This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view. While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment. No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course. This course is taught in English. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb
7.3 Economic imperialism & commodification
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From the course by The University of Melbourne
Contemporary India
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From the lesson
The past in the present: traditional art forms in today's India
We will use arts as a lens to look at some of the general transformations in today’s India. The focus in this section will be to negate the modernity/tradition dichotomy and instead argue that traditions in India are constantly changing. These traditions adapt to the prevailing conditions, which present its own complexities. To understand them, specific concepts and tools will be introduced to better explain the realities of contemporary India, which simultaneously remains connected to its ancient past.
Meet the Instructors
Anthony D'CostaProfessor
School of Social and Political Sciences
Welcome back.
So in the next section of this lecture we're going to be talking about
the concepts of economic imperialism and commodification.
We've already talked about how realities can be socially constructed.
And we've also talked about mythopraxis, the way that these social
constructions of realities, or a bunch of sets of agreements about reality,
are embedded in the ordinary,
routine practices that Marshall Sahlins calls mythopraxis. Mythopraxis,
that we learn as children and we practice in our daily lives.
And in the case of modern Americans and
modern people, modern members of our globalising economic culture, our
practices of self-hood are organised around routine acts of production.
I am what I do for a living.
And consumption, I am what I buy, I am what I own.
And this is a particular version of reality that is gradually becoming
not only widespread all over the globe, but it's also becoming
imperialistic in the sense that it's gradually invading every sphere of life.
Every domain of life is gradually becoming transformed into
a mirror of the economic sphere.
So the arts, the arts are —
nobody really agrees on what a great work of art is, or what standards we should
use to apply to judging whether a work of art is good or bad.
So we let the market decide, you know.
Now it's decided at auction.
It's how much something sells for.
And the purpose of making art.
What is art for?
It no longer has the same… in the West, it no longer serves the church.
Or it no longer had the kind of sacred functions, or
even political functions that it had for the aristocracy of ancient Europe.
Today, it's mostly about, it's another way of making a living.
It's another kind of activity of economic production and consumption.
Art is a kind of elite, high-class, very expensive consumer good.
So economic imperialism is this process by which various domains of life
are transformed.
Their local values are subordinated to economic values.
Medicine becomes primarily a business to make money, and
the values of health and well-being are pushed, you know, as means to that.
Medicine is just a means to the end of making money.
The law, legal profession, which its values should be those of fairness or
justice, but that is subordinated to the idea that law is another business.
It's another way of making money.
So every business from
the standpoint of modern corporate logic or
corporate management, every business makes the same thing.
They make money.
And whether they do it by providing medical services or legal services or
building airplanes or whatever it is that they do, those become the means and
money becomes the ends.
This is economic imperialism at work.
Gradually, every sphere of life is invaded and colonised by economic values.
Commodification is one of ways in which this happens.
And what is interesting is to see how this is happening in India.
So for example, here we see compartmentalisation and
economic imperialism at work at Khajuraho, a famous temple site
in medieval temples in, in central India that are
an important component of the the circuit for cultural tourism in Northern India.
Almost everybody who goes to India is encouraged to go and
visit these great temples at Khajuraho.
They're about 1,000 years old.
But, not all of the temples have been entirely museumised, or
commodified, they haven't been monetised.
Here we see a photograph, the temple on the right is
part of the archaeological park, and it is conserved as a work of art.
And it serves modern economic values that are expressed in the mythopraxis
of cultural tourism.
You pay money, you get to go in, you hire a guide or whatever.
You go and see this and primarily you're looking at it and
experiencing it as a work of art.
There is another temple right next to it, just out beyond the wall of
the archaeological park, park that you see on the left.
And you see that massive crowd of people rushing up the stairs.
And, unfortunately, what this photograph doesn't convey is the sound and
the smells of incense, and the excitement going on in the other side of the
of the wall where this temple is still in worship.
And there is a festival going on.
And here, it's a temple of the same age, about 1,000 years old, but
here, this temple is still in worship and
still being used for the
the pursuit of the values for which it was designed and for which it was built.
So this consumer version of reality,
the modernist version of reality aspires to be universal.
It proposes, it sees itself as universal, but it's not yet universal in practice.
And maybe, hopefully, and perhaps it'll never be universal.
Economic imperialism is a term that's used by Barry Schwartz.
Economic triumphalism is a term that's used by Michael Sandel in
a recent book called What Money Can't Buy,
published a couple years ago that's gotten a lot of attention in the United States.
Economic imperialism is this process, as I described,
of the economic sphere and economic values invading every domain of life and
turning those values into economic values.
Economic triumphalism is more narrowly focused on the recent neo-liberal
transformation of the American economy, or the American culture,
since the Reagan revolution in the early 1980s which is
paralleled by the Thatcher Revolution in Great Britain in the early 80s,
where neo-liberal practices, the idea of deregulating industries,
and allowing the free market to work with little or
no intervention by the political sphere, by the democratic forces.
