The stakes involved in some of these prizes can be quite high. For example, if a book makes it to the Booker shortlist, it adds to its hardcover sales by at least 5,000; if it wins, that would increase sales by 40,000 to 80,000 - according to Richard Todd in his 1996 book, Consuming Fictions.
What makes some books figure in the shortlist and not some others? To answer this question, Sharon Norris in "The Booker Prize: A Bourdieusian Perspective", published in the Journal of Cultural Research, invokes the social analysis methodology pioneered by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who saw power as something created and constantly re-legitimised through what he calls "habitus" or socialised norms that guide behaviour and thinking. Thus, a high proportion of Booker judges and authors have connections with Oxford and Cambridge - and more recently with the University of East Anglia (UEA), and especially with the university's Creative Writing M A course run by Malcolm Bradbury, a Booker Chair in 1981.
Thus, "the 1989 winner was former Creative Writing MA student, Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day); the chairman of the judges that year, David Lodge, was formerly a UEA Creative Writing fellow; and two further judges taught on the MA course". This year, the Booker Prize shortlist has a book by an Indian-origin writer, Neel Mukherjee - another alumnus of the University of East Anglia Creative writing Programme - The Lives of Others, a matter of special interest to me because it is set in the Calcutta (now Kolkata) of the late 1960s, when I was a student at the Indian Institute of Management there. This was a period when young people driven by a desire to change the world joined the Naxalite movement. The protagonist of Mr Mukherjee's book is one such young man who sees his family business implode, his family and the society around him unravel. It is an exquisitely written book - so I, for one, am cheering it on.
If literary and other cultural prizes are one way for some interest groups in society to signal what kinds of actions they desire to have, "rankings" are another powerful way. Transparency International, a Berlin-based non-governmental organisation, publishes a widely followed annual ranking of countries that it calls The Corruption Perception Index. It is based on an opinion poll of mostly Western businessmen. Its origin can be traced to 1977 when the United States Congress enacted, in the wake of the Watergate scandals, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prescribed strict criminal and financial penalties for such actions by United States companies. This led to protest from American companies that this law put them at a competitive disadvantage against their European competitors, who were not only free to pay bribes to foreign officials but could also claim income tax deductions for such payments. Intense lobbying by United States firms got the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to ratify the anti-corruption convention.
Transparency International was born out of these events with USAID, as well as the big accounting firms KPMG and Price Waterhouse, providing financing. Switzerland, a country that's usually implicated in most corruption scandals, is ranked high at seventh, which makes one wonder what this index really measures. Nevertheless the index functions as a useful tool in countries like India (ranked 94), where civil servants in their power struggle with elected ministers use it as an argument for the establishment of institutions where the former oversee elected representatives. Thus, rankings, like prizes, benefit the rankers and the sponsors of such rankings as much as they benefit the top rankers and prize winners.
The etymological roots of the word "prize" can be traced to the Latin "pretium", which meant "price" or "money", and to the Sanskrit "prati", which meant in "in return", says Professor English. The kind of explosion in the number of prizes that has occurred in recent times, he says, is because prizes are the single best instrument to convert economic capital, that is, financial assets, into cultural capital, that is, societal esteem (as, for example, when an ammunition manufacturer established the prestigious Nobel prize), or to convert cultural capital into economic capital (as, for example, when a book that would have sold a mere hundred copies sells in the thousands because of a prize), or even to political capital, that is, ability to influence others' actions. Prize-givers that have included associations of artists, academic groups, corporate sponsors and wealthy philanthropists, the administrators, judges, and others involved in a prize are themselves to be understood as agents of this intra-conversion. And all of these, not just the prize-winners or the toppers of a ranking list, count themselves among the winners.
Ajit Balakrishnan is the author of The Wave Rider, A Chronicle of the Information Age
ajitb@rediffmail.com
ajitb@rediffmail.com