Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music

Alluding by its title to Adam Smith, The Cultural Wealth of Nations contributes to a field of cultural economics pioneered by scholars such as Viviana Zelizer, that explores the inseparability of economic and cultural domains and more specifically, the creation of economic value through symbolic representations, ritual, and narrative. The editors compiled a number of case studies that illumine the manner in which cultural resources (cultural ‘‘heritage,’’ narratives about artifacts and places, images shaping the perception of products and peoples) are transmuted into economic wealth. The book examines historical processes, institutions, and agents that have effected such transformations, the social actors best positioned to recoup the resulting profits, difficulties encountered in attempts to turn culture to economic ends, and tactics used to surmount them. The case studies, almost all of which usefully cross-reference one another, stress a common theme: nations, ethnic groups, and diverse economic actors may be advantaged or disadvantaged in efforts to marshal cultural resources to create economic value through ‘‘heritage’’ tourism, the ‘‘branding’’ of nations, peoples, and commodities, and the management of consumer perceptions of production processes. Several common theoretical perspectives on the transmutation of cultural resources into economic wealth underlie the specific subjects examined by each of the papers. One is that there are asymmetries and inequalities, whether between nations, ethnic and occupational groups, or producers of any marketed commodity, in the power to define cultural values and turn them to economic use. A paper on the history of heritage conservation and on the designation of UNESCO World Heritage sites offers a detailed account of the specific political history, as well as the institutionalized professional power and ethos that resulted in a clustering of designated heritage sites in wealthy nations. These nations are then better positioned than others to recoup the economic value to be culled from the exploitation of heritage sites for tourist and other commercial purposes. A transnational mobilization of conservation professionals, embedded in universities, scholarly disciplines, and cultural bureaucracies has resulted in the institutionalization of rules favoring ‘‘cultural heritage’’ production in some countries more than in others. Adopting a ‘‘global value chain perspective,’’ some papers demonstrate that in a long chain of production and marketing, in which goods are endowed with symbolic value through branding, design, and narratives targeting particular groups of consumers, the creators of added cultural value often recoup most of the economic value of the final product—for example, companies in the United Kingdom responsible for the branding of South African wine, or middlemen in Thailand selling silk cloth on the internet. Erving Goffman’s work on impression management, long turned to good use by scholars in the sociology of institutions, occupations, and tourism, is explicitly adopted here as a helpful perspective in the study of cultural economy. What are the options for a country heavily dependent upon international tourism whose image as an attractive destination is spoiled by war and widely circulated images of atrocities? Will it turn the death camps and killing fields into historical ‘‘attractions’’? Or will it attempt to erase all signs recalling its stigmatizing history, rebranding the nation as identical to that of other countries whose imagery and histories it hijacks as its own? One paper in this volume, analyzing Croatia’s tactics for managing a discreditable national identity in the interests of resuscitating its tourist industry, adopts Goffman’s theory of stigma, suggesting