It really depends on the context and symbol system associated with the product, it's marketing - 're-educating' the market, and the symbol systems of the new market context. And even then, things from one context are frequently used differently in another context. The content and practise of Haute Cuisine, for example, is often 'mis-translated' or mis-represented after some time. What constitutes 'Haute Cuisine' varies considerably depending on where you are.

The 'transfer' of the object can be 'successful' but its symbolic content/context may have shifted it's content. In the sense that some or all of the cultural meanings that are associated with a cultural or artistic product lose their sense or lack the same impact in the new context (post-transfer). Sometimes the impact is the opposite of it's original. It can also be potentially disruptive when it is sited in its new context. I once witnessed woman who lived in an large old metropolitan city. She was a very determined urban person who believed her point of view was automatically shared by everyone. Or at least, if it was not, it should be shared by everyone. I watched her purchase cloth from small shop keeper in a very small traditional village in the countryside - in the same country. One would think that the cultural distance between the city and the countryside might not be so great. However, she proved that in this case, it was very great. The cloth was a specific striped cotton . On the face of it, this might not seem a significant fact. She was very unaware that there was any system of meaning attached to the 'uses' of certain cloths - other than cotton, linen, wool, silk, velvet, etc. These had been associated with social groups and rules of use but it appears that her knowledge of this was not detailed. However, there was a symbolic system in the countryside that was associated with the uses of certain patterns. She asked for two meters of this darkly striped cloth and announced that she wanted it in order to have a skirt made for herself. The shop keeper, a man, immediately became agitated and tried to refuse to sell the cloth to her, saying that this cloth was only sold to make male undergarments.. By using the cloth for female clothing, she was transgressing a number of cultural boundaries . The transgressions were notions of appropriate gender-specific uses and appropriate private uses versus public uses. She took something very intimately male and used it for something publically female. She produced a double shock by moving something that was embedded in the private realm to the public realm. She had the skirt made and wore it - parading the under-garment cloth as an outer-garment - a skirt in the public realm. The Question is - Did she show her sophistication or was she shaming herself? It depends on the context of where she wore the skirt. From one context, the point of view of the country dweller, she was seen to bring terrible shame on herself. From the city context, her friends and associates in the city, she appeared to be innovative and clever. She was 'safe' wearing that skirt if she only wore it around her friends. She consciously believed that she was powerfully moving the undergarment cloth in to the public realm in the city. So, from the analyst's point of view, was the power of that set of symbols accumulated or dissipated - and where ? She would have been at least verbally attacked in the countryside.

Hello Jean

Thanks for your answer - yes, certainly the local symbol system is important, in fact that's exactly what I was looking for, some ideas or research directions regarding how local symbol systems deal with incoming artefacts from other cultures. There are certainly several options here - hybridization, subordination, empty adoption, rejection - but particularly in the case of high culture or art, I'm not aware of works that track these processes.

Any ideas?

Gazi

A thorough study that would answer some of your questions is presented in this book by Ulrike Rohn (title: Cultural Barriers to the Success of Foreign Media Content: Western Media in China, India, and Japan): http://books.google.ee/books/about/Cultural_Barriers_to_the_Success_of_Fore.html?id=xWl7coVHCncC&redir_esc=y

Thank you Indrek - although I wouldn't want to think of culture only in terms of "barriers" - I'm also imagining cultural transfer as a site of new transformations, creations, and hybrids.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the idea of the "success" of a cultural form..but that's a different issue.

The author develops a concept of cultural universals and lacune - aspects that either facilitate the the cultural transfer or not. So it is not abour barriers only. But as it is mostly media economics (you asked for 'export') mixed with cultural studies hence also the 'success' in the title. See the short form on conceptual work here: http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/33/4/631.extract ("Lacuna or Universal? Introducing a new model for understanding cross-cultural audience demand")

Firstly, I am adding a comment on my first posting. I think that if the woman I mentioned above wore her skirt in another country, nobody would think anything about it other than perhaps the shape and colours were interesting or boring. Context (time and place) is everything. But context is perceived and possibly understood by people (that is to say, that different people have different undertandings) and that understanding is moderated and expressed through language.

As to writings dealing with this subject. I'm not aware of any works using your exact terms but I think that you could rewrite or reinterpret some of the descriptions of the phenomena noted by historians and art historians as well as anthropologists.

If you think about it in another way, these transfers have been happening since the beginning of time. The history of groups that hold different views interact with one another for trade and friendship. Sometimes their encounters 'go well' and other times there are terrible misunderstandings. Most of history deals with the results of how humans 'accommodate' /assimilate or reject their differences with one another.

