Legal Claims to Culture in and Against the Market: Neoliberalism and the Global Proliferation of Meaningful Difference

Abstract

Under conditions of neoliberalism legal claims to protect, preserve, maintain, and to exploit culture have assumed a new urgency. Cultural diversity has become a matter of state concern and fears of cultural homogenization animate movements to promote a revitalized realm of cultural policy. Municipal governments see cultural amenities, attractions, and social values as important resources to attract labor and capital and engage in cultural planning exercises as they seek to brand urban space. Rural spaces become culturalised as traditions are constructed to establish market distinctions for local goods and traditional knowledge is valorized in international environmental treaties. But if culture is clearly delineated for the purposes of state management and the creation of new intellectual properties, it is also evoked in anti-globalization movements that contest growing forms of corporate hegemony. Finally, we witness the emergence of a new cultural politics of difference in place-based movements that draw upon international indigenous and human rights traditions to establish their claims to livelihood resources, territories, and cultural survival. Critical scholarship is needed to explore the conditions under which neoliberal regimes of govern-mentality are supported and challenged by the legal recognition of cultural assertions and the stakes and limitations of cultural claims.

Connected and Disconnected in Viet Nam: Remaking Social Relations in a Post-socialist Nation

“…In other words, the value of heritage is not simply cultural or intangible, but financial as well, suggesting a process of commoditisation in spite of all professions of disinterestedness (cf. Coombe 2005Coombe , 2009Coombe , 2013. In the next section, I investigate the emergence of the concept, discourse, and practice of intangible cultural heritage in Vietnam.…”

“…(Coombe and Turcotte 2012:304) In other words, because of the entanglement of different systems of valuation -by practitioners, cultural experts, state officials, and markets -at different levels (local, national, transnational, and international), ICH recognition can be a mixed blessing for those communities that are 'bearers' -but perhaps no longer 'owners' -of the cultural practice deemed intangible heritage. These connections between culture -including cultural heritage -and possessive (individual, collective and/or indigenous) subjects who claim rights over or property of cultural 'objects' have been studied critically and comprehensively by Rosemary Coombe in a series of books and articles (Coombe 1998(Coombe , 2005(Coombe , 2009(Coombe , 2011a(Coombe , 2011b(Coombe , 2013. The combined effect of these studies is to denaturalise both (cultural) subject and (cultural) object by treating these as constituted by their mutual connection; the discursive, practical and performative aspects of these connectionsas claims, rights, identifications, etc.…”