THE ECONOMY
6. The “economy is embedded in culture” conversation
I now come to the conversation that is most relevant for my inquiry. This is the conversation that views economic phenomena as manifestations of culture.
In the “economy is embedded in culture” conversation, culture is what life is about and the ordinary business of mankind--including the trading, consum-ing and workconsum-ing that people do--are part of cultural phenomenon.
Suppose you finished a painting. What you do with the painting is a mat-ter of what you are used to doing. It is a matmat-ter of your values and, with that, it is a matter of the culture that you are part of. In the culture of cavemen, painting is a strange kind of activity. When you’ve finished your cave paint-ing, you must be pleased if you get your share of the food that others hunted down or gathered. In order to get the time to paint, you most likely have a special status in the group, such as a medicine man, or as a spiritual man. In the culture of 17th century Netherlands, you have to realize your value as a craftsman. In order to get anywhere with your work, you need to be part of the guild and partake in its customs and rituals. Selling your painting is part of the ordinary business of the guild. In the contemporary culture of high art you will seek the approval of fellow artists, and socialize with the right people in the hope of getting your painting into the collection of a contemporary art museum or an important art collector. Maybe a critic will write about it! In all three cases you operate in a different culture.
In the “economy is embedded in culture” conversation, the variations of the conversation are what evoke interest. What do the actions say about the culture in which the actor, you, is operating? Clearly, speaking of guilds in the contemporary setting would be meaningless. Then again, some artists may wish they had the status that the painters of cave paintings had.
The “economy is embedded in culture” conversations stress the mean-ingfulness and value-laden character of human actions, and will tend to put them in the (cultural) context. Whether you and I go shopping, do our job, or engage in entrepreneurial activities, we attribute meanings to things and activities, we value them and, along the way, we generate meanings and values for ourselves and for others. We humans are signifying people: we attribute meanings to what we do and need a cultural context in order to make sense of what we and what others do. See for example Van Heusden in (Klamer, 1996).
In these conversations the main purpose of studying the behavior of people is to sort out, interpret and characterize the meanings and values that people attribute to things and activities, and the meanings and values that they realize with their actions. Exemplary is the work of the well-known American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) who shows in his
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lengthy descriptions of how culture becomes manifest in daily practices, such as cockfights in Bali. His article Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight is a clas-sic as it demonstrates how to “read” culture (Geertz, 2005).
In recent reinterpretations, Adam Smith is considered a participant in this conversation. When we read The Wealth of Nations in the light of his ear-lier Theory of Moral Sentiments we understand that people, in their striving to do right, answer to their moral sentiments (Smith, 1776). In Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith depicts people in their moral life, acting out of sympathy for others, and seeking to be virtuous. In The Wealth of Nations, he confronts the problem that sympathy and virtue appear to lose their relevance in market situations. The market poses a special situation since you and I cannot ask for favors and will not expect pity from others for the simple reason that we usually do not know our trading partners very well. That is why we appeal to their self-love, as Adam Smith famously argued. By acknowledging as much, Smith hastens to add that the market is but one element in society. There is sufficient space in which people can be virtuous and be benevolent towards fellow people. At least, that is the point of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the book that he most cared about.
The “economy is embedded” vision is also present in the writings of Karl Polanyi (1886-1964). This economic historian shows how all kinds of economic institutions, foremost among them the market, are historical and therefore not universal. Markets function in some settings and not in others.
Children are bought and sold in some historical and cultural settings, whereas such a practice is a taboo in the contemporary Western world. High bonuses are in some situations a sign of success, whereas in others they are considered immoral. It is all a matter of culture, this conversation will suggest.
A similar inquiry into the embeddedness of economic processes and phe-nomena you find in the conversations of economic sociologists such as Mark Granovetter and Viviana Zelizer, and of economic anthropologists such as Stephen Gudeman (Granovetter, 1985; Zelizer, 2005; Gudeman, 2008).
I would like to make sense of C, of what makes life meaningful, of the content of our lives, be it our oikos, friendships, society, art, religion or science. For that purpose I am in need of a con-versation, a conversation that, for example, can make sense of the banner that I picked up in the dusty streets of Kampala.
So let us see what happens when we think in terms of culture, when we focus on the things that are really important to us.
The first thing that happens, at least in this book, is that we start paying atten-tion to values and, more particularly, to the realizaatten-tion of values.
CULTURE IN RELATIONSHIP TO THE ECONOMY 19
CHAPTER 3