Festival Encounters: Value Logics and the Political Economy of Cultural Production in Ghana

Festivals in Ghana provide an intersection of diverse political and economic actors: from local chiefs who use festivals to promote their authority and observant spectators, to global marketing directors who fund festivals to promote corporate brands. Yet festivals are also sites for the production of culture, that is, performances popularly perceived as representing the sum of a community's customs and ideas. This dissertation presents a historically situated analysis of the relationship between cultural production and Ghana's shifting political economic landscape since colonialism. I examine various forms of value production and conversion across festival contexts, providing crucial insights into how political power operates in the interstices between the state, corporations, and traditional forms of authority. While corporate sponsors seek to capitalize upon cultural distinctions by associating festivals with commodity consumption, some chiefs promote commodities from their sponsors to assert a new claim to political authority based on the nobility of their lineage and their participation in global economic networks. At stake in corporate sponsored festivals is the emergence of new logics of value that challenge people to reassess the social and economic relations that underlie the production of political power in Ghana. My dissertation focuses on the articulation of cultural production and corporate sponsorship, examining how infusions of global capital contribute an added dimension to the ongoing struggle to define meanings, control resources, and achieve social and political status in Ghana and in a globalizing world.