0.4 What is cultural economy?

At the outset, let me say what “cultural economy” is not . Cultural economy is not the study of the artifacts and institutions—such as literary texts, media forms, or the publishing industry—that are assumed to reside in some relatively autonomous domain called “culture.” In fact, cultural economy takes as its initial premise the claim that “culture” cannot be separated from the other two concepts that have traditionally organized the social and cultural sciences: the economy and the social. The “Editorial Statement” of the Journal of Cultural Economy states that “the three main organizing concepts of the social and cultural sciences [are] culture, economy, and the social.” Journal of Cultural Economy 1.3 (2008), n.p. Once we assume that these three concepts, as well as the ontological entities and practices to which they refer, are interrelated in complex ways, it no longer seems adequate to analyze individual discourses, events, institutions, or texts in the kind of hermetic environments that traditional disciplines create. Cultural economy thus examines economic institutions, practices, and texts as cultural entities, just as it explores the economic dimensions of cultural practices and products. And it also investigates the ways that these intersections emanate from and inform social forms, including forms of government, modes of persuasion, and ways of knowing and failing to know the world.

Next it may be helpful to examine what cultural economy resembles , because the new approach of cultural economy is certainly not the first attempt to treat economic practices as cultural or social forms. In fact, the ongoing financial crisis has generated a veritable avalanche of cultural commentary about economic matters, some of which overlaps with my work and that of my colleagues. The discipline of sociology includes both the sociology of financial markets and the study of such organizations as trading floors. (David Stark’s Center for Organizational Innovation at Columbia University is one manifestation of this.) In some English departments, faculty practice what Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen have called the “new economic criticism.” Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics , Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, eds., (London: Routledge, 1999), 3-50. Finally, in anthropology, some scholars stress the anthropology of markets or the culture of finance, others conduct ethnographies of stock traders, and still others call their work the social studies of finance. Such work, wherever it is found in U.S. universities, also has an international counterpart (with important centers in Edinburgh, Paris, and London), is simultaneously institutionalized (in such centers as Stark’s at Columbia, the Economic and Social Research Council professorial fellowship at Edinburgh, and so on) and has a presence on the web (in, for example, the Social Studies of Finance network). There is already at least one journal devoted to scholarship in this area ( Journal of Cultural Economy ) and at least one annual conference (the Social Studies of Finance Conference). A growing number of listservs disseminate calls for papers on related topics; these promise conferences such as the one I am helping to organize in the spring of 2010 in New York, special issues of journals, and collections of working papers. If not a discipline, cultural economy (or, as it may also be called, the social studies of finance or financial anthropology) certainly constitutes a publishing opportunity.