Culture and Value , livre ebook

CULTURE AND VALUE
CULTURE
and
VALUE
TOURISM, HERITAGE,
and
PROPERTY

REGINA F. BENDIX
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© 2018 by Regina Bendix
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CONTENTS
Culture and Value: An Introduction
Section I
Introduction: Creating, Owning, and Narrating within Tourist Economies
1. Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?
2. On the Road to Fiction: Narrative Reification in Austrian Cultural Tourism
3. Fairy-Tale Activists: Narrative Imaginaries along a German Tourist Route (with Dorothee Hemme)
4. Capitalizing on Memories Past, Present, and Future: Observations on the Intertwining of Tourism and Narration
Section II
Introduction: Heritage Semantics, Heritage Regimes
5. Heredity, Hybridity, and Heritage from One Fin de Siècle to the Next
6. Heritage between Economy and Politics: An Assessment from the Perspective of Cultural Anthropology
7. Inheritances: Possession, Ownership, and Responsibility
8. The Dynamics of Valorizing Culture: Actors and Shifting Contexts in the Course of a Century

Section III
Introduction: Culture as Resource, Culture as Property
9. Expressive Resources: Knowledge, Agency, and European Ethnology
10. Daily Bread, Global Distinction? The German Bakers’ Craft and Cultural Value-Enhancement Regimes
11. TK, TCE, and Co.: The Path from Culture as a Commons to a Resource for International Negotiation
12. Patronage and Preservation: Heritage Paradigms and Their Impact on Supporting “Good Culture”
Index
CULTURE AND VALUE
Culture and Value: An Introduction
Q uestions of value permeate tourism, heritage, and cultural property, but they reached their present, prominent place in cultural scholarship quite slowly. This is true of my own contributions to these fields of research as well: only in the past decade have I been able to see more clearly the constant undercurrent of issues revolving around the (e)valuation, distinction, and individual and social economic, ideational, and scholarly value inherent to these interconnected parts of my work. Thinking about how best to frame the articles gathered in this volume, it seemed most useful to trace the change in scholarly attention and attitude toward value regimes involving culture, folklore, or tradition during the time since I trained in the fields of folkloristics and cultural anthropology in Switzerland and the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s. In hindsight, three overlapping steps are clearly recognizable. Cultural scholarship moved first from a negative, even outraged witnessing of marketed, ideologically deployed, and adulterated expressive forms in nation-building and commerce, toward examining (and occasionally supporting and celebrating) cultural representations as opportunities to uphold identities in increasingly diverse, globalized worlds, to finally acknowledging and occasionally advocating efforts to claim ownership of culture as property.
Obviously, scholars do not speak with a unified voice: each of these stances finds support, depending on the location and the sociopolitical and economic context within which cultural actors and scholarship about them is situated. These are, however, the layers I can make out as influential for my development as a cultural researcher. Each of these steps bore increasing marks of the constructivist turn which, in its unfolding, endowed me with a particular gaze not just on phenomena to study but also on those who study them. This reflexive move in cultural scholarship, so beautifully captured in Observers Observed , one of George W. Stocking Jr.’s many important volumes on the history of anthropology, has accompanied me throughout my professional life. In situating the present collection, it seems fitting to sketch these three takes on culture and value. I am not aiming for an overarching, four-decade-long historiography of neighboring disciplines; rather, I seek to point to some contexts and works that I encountered and that contributed to the questions I chose to pursue. I trained first in German-speaking Europe, and then in the United States; I taught for more than a decade in the latter before moving back to Europe and teaching for many years now in Germany. There is thus a certain amount of serendipity regarding which conversations and controversies I read and participated in, and which ones bypassed me or reached me in circuitous ways. Many were not part of my training and had to be absorbed along the way. 1 The networks and interests of our mentors, colleagues, and doctoral students manifest themselves in how and where our thinking turns—the lacunae that arise are, as one is wont to state, entirely my own fault.
Folklore and nationalism emerged as a topic of scholarly inquiry in the early 1970s, as concern over the economic uses of expressive forms had already arisen in the early 1960s. Both were, arguably, concerned with ways of marking and enhancing the value of excerpts of culture. Heightened attention to “tradition” linked to both these trajectories as of 1983. That year saw the publication of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities . Each in their own manner expedited the intertwined discussion of nationalism’s codification and the role of marking tradition, culture, and shared sets of knowledge facilitated through new forms of communication. To a graduate student, the unfolding of these academic discussions was at once puzzling and intriguing. They seemed to be next to, or outside of, the heart of the subject matter that really was the focus of folklore studies and anthropology, that is, outside of the cultures lived and expressive forms performed in everyday life within the milieus—however homogeneous or heterogeneous. During my training, I conducted fieldwork on year-cycle rituals and lay-theater productions in Switzerland, but on the margins, I kept encountering the intermeshing of my topics with tourism in local economies, nationalism, mass cultural distribution, and the building up of heritage sentiment in newly founded institutions. These developments were part of the local scene, debated controversially but ultimately also intertwined with everyday lives, and I included them in my ethnographic documentation.
During the 1980s, most scholars in the disciplines I studied still made an effort to separate such phenomena from the core concerns of research. Folklorismus and fakelore, political manipulation from the right and the left, invention and commoditization were studied as irritating phenomena, as scholars of culture perceived them as spoiling the “actual culture” ethnographers set out to study. 2 Yet if one took field consultants seriously, it was hard to separate their actions and productions in acceptable and inacceptable varieties, and hence I found myself perplexed by such scholarly formulations and was immensely grateful to discover Hermann Bausinger’s “critique of Folklorismus critique” (1966). It was not up to scholars to herd culture into an ever-smaller corral. And while Arjun Appadurai had not yet published his groundbreaking Modernity at Large (1996), the notions of disjuncture and difference theorized by Appadurai were already in Bausinger’s early work, which noted the impact of technology and media on cultural worlds that never were closed off, and actors who navigated between old and opening horizons (1990 [1961]).
Further helpful tangents moving the question of culture and value to the second perspective that sought to understand the marking of culture and tradition came from inquiries in the field of travel and culture. Questions of encounter, captured in such a prescient formulation as “the fourth world” by Nelson Graburn (1976), were, for obvious reasons, central to the anthropology of tourism. Yet, this subfield initially struggled to gain acceptance within cultural research, as tourism was perceived as an agent undermining “intact” cultures. The critical, reflexive turn toward ethnographic practice (Clifford and Marcus 1986), and the broadening of cultural historical research to colonial encounter and its critique, assisted in shifting perspectives. Along with the rise of postcolonial work, conceptualizations of whole cultures were hard to maintain. New understandings were put forward for how culture as lived, habitual practice could turn into “culture” as different, other, and marked within the contact zone (Pratt 1992), or as Edward Bruner perhaps more aptly formulated, within the “border zone” (2004, 192), given that bordering and gaining awareness of one another does not necessarily make for contact.
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