Patrimonio y globalización: el recurso de la cultura en las Políticas de Desarrollo Europeas

Abstract

Any approximation to today's reality must refer to globalization , understood as a backdrop without which social processes cannot be analyzed. In synthesis, globalization is the market's penetration into social life. It is a long-term process that, accelerating in the last several decades, has expanded into new spheres such as culture.

I discuss the causes and consequences that the gradual commercialization of culture is producing in Spanish society, explaining both the growing importance of cultural patrimony as a factor for development and the changing emphasis in our own ways of studying it. In the second part of the text, I examine in depth how this is negotiated at a local level, analyzing the new function of handicrafts in Spain in relation to European development policies.