The neoliberalisation of cultural production: an ethnography of professional Irish traditional music

Through the theoretical lenses of agency, autonomy, resistance, and resilience, this ethnographic study reveals how professional musicians and cultural workers experience the neoliberalisation of cultural production in their careers and everyday lives. Neoliberal capitalism is the most powerful cultural, ideological, and economic system in the West today. As such, it largely influences labour and other social relations, including the modes of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. Further, many of the most urgent issues facing artists and cultural workers today result from neoliberalism’s intensification of precarious labour relations, and its encroachment of market values into nearly all realms of cultural life. This study examines the lived realities of over eighty artists and cultural workers involved in professional Irish traditional and Celtic music production. Through indepth interviews and extensive participant-observation, this work investigates the ambivalent, dynamic, and entwined relationships between art, commerce, and the social. It proposes that the majority of participants’ activities that increase their access to resources and capital are in service of enhancing or increasing their agency. This increased agency can be used to achieve greater autonomy from market influences. More autonomy, in turn, can help them attain a better balance within the art / commerce / social arena, which is believed to promote a healthier, happier career and lifestyle. Whether they are accumulating more economic, cultural, and social capital, recalibrating power dynamics, or configuring their environment to best suit their needs, artists and cultural workers often view attaining more control over their creative decisions, business relations, and professional environment as helping them achieve a more sustainable state of working and living with integrity. These values inform artists’ guiding philosophies, and as such, drive how they approach cultural production and labour relations in a tumultuous and challenging industry.