What is a ‘cultural economy’?

This term ‘cultural economy’ connotes the mutually constitutive relationship between meaning and work, culture and production. Taking this term as a methodological model, Groomed for Power demonstrates how ideas about race shaped the practice of barbering; how changes in barbering reshaped white men’s bodies; and how white men’s bodies, in turn, called forth new ideas about race. Inspired by works in the so-called ‘new’ history of capitalism, I take neither ‘culture’ nor the ‘economy’ as primary or causative.