ABSTRACT
A polarized analysis of knowledge and economy would miss the global complexity into which regional and national memories are embroidered. A synthesis of culture and economy must investigate how the split Enlightenment philosophy introduced between natural and cultural worlds impacted on the crystallization of heritage discourse (Fromm 1978: 33). When science started gaining ground through empirical observation and experimentation a whole constellation of innate knowledge was put in the service of organized factual analysis. The change heralded science’s ergonomic (ergon = work, nomos = law) principles that socialist thinkers, conceptualizing society under industrialized conditions, later condemned as inhumane. Folk wisdom’s exclusion from the sphere of modernity obliterated the ergopoetic principles of ‘primitive’ cultures and their historical contribution to notions of civility.
