ABSTRACT
How did it come to pass? The notion – captured perfectly by the USAID trainer offering micro-entrepreneurial counsel to Egyptian NGOs – that culture is the indispensable stuff of development. The museum of culture is to be ransacked by the development practitioner (and by implication the development theorist) in search of things that “work.” In the name of development, culture must be instrumentalized – what we might more properly call the “economization of culture.” At stake is yet one more expression of the colonization of the life world by the deadly solicitations of the market. In Elyachar’s example, the headman becomes the enforcement mechanism for Grameen banks Egyptian-style. The pursuit of some cultural form capable of being put to work presumes, however, another aspect of the complicated dialectics of economy
the economy”).1 cannot function without culture. The dull discipline of the market requires its own cultural conditions of existence: to operate, in other words, the market requires trust, networks, norms and values, and various institutional prerequisites including law.
