- This post is part of a debate on the relation between scholarship and policy held during the conference “The Constitution of Cultural Property: Interim Conclusions” in June 2011. It is reproduced on this blog for further discussion.
Rather than summarizing the opposing points of view, let me point to the crevices of interdisciplinarity that become apparent in this debate: the social significance or even legitimacy of intellectual inquiry look very different for an economist’s and a cultural anthropologist’s point of view. The former has several decades of research experience and participation in endeavors that not only suggest but demand policy recommendation and he demands – not without caveats – that investigating the constitution of cultural property result in policy recommendations. Society as the client ultimately paying for our work might otherwise just decide that work such as ours might not be worth funding anymore. The cultural anthropologist in the process of finishing his dissertation delimits the boundaries within which he could permit recommendations. He draws on the foundational history of humanistic inquiry and updated stances of post-war critical theory. Both to him combine into a sufficient bulwark against forgetting the power asymmetries existing within the very problem that we investigate.
Are there possibilities to reach common ground – or at the very least productive cooperation – between disciplines as different as law, economics, cultural anthropology and ethnology? We would like to think or imagine that there are, and in the days ahead of us, we hope to illustrate where we have found the possibility of working in tandem or at the very least next to one another in addressing arenas within which cultural property is constituted.
On Friday morning, finally, we will return to this debate and further input on how this group has experienced interdisciplinary research between fields of inquiry not usually teaming up together and we will – this at least I would like to promise – seek to come up with policy suggestions for funding organizations and universities with regard to fostering interdisciplinary work.