Regional Culture and Economic Development

Explorations in European Ethnology

Ullrich Kockel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351905596
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

From an interdisciplinary perspective based primarily on European ethnology and political economy, this book explores issues and concepts concerning the link between culture and economy. A historical introduction to key theoretical problems is followed by five empirical chapters discussing aspects of development in rural as well as urban locations. The author considers local leadership, looking in particular at part-time farming, counter-urban migration, and pluriactivity. The classification of informal economy is illustrated with examples drawn from fieldwork, and urban poverty and migration are each explored in detail. A discussion of heritage and identity as a resource for development questions whether the concern with the authenticity of culture(s) may be an inappropriate approach to take. The book concludes with a theoretical reflection on the problematic of culture and economy and a call for a return to the roots of European ethnology as an essentially political science.

1 Regions, Cultures and Endogenous Development

Over the last fifteen years or so, there has been a growing emphasis, in both European Union (EU) and national policies across Europe, on the promotion of ‘culture’, ‘regions’, and ‘sustainable’ development. Yet although these concepts are perceived instrumentally, as promoting economic prosperity, and/or political integration, they remain only vaguely defined.

This book approaches the connections between regional culture and economic development from the perspective of European ethnology, and the reader may well wonder what the study of folk life and traditional customs might have to say on contemporary economic issues. European ethnology has, however, always been broader than the discipline’s origin in the study of folklore. Since the 1960s, European ethnology has developed into, as Wolfgang Kaschuba once put it, a ‘truly interdisciplinary discipline’ – the empirical study of everyday culture. As such, it has rather a lot to offer to contemporary academic and policy discourse.

Setting the Scene

In this book, I explore how an approach rooted in European ethnology might contribute to the study of regional economic development. This opening chapter sets out the broader problematic, and also introduces the discipline of European ethnology. Chapters 2 to 6 review case studies drawing on fieldwork in the island of Ireland as well as a number of other European regions. In the final chapter, the theoretical debate is taken up again, to develop the outline of a perspective on economic development rooted in a cultural analysis that encompasses historical, political and environmental aspects.

Culture has been well prepared as ‘battleground’ for the twenty-first century. Linked to this is the idea of endogenous regional development that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. The implications of this theory are most intriguing in the political context of increasingly ‘de-’ and ‘re-territorialised’ identities, as I have argued elsewhere (Kockel 1999a). The concept of ‘endogenous development’ is often put forward, especially by anthropologists, within a discourse representing economics as culturally contingent, and arguing that there is no global economy, only more or less distinctive economies that make up a global economic system. My contention, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Europe, is that the case made by anthropologists for non-Western societies holds equally true for European regions and cultures.

Some Intellectual Biography

The empirical material and theoretical argument presented here reflect an intellectual quest ranging across a number of disciplines and drawing, at times quite liberally, on different traditions. Growing up as a child of the Wirtschaftswunder, I had little cause to question or doubt the effectiveness of the paradigm of free market economics. As a mature student in the early 1980s, having previously worked in international business, I grew increasingly aware of how poorly textbook economic theory corresponded to everyday economic practice, at least in West Germany at the time, where the ordo-liberal ideals of the first few post-war decades, rooted in a very different tradition of economic thought, had created a climate facilitating an ‘economic miracle’ through the construction of a broad social consensus. Although this consensus had been battered by global events like the oil shocks of the 1970s, it held forth into the early 1980s, underlining the feasibility of an alternative to the neo-liberal model of the economy.

At that time, I came across the writings of Binswanger and Pestalozzi, both teaching at the prestigious Swiss business school at St. Gallen, where the Czech economist Ota Šik, who had argued for a Third Way between market and plan, had found refuge after the Prague Spring. It seemed to me that these thinkers were far more in touch with economic reality than the mainstream economists. Shortly afterwards, as a budding lecturer in Leeds, I was drawn towards the schools of economic thought crystallised in TOES, The Other Economic Summit. The dissent expressed by TOES participants, many coming from, or working in, so-called Third-World countries, converged with that voiced by many mainland European critics searching for a theory of endogenous development, who were highlighting the significance of culture as one of many factors ignored by mainstream economics.

Another factor largely neglected by economics in the past, and highlighted by TOES, had been the environment, and for some time in the mid-1980s, I was primarily interested in environmental impact accounting and other aspects of an ecological economics that was emerging at the time. When, in 1984, I began my search for models of sustainable regional development, it was very much from this perspective of environmental, if you like, ‘Green’, economics. It was an article by Hartke (1984) that first drew my attention to the difficulty even endogenous development theory had in coping with cultural issues. Thus commenced an intellectual quest leading, via economic and cultural geography, and economic and cultural anthropology, eventually to European ethnology, the approach that has guided my empirical research since.

European Field Studies

The empirical background for the explorations of European ethnology presented here is provided by fieldwork carried out during the years 1980–1999 (Figure 1.1). Much of this work has been centred on the island of Ireland, while material from other regions primarily served the purpose of comparative analysis, reflecting the fact that my academic base for most of this period was at the Institute of Irish Studies in Liverpool. During the second half of the 1990s, the geographical focus of my research began to shift towards other parts of Europe, while Ireland and, increasingly, Britain feature prominently.

