ABSTRACT
In Keywords Raymond Williams (1985:90) outlines three currently common uses of the word “culture.” The first and last of these uses situates culture in the production or appreciation of the intellectual, spiritual, and esthetic. The second use refers to “a particular way of life,” and potentially includes both material and symbolic production. Williams-and the field of cultural studies he helped invent-has been particularly interested in relating rather than contrasting the symbolic and the material. Does the current tendency to refer to realms of symbolic practice and signification in terms of symbolic economies achieve such a relation, or simply conflate the two via metaphorical sleight-of-hand? The deployment of economic language to describe the circulation of cultural practices, tastes, and styles, which is supposed to refer the cultural to the economic in order to assert the impossibility of extricating the one from the other, has become a powerful and privileged way of understanding culture. Does culture, when understood as a symbolic economy, become economic, tout court?
