"Producing Culture and Capital" is a major theoretical
contribution to the anthropological literature on capitalism, as
well as a rich case study of kinship and gender relations in
northern Italy.
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on thirty-eight
firms in northern Italy's silk industry, Sylvia Yanagisako
illuminates the cultural processes through which sentiments,
desires, and commitments motivate and shape capitalist family
firms. She shows how flexible specialization is produced through
the cultural dynamics of capital accumulation, management
succession, firm expansion and diversification, and the
reproduction and division of firms. In doing so, Yanagisako
addresses two gaps in Marx's and Weber's theories of capitalism:
the absence of an adequate cultural theory of capitalist motivation
and the absence of attention to kinship and gender. By
demonstrating that kinship and gender are crucial in structuring
capitalist action, this study reveals these two gaps to be
different facets of the same omission. A process-oriented approach
to class formation and class subjectivity enables the author to
incorporate the material and ideological struggles within families
into an analysis of class-making and self-making.
Yanagisako concludes that both "provincial" and "global"
capitalist orientations and strategies operate in an industry that
has always been integrated into regional and international
relations of production and distribution. Her approach to culture
and capitalism as mutually constituted processes offers an
alternative to both universal models of capitalism as a mode of
production and essentialist models of distinctive "cultures of
capitalism."
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