Economy and culture are dead! Long live economy and culture!

This essay critically evaluates the debate in human geography and cognate fields about economy-culture relationships. It takes issue with the terms of the debate, wherein different authors have sought to ground their claims about economy and culture with reference to supposed \u27ontological realities\u27. Building on the arguments of Don Mitchell (1995; 2000), I argue that economy and culture should be seen as two powerful ideas that help to create the realities they seem only to describe. Economy and culture cannot, I argue, be uncritically invoked by academic analysts as either objects of analysis or explanatory resources. Rather, we need to inquire into how the ideas of economy and culture are semantically \u27fixed\u27 and with reference to what \u27real-world\u27 phenomena. Taking the case of indigenous peoples\u27 deployment of the idea of \u27cultural property\u27, I illustrate the kind of research agenda that follows from seeing \u27economy\u27 and \u27culture\u27 as two performative signifiers. I also challenge those involved in the economy-culture debate to take seriously their own role in sustaining, altering or eclipsing the various meanings and referents of these two powerful key words

Decolonizing the study of capitalist diversity: epistemic disruption and the varied geographies of coloniality

The nation-as-method approach of Comparative Capitalisms (CC) scholarship has generally taken differential economic growth outcomes between national settings as a core explanandum. The widening of this scholarship beyond its original concern for the Triad nations of Western Europe, North America and Japan draws in countries from across a much greater disparity in economic performance (see also Ebenau, in this volume). This ‘globalizing’ CC work therefore more intently confronts the problematic of how the material conditions of people have improved more rapidly and inclusively in some countries than in others, and it is here that CC scholarship begins to more closely resemble strands of development studies. It is also at this juncture that more statist CC scholars have imported the idea of the developmental state, as the literature surrounding this concept shares the interest of the capitalist diversity field in examining relations between degrees of state-strategic coordination and economic performance (see Storz et al., 2013, p. 219; Gaitán and Boschi, in this volume). But in the pursuit of an institutional formula for wealth creation, this CC work and cognate scholarship on the developmental state overlook the prospect that poverty creation (on which see Blaney and Inayatullah, 2010, p. 2) might actually be constitutive of such a process