The empirical chapters in this book highlight key issues in the interaction between culture and economy, drawing both on my own research and on the work of others across a range of social science and humanities disciplines.

Figure 1.1: Fieldwork Locations, 1980–1999

At this point it may be worth emphasising that my aim here is not to provide a comprehensive, up-to-date critical review of relevant literature – a task well beyond the scope of a short book. Rather more humbly, I want to explore the usefulness of European ethnology for the study of regional development. In this respect, the present volume revisits, and seeks to progress, a long-term research programme initiated in the 1980s (Kockel 1992).

Theoretical Explorations

Almost thirty years after Schumacher (1974) postulated a new ‘economics as if people mattered’, the lived experience of real people remains largely excluded from theorising about the economy. The neo-liberalist orthodoxy of the centre-right is not alone in this. Neo-liberalism’s recent masquerade as a revitalised social democracy of the Third Way à la Giddens (1998) fares little better when it comes to culture.

Delving into the history of ideas in European ethnology, I found at an early stage that this discipline shared important intellectual roots with the all but forgotten Historical School of Political Economy, which had lost the Methodenstreit of the 1880s to the Austrian School of Economics. Here, it seemed to me, was an opportunity to address some of the issues raised by the shortcomings of neo-liberal economics, with regard to the relationship of culture and economy in general, and in the context of endogenous regional development in particular.

But this is easier said than done. Two problems in particular have to be dealt with. The Historical School is today even less well known on this side of the English Channel than in its own country. Since the 1980s, it has had something of a revival, especially through the reappraisal of its chief protagonist, Gustav Schmoller, by social economists, economic historians and historians of economic thought. Needless to say, none of these groups are exactly close to the mainstream of neo-liberal economics. A further ‘awarenessraising’ factor in this respect has been the current vogue for re-visiting Max Weber’s work on economy and society, which has close links with the Historical School.

A second, potentially more serious problem is posed by the conceptual ‘reconnection’ of the two disciplinary discourses. While the Historical School and Volkskunde, as European ethnology has been known in Germany, share common roots in the eighteenth century, when both emerged from ‘general statistics’ (Allgemeine Statistik), attempts to re-establish a link between the two, for example by Riehl in the 1850s or Weinhold in the 1890s, have not been particularly successful in the past, for various reasons.

A key obstacle has been the dominance of an essentially Romantic, theoretically rather undernourished paradigm in Volkskunde prior to the radical shake-up of the discipline during the 1960s and 1970s, which was strongly influenced by social theorists like Bourdieu. Engagement with domestic intellectual traditions has concentrated on Marxist and other ‘radical’ schools of thought, whereas the ‘lectern socialists’ (Kathedersozialisten) associated with the Historical School have at best been regarded as historical curiosity.

Obviously, intellectual engagement with the ideas of the Historical School cannot mean a simplistic, ‘return to basics’ kind of revival disregarding the historical context of these ideas, and this would indeed be contrary to the spirit of that School. But it may be time to trace the intermittent path that leads from eighteenth century ‘general statistics’ to a twenty-first century theory of endogenous regional development, via a European ethnology drawing on contextually adapted ideas of the Historical School. Developing this perspective, and translating it into a formal language engaging mainstream economists, will take another book or two. As an alternative to the route offered by neo-liberalist economics, the approach outlined here may not provide all the answers to the problems of regional development, but I suspect it might well produce more relevant questions.

‘Region’, ‘Culture’ and ‘Development’

Before going any further, I need to explain how some key terms are used in this book, especially ‘region’ and ‘culture’. Both terms have been widely debated and critiqued in recent years, and while few protagonists are likely to agree with the radical voices denouncing their use altogether as politically suspect, their meaning can no longer be taken for granted.

Culture

From the late 1960s onwards, political and social discourse has become increasingly infused with notions of ‘culture’. The 1980s saw a ‘cultural turn’ not just in the social sciences and humanities, but also in European integration rhetoric under the influence of Jacques Delors, and in a global development discourse. The globalisation debate was in its infancy when the UN General Assembly, on 8 December 1986, adopted Resolution 41/187, stating that:

[n]o development project worthy of the name can ignore the essential characteristics of the natural and cultural environment, the needs, aspirations and the values of the populations concerned (UNESCO 1987, 15).

This resolution heralded the UNESCO ‘World Decade for Cultural Development’, 1988–97. A report on ‘Our Creative Diversity’, produced by the UN’s ‘Commission for Culture and Development’ during that decade, argued that any economic development, to be sustainable, needed a cultural foundation. The brief of the Commission was to map out the relationship between culture and economy. From an anthropological point of view, which sees ‘culture’ as the entire and distinctive way of life of a particular group, the economy is an integral part of culture. Hence the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins raised the question of whether ‘culture’ should be regarded as an aspect or a means of ‘development’ (defined as material progress), or whether it constituted the purpose and goal of ‘development’ in the first instance. In the latter vision, echoed by theorists of regional planning (e.g. Stöhr 1986), ‘development’ aims to ‘cultivate’ human existence in a manner reminiscent of the German concept of Bildung. I shall come back to this issue in the final chapter.

