Everyday Cultural Politics, Syncretism, and Cultural Policy

Abstract

Cultural policy, designed and engineered by elites and states, should be understood in relation to an underlying cultural politics, processes of ongoing contestation implicating many actors, at all levels, in transformations of meaning, symbols, habits, values, and identity. As noted elsewhere in this volume, the politics of culture (let alone something as formal as cultural policy) has long been shackled to an essentialist, static, primordialist notion of culture itself, as a hard-wired cognitive and semiotic script, which undergirds human action and taken-for-granted routine. This is true in “old school” anthropology (Geertz, 1973), more “cutting edge” thinking on action and reflexivity (Bourdieu, 1977), the classics of political culture (Almond and Verba, 1963), mainstream institutionalism (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), and the latest reincarnations of modernization theory in studies of global convergence (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005).