CRIA

Although the manifestations of the commoditization of culture are difficult to summarize they are most obvious in situations where cultural, visibility and visitability have been enacted (cultural displays endorsed by tourism, heritage or patrimonialization). Such displays pre-suppose an accrued investment in cultural staging which includes the convening of collections and classification of fragments of material and non-material culture through renderings of it in picture and photograph, displays of it through exhibitions, performances and parades, references to its past and ‘local’ nature and landscape and often commoditization of it and advertising as a way to attract visitors and sightseers, spectators or readers, making people feel culturally knowledgeable and thereby cultured themselves. The globalization of these procedures should not conceal either their variety or their relation with other concomitant or historical productions of social or political identities using culture as idiom (or rather, explicitly refusing it). This calls for a balance between comparative insights (local, national and international levels, border and contact zones) and historical analysis (colonial and postcolonial) which address the arts, archive assembly and other materializations of time and memory in order to sustain a broader and comprehensive analysis of the processes of cultural visibilities. This line of research intends to gather data on sites, histories, performances, rhetorics, images and other procedures which capture, divulge, configure – and are configured by - culture in different ways. While the common topic of reified culture unites all the topics to be incorporated here, underlying them all is the motivation to go beyond merely culturalistic discourses and to understand culture in its uses and practices, embedded in the specific social, economic and political contexts and other identity differentiation frameworks, within which it is produced and interpreted.