Page 100 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Economy

David Chidester

Expanding economy
Secret, sacred
The political economy of the sacred

Modern economists, who claim specialized expertise in the scientific study
of the capitalist economy, have no privileged role in defining or deploying
the key word economy in the study of religion, media, and culture. So, if
we cannot rely on economists for our understanding the economy, what can
we do?
Within cultural studies, economy has been integrated into a wider field
of practices that are simultaneously material and symbolic. In his Outline
of a Theory of Practice, the influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
insisted that we must “abandon the dichotomy of the economic and the
non-economic,” because the conventional assumption that the economy
can be distinguished from its wider field of symbolic, material, and social
relations “stands in the way of seeing the science of economic practices as a
particular case of a general science of the economy of practices.” Dissolving
this dichotomy promised radical results. Modern economic science, with
its laws of supply and demand, financial interest, exchange value, market
competition, and so on, could be recast as a particular set of symbolic practices
in a social field. Social practices, including religion, the arts, and media,
could be recast as “economic practices directed towards the maximization of
material or symbolic profit” (Bourdieu 1977: 183). This notion of symbolic
profit, which could be produced by symbolic labor and realized as symbolic
capital, effectively integrated economic practices into the entire field of
meaningful cultural productions (Urban 2003).
At the same time, cultural practices, including the practices of cultural
media for the storage, transmission, and reception of information, could be
incorporated within this expanded understanding of economy. Meaning-
making enterprises, such as religion and media, emerged as economic
practices of production, circulation, and consumption. Though modern
economic theories, such as rational-choice theory, might seek to explain