Taking up Sahlins’ point, a UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies in Mexico defined ‘culture’ in terms of ‘all the distinctive spiritual and material, intellectual and affective features which are typical of a society or social group’ (Janne 1993, 6). The European Commission (1992, 1), gearing up for the Single European Market, identified the cultural challenge instrumentally, in terms of policy action, stating that:

cultural action should contribute to the flowering of national and regional cultural identities and at the same time reinforce the feeling that, despite their cultural diversity, Europeans share a common cultural heritage and common values …

There is an implicit territorial emphasis in this dual use of ‘culture’ as something incorporating both diversity and unity, indicating a cultural policy that caters little for non-territorial – or, indeed, in EU terms, extra-territorial – cultural groups. Similarly, the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional and Minority Languages covers neither extra-territorial (i.e., non-European) nor any non-territorial (e.g., Romani) languages (cf. Nic Craith 2000).

With the Maastricht Treaty, culture became, for the first time, a formal part of the EU policy framework, ‘with subsequent modifications on the possible action in the cultural field’ (Bekemans 1994b, 266). While both the UN and EU are clearly concerned with issues of development policy, the EU Commission’s understanding of ‘culture’ remains a more narrowly instrumental one (Kockel 1999c), expressing a focus on territorial management as well as – and perhaps over and above – the refinement of human existence.

With Europe being the geographical frame of reference here, it seems appropriate therefore to emphasise endogenous – rather than ‘self-reliant’ – development. The two concepts are often used interchangeably in the literature, but the former has a more clearly territorial dimension, implying a reliance on resource potentials in situ rather than wherever access to resources can be obtained by whatever means. EU or national policies promoting ‘self-reliant’ development tend to target the more territorial ‘endogenous’ development. These strategies of territorial development, in adopting culture as a resource, are conceived as ‘responses to extra-local forces that have demonstrated a powerful capacity to undermine the socio-economic vibrancy of local areas’ (Ray 1998, 3). There is an assumption here, that local areas are intrinsically vibrant, that betrays the naivety of instrumental definitions of culture.

Nevertheless, both definitions are employed for the purpose of this book. While the anthropological definition adopted by the UN offers a suitable broader framework, and a reminder that economic activity is culturally conditioned, the European Commission’s more instrumental view, representing ‘culture’ as something to be manipulated for the ‘common good’ of the EU, must be kept in mind in any study of the links between culture and regional development in Europe today.

Region

Academically as well as politically, concepts of ‘the region’ are enjoying a discursive boom (Diskurskonjunktur, Maase 1998, 53). Beyond the demarcation of administrative territories for functional reasons, the task of defining regions has exercised geographers and others for some time. In the early 1980s, the view that ‘the region might be the fundamental basis of economic and social life’ (Storper 1997, 3) gained currency. Jelin (1999, 6) asks how regions can be characterised in the face of increasing internet use and other globalising factors, suggesting to see them as:

neighbouring territories which, for purely administrative reasons or because they have a common economic, cultural, social or geographical characteristic (or a combination of two or more), are defined as sub-entities within the nation-state.

While this definition overlooks the growing incidence and significance of border regions straddling two or more nation state boundaries, it reflects the common idea of ‘region’ well enough. With reference to processes of political and economic integration, Jelin (1999, 7) observes that these ‘have their counterpart in the renewed recognition of the value of local roots and identities’, especially in post-1989 Eastern Europe. He describes (ibid.) the concept of the ‘region’ as ‘a cultural, historical and administrative construct’ for the purpose of ‘drawing a symbolic line of demarcation’. Nordström (1996, 3) notes that ‘the nearby area, … common language and religion’ of ‘old nation states and principalities’ have for many people in Europe remained ‘important factors of creating identity’, and estimates the number of these areas to be ‘approximately 200 in Western Europe alone.’

In the ‘multidisciplinary ensemble’ of regional studies, the role of European ethnology can be in the investigation of how people constitute their region by practically utilising space, investing it with meaning, drawing boundaries, and creating traditions (Maase 1998, 56). Elsewhere (Kockel 1999a, 293f.), I have outlined a concept of regio defined in terms of how far the writ of a particular politico-cultural hegemony reaches. This concept of a quasi ‘free-floating’ regio is based on people rather than territory, and allows for the reality of regional allegiances overlapping and conflicting, in the same place. In the present book, ‘regional’ is taken as a way of approaching cultural issues, rather than as a reified primary concern. The regions referred to in the text may well, but not necessarily, correspond to administratively delineated territories. ‘Region’ is used here to denote a sub-national assembly of – often, as in the case of migrants, highly personal – localities and their interconnections, including relations to the wider world.

Treating ‘region’ thus, as a vaguely defined concept, in a discussion of regional development may strike the reade...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• 1 Regions, Cultures and Endogenous Development
• 2 The Land, the Folk and the Whole House
• 3 Makeshift Propriety
• 4 The Urban Challenge
• 5 Community Revisited
• 6 Authenticating Heritage
• 7 Beyond the Folklore of Economics
• Bibliography
• Index