Streams of Cultural Capital

Abstract

Well, I have to confess it took me a while to get over the title of this collection. I am afraid it brought out the brat in me; I tried rhyming alternatives (Creams of Cultural Capital) and water metaphor alternatives (Swamps of Cultural Capital) to exercise/exorcise my annoyance, with limited success in each area. However, the title, which I found off-putting in its naturalizing and reifying of the concept of cultural capital, provides my only real quibble with this book. (And, after all, irritation is memorable.) But the contents are solid and valuable, and that is should always count.I should add that Streams also came with at least two marks in its favour. First, it is part of the series Mestizo Spaces/Espaces Metisses, in which Open the Social Sciences, the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1996), is also published. This small, eminently readable work not only gives a useful capsule history of the disciplining of the social sciences, including anthropology, but also asks critically value such disciplining has for academics and for society today. Clearly, this series is in the forefront of critical and accessible writing on issues of concern to anthropologists and other students of culture. Second, a glance at the contributors shows that this is a truly international collection, not just another reproduction of the same old, same old what Americans think about publication that is all too characteristic of gets published -- and reviewed -- in the U.S.I think it is always necessary to refute the belief that is published in the U.S. is international, and is published in Canada, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, etc., is national or regional. Collections like this, by juxtaposing sociocultural contexts and texts, contradicts those who assume that we are always interested in everything that happens in the U.S., but only specialists are interested in Corsican identity (discussed by Anne Knudsen with respect to the writing of history and literature) or in theatre in China (explored by Xiaomei Chen, who looks at Occidentalist productions).This is a very useful, thought-provoking collection of concrete, specific examples from a diversity of genres and locations. It is a series of situated elaborations of the concept of cultural capital, particularly useful for showing the value of anthropological views on colonizers as well as colonized. For those of us who are tired of the backlash against poststructuralism, which has in many cases taken the form of an anti-intellectual move against critical thinking of any kind in anthropology, collections such as Streams can provide hope that it is not all over but the crying.Streams is taken from a special issue of Stanford Literature Review (1993), but has two additional essays which open and close the collection. …