Abstract:

The politics of cultural identity appears to have taken on new force with the triumphal rise of neoliberal capitalism. This has yielded many efforts to explain the continued salience of ethnicity in a "new" world order that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was widely predicted to dissolve difference in the face of global flows of people, objects, currencies, signs, styles, desires. Less attention, however, has been paid to a subtle shift in the nature of ethnicity: its commodification. This lecture is devoted to showing that, increasingly, ethnic groups across the planet are beginning to act like corporations that own a "natural" copyright to their "culture" and "cultural products" – framed in terms, also, of heritage, indigenous knowledge, and intellectual property – which they protect, often by recourse to the law, and on which they capitalize in much the same way as do businesses in the private sector. Why is this occurring? What are its political, economic, social, and ethical consequences? How is it transforming the nature of citizenship? And what are its theoretical implications for understanding such foundational social science concepts as culture, identity, and political subjectivity?