Egypt and Syria, which centres on the V&A’s collections, inventories and archives.

The following is my draft presentation to the World Ecology Research Network Conference, Helsinki, August, 2018

Ideological commitment to the concept of “free trade” has a long, violent, and oppressive history that turns largely on the profit-centered objectives of its beneficiaries. This, of course, is not news; it’s simply one point along the narrative trajectory of the Capitalocene, defining the “world” according to a logic whereby the value of everything is calculated according to its capacity for commodity exchange. Whether the American President finds favor with specific agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) matters only insofar as they advance his brand, “Make America Great Again!” or realize his vision of an America, Inc., one-part private corporation, one-part reality television, and one-part Twitter-fed competition for future rights to the MAGA Network. Donald Trump isn’t really a different instantiation of the narratives that drive the Capitalocene; he’s just a particularly transparent, if unsightly one. I’ll argue that what Trump foreshadows, in fact, is the transition between the Capitalocene and the Kleptocene, that is, between Capital as it still operates behind the thinning facade of “free trade” and the world whose vanishing shorelines, droughts, fires, species loss, and massive human migrations make unembellished theft combined with authoritarian rule the only remaining option for maintaining the levers of power. What is the difference between the capitalocene and the kleptocene? More than violence. More than desperation. The difference is that not only is the myth of endless resources false, but that climate change is very real.

En este artículo se expone  un estudio de caso desarrollado con la comunidad extendida de los nahuas de San Juan Tetelcingo asentados en Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo. Específicamente en la colonia Colosio, donde se encuentran establecidas la mayoría de las viviendas de los nahuas que dan clases de artesanías de barro pintado a los turistas que se hospedan en las grandes corporaciones hoteleras de la zona. Es dentro de este espacio de consumo, donde estos artesanos han encontrando una forma innovadora de valorizar sus artesanías de barro en un mercado cada vez más globalizado.
El presente artículo representa un breve acercamiento a las estrategias de mercantilización que los artesanos nahuas de San Juan Tetelcingo han desarrollado para insertarse a la economía de servicios turísticos a lo largo de la República mexicana. Los procesos migratorios de esta comunidad mantienen una relación con la producción y comercialización artesanal a partir de mediados del siglo XX. Se toma como referencia el caso de Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, ciudad donde los migrantes nahuas han desarrollado diferentes prácticas sociales y económicas para innovar los procesos de producción y comercialización artesanal. Dichas prácticas se caracterizan por un proceso de interacción dinámica entre las corporaciones hoteleras transnacionales, los indígenas nahuas y los turistas internacionales en busca de paraísos de “Sol y Playa”, donde “Todo esta incluido” -hospedaje, comida, bebidas y clases para pintar barro con artesanos nahuas-.
El siguiente trabajo es resultado de una investigación de campo realizada del 2005 al 2009,  en la localidad de origen de los nahuas de San Juan Tetelcingo y en Playa del Carmen,  por lo que es necesario adevertir en todo momento su enfoque multilocal del estudio.

Jon Altman has argued that an ideological commitment to the market has blinded many policy makers to the viable alternatives to market-based development in Australia’s north. This seminar examines the distinctive approach to economic development he advocates – the hybrid economy approach. This approach emphasises the importance of the customary sector of regional economies and the way the customary sector is linked to the state and market sectors. It is motivated both by scepticism that the market economy will ever deliver an adequate income for most Indigenous people in remote regions of Australia, and by fears that the transition from a kin-based to a market-based economy demands a profound transformation of Indigenous people’s values, desires and relationships. I argue that the concept of partial commodification is useful for grasping the appeal of the interaction between the customary, market and state sectors of regional economies, and thus appreciating the hybrid economy approach. The partial commodification of goods and services deriving from the Indigenous customary domain promises to create income-generating opportunities while supporting the continuation of distinctively Indigenous forms of personhood and sociality.

Primer i darrer paràgrafs en comptes de resum:

El 1988 el director de cinema i fotografia australià Dennis O’Rourke donà a conèixer Cannibal Tours, un documental amb bones dosis de ficció que havia filmat onze anys abans, al 1977, al llarg de les ribes del sud del riu Sepik a Papua Nova Guinea. El film tracta del viatge fluvial que realitza un grup relativament reduït de turistes benestants d’origen europeu i nord-americà i de com aquests es relacionen amb els habitants papus locals de l’ètnia iatmul que es van trobant pels poblats visitats. Sense entrar en afirmacions polítiques explícites, bona part del documental està dedicat a mostrar el passat idealitzadament bàrbar dels iatmul, pe. les seves extingides pràctiques caníbals.
...
Per si no fos poc, aquesta comercialització dependrà cada cop més d’àmbits de decisió individuals. Aquí, com amb els papus de Cannibal Tours, la relació econòmica no s’amaga però encara hi trobam continuïtats amb les representacions nadiues d’IBATUR i de l’Arxiduc; com ara el fet que la fidelitat turística és un afer intern abans que no pas extern. I és que la comercialització turística dels habitatges necessita de  la participació activa dels petits propietaris rendistes fins a l’extrem de fer de la seva col·laboració un col·laboracionisme incondicional. Ja els hi hem donat els paisatges i les cases, ara només és qüestió de temps per a que ens fotografiïn els cossos i, qui sap?, que se’ls mengin.

Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating space, free time, and access to leisure, mainly by means of mutualistic practices. Based on data from qualitative semistructured interviews with key informants and activists, this article sheds light on recreational activism, adopted as a political practice by the Italian youth active in counter-cultural spaces, nowadays at the forefront of the struggle to oppose the commodification of free time and leisure.

"We live in what appears to be an unprecedented global moment in which the contemporary arts, new museums and art biennales have become linked to what can be called ‘commodity reification’  and a near-frenzied consumerism that are part of the free-market capitalism that became dominant after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This ‘moment’ – essentially from the 1990s for Singapore – has led to a seemingly overnight establishment of institutionalised art markets, galleries, museums and arts centres, notably The Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, opened on 12 October 2002. Such developments have transformed the puritanical and (that favoured People’s Action Party [PAP] adjective) ‘pragmatic’ city-state from a purported ‘cultural desert’ into … what exactly?  A ‘Global City for the Arts’?  An empty cultural hub where other people’s cultural products flow through,  and ‘hip’ capitalism is celebrated?
"On the one hand, the transformations have led to more outlets for the ambitions of younger writers, visual artists and theatre practitioners; on the other hand, paradoxically, I suggest that it has also contributed to a lack of critical clarity of what the arts might signify in relation to the global capitalist system within which the city-state is entrenched. This essay attempts to look at two specific events in 1993 and 1994 and consider what they might retrospectively reveal to us now of this extraordinary contemporary moment."

In this book chapter I discuss the use of religious imaginaries in developer-driven planning processes in contemporary London. Focusing on visual references that  architects put forward to explain their design for the tallest and most iconic office tower in the City, I show that religious references have not been replaced by a celebration of the market. Religious and capitalist imaginaries are not exclusive nor are they opposed; they are interwoven and co-dependent. I challenge the idea that a sacred city is one in which secular structures are marginalised and - through a detailed discussion of Walter Benjamin's fragment 'Capitalism as Religion' and Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals - draw attention to an inbuilt religiosity of capitalist structures

First and last paragraphs in lieu of an abstract:

In 1988 the Australian cinema and photography director Dennis O'Rourke  released Cannibal Tours, a documentary with a sound dose of fiction he had filmed eleven years earlier, in 1977, along the shores of the South of the River Sepik in Papua New Guinea. The film is about the river journey a relatively small group of wealthy Americans and Europeans undertake, and of how they interact with the local Papuan inhabitants of the Iatmul ethnic group they encounter in the villages they visit. Without really going into explicit political statements, most of the documentary is devoted to show the barbarian idealised past of the Iatmul, e.g. their extinguished cannibal practices.

...

Moreover, this commercialisation will depend every time more on individual fields of decision-making. Here, just like it happened with the Papuans of Cannibal Tours, although the economic relationship is not concealed, we still find continuities with the native representations of IBATUR and the Archduke; exemplified by a tourist fidelity that is first and foremost seen as an internal affair, not external. And this is so because the tourist commercialisation of housing requires the active involvement of small landowners to the extent of tuning their collaboration into and unconditional collaborationism. We have already given them the landscapes and the houses, now it is only a matter of time for them to take pictures of our bodies and, who knows?, for them to fast upon us.

This study is based on author’s observation that the word format is becoming more and more frequent in the media practice and theory. However, the terminology of the (domestic) media studies is still omitting it. There are three definitions of format presented: 1. targetted broadcast media programming, 2. commodified manual for programme production, and 3. routinised processing of specific themes. The presented meanings of the word are interpreted in broader theoretical and practical context. The second part deals with the attempt to differentiate between two frequently confused terms format and genre: format as a commodity is a pattern created by a certain organisation in a specific time, whereas genre is a pattern created by a discourse community over a period of time, thus it does not belong to a certain organisation or person. The structure of format is relatively strict and absolutely obligatory, preserving of format’s norms is carefully monitored.

Keywords: format – genre – programme – programming – commodification – broadcast media

TO DOWNLOAD THE FULL PAPER : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2472339


The increasing sensibility regarding cultural heritage provides momentum to better define a legal framework for the protection of these peculiar intangible goods. It is indeed fundamental to ascertain whether the current intellectual property rights (IPRs) regime represents an adequate model of protection vis-à-vis intangible cultural heritage. A plethora of caveats must be taken into consideration, starting from the desirability of the commodification of intangible cultural heritage, i.e. its exploitation in commercialization through the IPRs regime, but also the outlining of the legal instruments needed for guaranteeing adequate advantages for the countries and communities representing the sources of origin of the intangible goods. 

Our analysis begins framing the crucial issues detected in literature regarding intangible cultural heritage and then proceeds to investigate the ways in which the actual IPRs regime grants protection to intangible goods. Our evaluation supports the idea that without a many-faceted remodeling, current intellectual property laws represent an unsatisfactory footing to protect intangible cultural heritage, as one can infer from the inefficacy of IPRs under the patent and copyright regimes to ensure protection of cultural heritage, besides falling short of fostering an appropriate comprehensive social policy.


TO DOWNLOAD THE FULL PAPER : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2472339

This dissertation is an investigation of the relationships and interconnections between local culture, commodification, rural community, and tourism, particularly within the local-global nexus and the ongoing challenge for sustainability. It involves the study of one rural community in Atlantic Canada in its pursuit of culture-based tourism development, and in particular, the commodification process in that community. The dissertation is also intended to broaden our perspectives when attempting to assess the real potential of culture-based tourism development for rural community sustainability.