Some older anthropological categories of these events are termed 'borrowings', 'cargo cults', millenarian movements, syncretism, ... But, when you think about it in a more general level, you realize that the human world is a mixture of trading and borrowing of ideas, knowledge, customs, goods, etc. Architecture and the world's cuisines social and cultural artefacts show that we do share some of each other's forms of living, building and eating. Some societies share them more than others. The questions that occur are that of specific meanings attached to these items. We do not all share the same meanings, languages, or modes of expressing our ideas. Form and content are always moderated by context (human agency and time). The meanings associated with such an item can shift even though the object itself may keep much of its 'original' form. A obvious example is the transfer of the building shapes that are found in ancient Greece, Turkey and Rome but are reused in Europe and North America. In some cases, temples have become used as libraries and banks. Arab society has contributed many items to the rest of the world..which are seen as just part of the normal world of the Mediterrean. People take this 'presence' as normal. Art and Architectural historians think about where their meanings and forms came from but the average inhabitant who lives in that milieu takes these objects as their own even though they [the objects and maybe even the persons] were originally from some other location. And, over time, these meanings change even though the form or structure remains more or less the same...sometimes the forms also change.

An understanding of how symbol systems encode specific meanings in specific contexts helps. An understanding of the social and historical contexts in question is also extremely important. Equally an understanding of how language, symbols and meaning work is useful. A partial bibliography might be E. Gombrich, C. Levi-Strauss, E. Cassirer, Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach, but there could be others.

What do you think?

You might find Daniel Everett's books an entertaining read: "Don't Sleep There are Snakes" and "Language" and for a look at how wide the differences can be between cultures and their value systems and how languages have developed.

A variable that should be considered in any case of the borrowing, lending, or imposing of cultural elements is the relative power and/or prestige of the groups involved. Two authors that deal with this variable are Pierre Bourdieu and Eric Wolf.

In colonial situations over the last five centuries, it has been common for subaltern groups to adopt cultural elements from hegemonic groups (borrowing a couple of terms from Gramsci), and a fascinating area of study is to look at how these cultural elements are adapted, often in ways that reflect mechanisms of cultural resistance, evolving ethnic identity, and strategies for preserving personal and collective dignity.

I find this to be the case in the cultural productions of New Spain, or Spanish North America, from the early 16th to the early 19th centuries, including varias forms of aesthetic creation: visual arts, literature, music, dance, theater, et cetera. These processes continue among indigenous peoples today.

In the case of language, the field of sociolinguistics takes this variable into account, and may provide useful models that can be adapted for applying to other areas.

Exactly.

Hello All - very interesting answers, thank you! I realize now that my question was probably too general, and will have to be narrowed somewhat. The colonialism and anthropology cites (e.g that Morgane mentioned) as well as the sociology/power literature that David mentioned are excellent (but also distinct) leads, but demonstrate to me the tough choices to be made.

Perhaps this specification can narrow things - I'm interested in sectors that are neither purely culture industry in the sense of mass-culture/media (e.g. Hollywood movies), nor fine art per se (e.g. paintings). I mentioned "haute cuisine" as it is somewhat in-between these spheres (see also, fashion, luxury industry, high status products), neither simply commodity neither simply art. (of couse, I agree with Jean that these spheres are themselves variable across cultures, complicating things).

Any ideas on how some interesting theory could be built around this domain, as distinct from the work being done on mass-culture and globalization, on the one hand, and the globalization of art, on the other?

also - Happy New Year to all!

ok. Please tell us how you specifiy 'haute cuisine' and where it lives and moves.

Here is your reading list:

Apicus

Lucien Febvre,

Fernand Braudel

Marc Bloch

Claude Levi-Strauss - Le Cru et le Cuit/The Raw and the Cooked

Theodore Zeldin, The French; The French Passion

Sidney Mintz - Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985)

Sidney Mintz - Sweetness and Power (1985)

Alfred Crosby - The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972).

Bridget Ann Henisch - Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (1977),

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton - Savouring the Past: The French Table from 1300 to 1789 (1983)

Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966)

Jack Goody - Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (1982)

You also need to start reading serious cook books.

Thank you, Jean, for the list. In response to both your and Alicia's comments, I think it's clear that I wouldn't want to define any cultural field in terms of specific exact locations and techniques, aware that these are often in flux.

But what might be possible would be to specify key actors and their contexts (e.g. in the example of haute cuisine, say, classic French traditionalists, "reformist" movements like nouvelle cuisine, fusions, etc., innovators like Bulli, etc,). Then I could look at the relations between these actors in terms of power and resources, a la Bourdieu.

But - I get the feeling that looking at such fields just in terms of power relations is a bit reductionist, and loses what is really interesting about cultural industries, that is, their pretention to be "art", which is clearly influenced by, but not reducible to (I think), power. Particularly in fields like luxury, which are so obviously are linked to power yet seem to be trying to cross some kind of threshold into something more "meaningful", I'd like to find some leads in how to think about their fraught relationship with the power issue.

This is, btw, even more acute in the cross-cultural area, where the forms may be brought in purely as a power symbol, rather than for some cultural notion of "quality". I think of a fine whiskey, which in Scotland might represent both beauty and power, but, say, imported into Brazil, might stand purely for power and social class, with less focus on the "art" side. But that's just a speculation.

Any thoughts here?

Gazi, no one was proposing "looking at such fields just in terms of power relations", so your third paragraph seems to me to be a "straw man" type of argument. Power relations are obviously a variable that should be considered, among many other aspects, within a complex network of actors, factors, associations, and interrelations.

