Cultural display;
Tourism;
Heritage;
Performance & media.

One of the more evident outcomes of globalization in the Twentieth century has been the dramatic increase in the economic and political value of culture. This has led to a rise in cultural production and cultural visibility in different manners and places, as well as the culturalization of political rhetoric – institutional and non-institutional – at international, national, and regional levels. Paradoxically, anthropologists are among those who follow these processes most cautiously. This is because i) they have become suspicious of the empowerment of culture and its capacity to hide the social structures, economic differentiation and political practices that actually produce it and ii) general approaches usually neglect the diversity, plasticity and multiple configurations of culture itself.

Although the manifestation of this capitalization of culture is difficult to summarize they are most obvious in situations where cultural legibility, visibility and visitability have been enacted - such as in cultural displays endorsed by tourism, heritage or processes of patrimonialization. Such displays pre-suppose an accrued investment in cultural staging, which includes the convening of collections and classification of fragments of material and non-material culture through artistic renderings of it in picture and photograph, displays of it through exhibitions, performances and parades, cultural theming, references to its past and ‘local’ nature and landscape, and often commodification of it and advertising as a way to attract visitors and sightseers, spectators or readers, making people feel culturally knowledgeable and thereby cultured themselves.
At a deeper level, the contemporaneous globalization of this kind of procedure should not conceal either their variety, or their relation with other concomitant or historical productions of social or political identities - or identifications - using culture as idiom (or rather, explicitly refusing it). This calls for a balance between comparative insights (at local, national and international levels, including border and contact zones) and historical analysis (colonial and postcolonial), which combined, explicitly address the arts, archive assembly and other materializations of time and memory in order to sustain a broader and comprehensive analysis of the processes of cultural visibilities. Accordingly, this line of research intends to gather data on sites, histories, performances, rhetorics, images and other procedures which capture, divulge, configure – and are configured by - culture in different ways (not always as obvious or tamed as they are in heritage or touristic displays). In fact, while the common topic of reified culture unites all the topics to be incorporated here, underlying them all is the motivation to go beyond merely culturalistic discourses and to understand culture in its uses and practices, embedded in the specific social, economic and political contexts and other identity differentiation frameworks, within which it is produced and reproduced.