“Of everything in the world, there is popular culture”: rethinking the economics of culture and innovation in situated contexts

Abstract

The present teaching case elaborates narratives from the context of popular cultures, presenting the specificities, similarities and disparities that demarcate the cultural manifestations promoted by the organizations of “Afoxé”, “Clay handicrafts”, “Pifano Band”, “Capoeira”, “Circus”, “Popular Dance”, “Cordel Literature” and “Theatre of Mamulengos”. The central dilemma of the case is based on the character “João” who analyzed cultural organizations, respecting the characteristics and popular knowledge according to the precepts of the local cultural and creative economy. João was faced with the following empirical dilemma: how to understand the characteristics and popular knowledge of cultural organizations in the city of Caruaru: (1) from the idea of innovation consistent with the experience of the cultural industry of mass production? or (2) from the idea of innovation aligned with the contextual and relational dimensions of the cultural economy? The expectation is that the understanding of innovation is no longer contextualized only in terms of the experiences of industrial transformation of mass production, bringing the empirical experiences of popular cultures to show the situated nature of innovation in the context of the cultural economy. Thus, the work to create artistic values, cultural goods and the creative vitality that takes place in cultural organizations can be understood as everyday innovation arising from social and relational contexts in diverse networks of actors, bringing material work closer to immaterial work, knowledge with doing, the perception of economic value with the perception of symbolic value.