Dear David - point well taken. Perhaps this was more of an internal debate with myself :)

Yet, also, when the question of "how is the field defined" comes up, I tend to link it to the question "who GETS to define the field", and it slides to a power perspective, for better or worse.

There never was a single form of 'classic French Cuisine'. It was different everywhere.

Theodore Zeldin has also pointed out that "French Cuisine" was developed by French chefs in the 18th century when they learned to cook English Cuisine in England. They took it back home and by the 19th century it transformed itself into French 'haute cuisine'. By the way, Whiskey is originally a peasants drink. It is the one way that the value of grain can be monetized when storage and transport is all but non-existant.

Hello Jean,

Apologies for my lack of knowledge of the history of whiskey - that's a really interesting observation. (of course, being a peasant drink, and "monetized" doesn't say anything about it's intrinsic value, if there is any such thing, nor does the idea of French cuisine coming from England. I happen to be a big fan of many peasant drinks, although not so much of English food :)

Along with the French cuisine example, it seems your point would be that what often gets sold as "high culture" or "art", and also as unified, is often fragmented or diverse. In this case, some kind of transformation (or propaganda) would be necessary to build an illusion around such diversity, right?

So the idea of "fine" whiskey (btw, there may be a similar phenomenon in Brazil itself, in the domain of "fine" cachaca), or "haute cuisine" would essentially require hiding the tracks of the history of these products, or at least romanticising these histories.

I do think something like this must be happening - but my earlier point was that if this were ALL that was happening, it frames those who "appreciate" art/high culture, or at least those who pay to do so, as essentially "cultural dupes". Since I think this is not (at least, not always) the case, then there must be some other notion of appreciation that does not rely on some false illusion of unity.

Tying to the earlier discussion, essentially, I would not like to argue that the cultural importation is purely a kind of colonial propaganda, nor that it is a sort of impartial and apolitical artifact of beauty. But where, then, can such importations be conceptually located?

I am concerned with the importation of Spanish music to France at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. After hearing Spanish gypsies at the Exposition Mundiale in Paris, great French composers like Debussy and Ravel reinvent Spanish music. They subsequently attract Spain´s greatest twentieth-century composers, among them, Isaac Albeniz and Manuel de Falla, who absorb the influence of Debussy´s and Ravel´s impressionism into their own attempts to write Spanish music with folkloric casts. Without Debussy, Albeniz's greatest work, "Iberia," would probably not have been possible, nor would Falla´s memorable suite of nocturnes, "Noches en los jardines de España" [Nights in the Garden of Spain].

great example Nelson, thanks! I wonder how the meanings attributed to these musical forms changed (or not) as they moved across borders.

Also, I'm curious about your use of the term "folkloric casts"..does this imply that it appears to be traditional folklore but is not?

Like Nelson Orringer, my concern for the Tahitian people is the lost of their own pure Tahitian Language (Reo), music and culture . The history of the Colonisation around the Pacific in particular Tahiti under France has a huge influence on their culture and language. Most of the local Tahitians speaks French Polynesia. It best for you to refer to some readings. Tahitians are proud of their French history but to what extent.

Gazi, when Spaniards imported the habanera (a two-step dance with dotted rhythm) into Paris in the mid 19th c., the Parisians were so enchanted with the musical genre, that it persisted among the French long after it went out of style in Spain. Bizet´s opera "Carmen" has a very famous "habanera," originally imported by a Spanish pianist who was tutoring the Empress Eugénie.

As to the exportation of French-style Spanish music back into Spain, Spanish composers like Albéniz and Falla were convinced that the French had managed to capture the "essence" of Spanish music. By this they actually meant Spanish folk-music, with melodic genres drawn from the people. Hence, by imitating the French imitation of Spanish folk-music, Spanish composers created very beautiful "faux" folk-music. Examples: Albéniz's "Iberia" and Falla´s "Nights in the Garden of Spain." Is this explanation clear? It is complex, I know, and I apologize. Listen to the music and you can actually hear French impressionist elements.

Thanks Nelson! So when you say the Parisians were enchanted, and the Spanish composers wanted to find the essence, I take it you're seeing the transfer as mostly an aesthetic and intellectual borrowing? Would the fact that the music came back from France also have a "political" effect, perhaps legitimating it as a "high-art" form?

Again, as in above, I want to be able to discuss the aesthetic borrowing and symbolic power/capital perspectives together, without privileging one or the other, but I'm not sure what's the best way to do this?

btw I don't think your explanation is too confusing - it's very informative! and more generally, I'm finding a lot of nice examples along the thread of this discussion!

Yes, Gazi, the transfer was mostly aesthetic and intellectual, but cultural capital was involved. Surely Bizet´s "Carmen" is today considered "high art." I understand that when it first appeared in Paris, it was badly received. Then it went to London, where it was highly acclaimed. It returned to Paris, and the Parisians now acclaimed it! It is perhaps France´s most popular opera today.

I think a good way to discuss aesthetic borrowing and power/capital perspectives would be to study the critics of major artworks at the time of their early performances. You can find many of the critiques on line! In a book due out in early February in Univ. of Toronto Press, I discuss early critiques of Lorca and Falla. Try this method: it is not only fascinating, but clarifies much.