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The Commodification of Culture
DOI link for The Commodification of Culture
The Commodification of Culture book
The Commodification of Culture
DOI link for The Commodification of Culture
The Commodification of Culture book
ABSTRACT
The public property also encompasses cultural objects such as museums or sites of historical interest, which are exposed to enclosure, taking a form of commodification, or a conversion into objects to be sold to the public by the tourism industry. This practice takes a specific form in the case of the so-called acculturation of pre-capitalist peoples' customs and rituals. A case in point is provided by "Inuit sell their hunters' vouchers to vacationing gunslingers eager to blow walruses away at point-blank range". The colonial authority, the independent nation of Fiji, and the tourism industry have been progressively making a branded commodity out of the Naivilaqata's mythical gift, successfully publicizing its uniqueness. The Comaroffs conceive of this phenomenon as a product of two complementary processes: the incorporation of identity and the commodification of culture. The commentator apparently is incapable of differentiating between common and private property, as a consequence of which her notion of capital must be flawed as well.