That has led to a trend in which economic values have emerged
as something that is almost triumphant.
Has won. And has become dominant over just
about every other dimension of life that you can imagine.
And Sandel's book, What Money Can't Buy, is a long list,
includes long lists of things that money can buy and
showed that there is virtually nothing that is not subject to commodification.
Not subject to quantification, quantified
monetary values that can't be reduced somehow to money.
So this is a trend where the local qualitative values of various spheres of
life, spheres of human practice, like health and sports, and
education and law, and even the sacred domain are gradually subordinated and
eventually displaced by the uniform quantitative values of the market.
Which are symbolised by money, by some kind of amount of,
some quantity or other.
The imperialistic character of modern economic culture is seen in
the commodification of the traditional visual arts in India.
These are now produced in service of systems like art markets and tourism,
cultural tourism in particular,
that are increasingly organised in neo-liberal terms.
So here, for example, is an image of a Tamil Sthapati,
who is engaged in the ritual production of a wax model that's going to be used
for making a bronze image that is destined for worship, destined for pooja.
A Shtapati is a traditional image maker and this is his family occupation.
And when he's making something for worship,
his productive activity, his material productive activity
takes on a priestly nature, which is expressed in how he is dressed.
He is dressed like a Brahmin priest with the sacred thread and this towel
over his left shoulder, and he's seated in a cross-legged fashion.
He has gone through a bath and a set of ritual preparations.
Everything about the production of this material
form is subordinated to a whole system of sacred ritual assumptions,
sacred assumptions about the nature of reality and the nature of human life.
And what we're here on this world to do and what the purposes of life are.
This same image maker makes images for the market.
He doesn't like it.
He doesn't like dealing with the middle men,
he doesn't like, making things for the market.
The way he put it to me is that that you have to dance to their tune.
They're always pressuring you to cut costs.
They want you to cut corners.
They want you to do, you know, do this and that.
And so these cost-cutting, economising values and
economising forces put great pressure on this Sthapati.
They don't really care what the image looks like or
whether it's got ritual power, or whether it
meets the standards, the aesthetic standards of this tradition.
They only care about whether it sells, and how much it sells for, and
what their margins are going to be.
So, when the economic values become supreme, when that becomes
the dominant side of symbol production, this practice is dramatically transformed.
So in a kind of context-sensitive,
compartmentalised way this Sthapati ritually makes images for
temples and for personal use, for pooja, for worship.
But he also, makes images for the market.
He has to in order to make a living.
And in that case, he is not going to be taking a bath,
he is not going to go through all of these ritual procedures.
He is not going to add the various precious metals to the mix that he
is required to by ritual.
It's just going to be a less expensive material.
He's going to cut corners in various ways.
So both the form and the practice are transformed,
and you could say eroded, made corrupted,
corrupted in some sense when the practice is
subordinated to neo-liberal market values.
Here's another example of commodification.
This is a shop in what has recently been
designated as an official Heritage Village named Ragurajpur in Orissa,
where an ancient tradition of painting once flourished that is,
was dedicated to serving pilgrims to the nearby Temple of Jagannath.
This is an image of Jagannath that you see here.
And these painters made relatively simple, inexpensive
images that were purchased by pilgrims to take home and put in their pooja room.
And use them for worship and use them to as a device to assist
in remembering the God, and to remember the experience of the pilgrimage.
And to remember the sacred values that they’re
performing these various ritual acts in service of.
But now these artists, now that they're part of a Heritage Village, and
their painting has become fetishised by the marketplace, the form and
the practice has been transformed in service of the values of cultural tourism,
which are primarily economic values, primarily about money.
So these older, simpler forms of painting that were once made for
pilgrims have become increasingly elaborate, and fussy, and
detailed, and complex, in order to help to justify the higher prices
and to make the economics of this practice work out for the painters.
It's a very different world when you're painting these things for
the market, for speculative sale to a market in tourism,
and in cultural tourism, than if you're making them for pilgrims.
So in this part of this lecture we've briefly looked at economic imperialism, or
economic triumphalism, the rising dominance of the economic domain of
life at the expense of other older domains of value that once operated according to
their own diverse non-economic values.
This is happening in India, and
happening in a lot of places in the world, happening in the United States.
But it's happening in a different way in India because of the long-standing practice and
traditions of a kind of compartmentalised, context-sensitive approach to life.
I mean, in the United States we practice context sensitivity all the time.
But we tend to deny it to ourselves because we like to think
of ourselves as people of integrity, who are not hypocritical,
who always do the same thing, who treat everybody the same way.
We value this standardisation, this universalising uniformity.
Even though we practice a kind of context sensitivity, we tend to deny it.
So in the next part we're going to be talking about essentialism,
fetishising or fetishisation and museumization, three other
trends related to the transformations of India under a more neo-liberal world view.
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