(A) In their book Memory and Modernity, William Rowe and Vivien Schelling (1991, 2-3) identify three ways of thinking about Latin American popular culture:
(B) We need to adopt a critical approach to Rowe and Schelling’s third definition; we need to consider: (1) traditional and modern worlds overlap (folk and mass culture interact); (2) the importance of popular culture in national politics: since the 1930s, popular culture has been linked to the liberal project of nation building; (3) Latin American popular culture has not only imported the ‘modern culture of the advanced capitalist countries’ (USA) but has also adopted a critical stance towards it and developed its own particular varieties.
(A) Pierre Bourdieu (1989, 28-30): certain patterns of upbringing or schooling provide people with tools for judgment (taste) – which he terms ‘cultural capital’. ‘Cultural capital’ is used to reinforce social, as well as intellectual, divisions – to differentiate between a ‘popular aesthetic’ and a ‘high aesthetic’.
(B) Latin American theorists have drawn on (and problematized) Antonio Gramsci’s idea that culture is the main strategic factor in maintaining state power. Gramsci argues that dominant groups in society use control of cultural production to attempt to win the consent of subordinate groups in society.
(A) Foucault’s concept of power. Power is localized through the network of relationships which make up society and are based in discourse: ‘discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy’ (see Bristow (1997, 178)). [1]
García Canclini (1982, 69) argues that popular culture should be considered in terms of use rather than origin, ‘como hecho y no como esencia’.
(B) Martín-Barbero’s concept of mediaciones in De los medios a las mediaciones: (1) what is important is not the level of consumption but the way in which society views itself through the media; (2) the process of reception and interpretation of radio, TV, press is mediated by different social agents; there is no direct or unmediated relationship between medium and person.
García Canclini (1995a, 330) identifies four processes of modernity in Latin America: emancipación; renovación; democratización; expansión. García Canclini has since questioned whether there has been a regression in these four processes.
Some definitions: (1) a rejection of the term ‘postmodern’ in a continent with inequalities and uneven modernization [Rowe and Schelling]; (2) some split ‘modern’ for the economy/politics and ‘postmodern’ for questions of culture [García Canclini: Henry Pease García]; (3) some link postmodern culture with the historical and economic period [Jameson: Colás and Sarlo]; (4) García Canclini and others see it as a way to problematize the failings of the modern; (5) Nelly Richard (1994, 216) (and Jean Franco): Latin America was postmodern avant la lettre.
(3) Beatriz Sarlo, in Escenas de la vida posmoderna, emphasizes the economic and historical specificities underlying Latin American postmodernity:
Como otras naciones de América, la Argentina vive el clima de lo que se llama “posmodernidad” en el marco paradójico de una nación fracturada y empobrecida. Veinte horas de televisión diaria, por cincuenta canales, y una escuela desarmada, sin prestigio simbólico ni recursos materiales; paisajes urbanos trazados según el último design del mercado internacional y servicios urbanos en estado crítico. El mercado audiovisual distribuye sus baratijas y quienes pueden consumirlas se entregan a esta actividad como si fueran habitantes de los barrios ricos de Miami. (7-8). [2]
(4) García Canclini (1995a, 23) sees the postmodern not only as a continuation of the modern but as the means to question and problematize the modern in new and fruitful ways (‘concebimos la posmodernidad no como una etapa o tendencia que reemplazaría el mundo moderno, sino como una manera de problematizar los vínculos equívocos que éste armó en las tradiciones que quiso excluir o superar para construirse’). [3]
‘High’ and ‘Low’ Culture Redefined; and Cultural Hybridity
One key point where stylistic and periodizing concepts of the postmodern coincide, and which is central to a consideration of Latin American popular culture, is in the idea of the breaking down of the barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Two important theorists are: Linda Hutcheon (1989) and Fredric Jameson (2000).
García Canclini’s Culturas híbridas: oscillation between tradition and modernity in twentieth-century Latin America due to mass migration and mass media: a characteristic of contemporary culture is the interchange between ‘lo culto’, ‘lo popular’ and ‘lo masivo’ (1995a, 17).
Globalization and the Effects of Mass Culture
(A) Possible models: (1) the diminishing importance of local and national organizations in favour of private, multinational corporations; (2) the re-structuring of the city; growth of suburbs and creation of shopping malls; (3) new definitions given to private space because of increased consumerism and media; (4) new definitions of identity, which have as much to do with globalized media technologies as with local and national questions. [Key theorist is Brazilian Renato Ortiz.]
(B1) Problems with global ‘models’: different conditions, such as uneven development; mass internal and external migration; insufficient planning or policy for accommodation, health care or public services; lack of security; and different inter-ethnic relations.
(B2) García Canclini (1995b, 13): globalization is an uneven process, which excludes sectors of society in its (re)ordering: ‘la globalización no es un simple proceso de homogeneización, sino de reordenamiento de las diferencias y desigualdades sin suprimirlas’. [4]
García Canclini’s La globalización imaginada: globalization is imagined because it is not a stable, homogenous paradigm produced by modernity but is rather a conflictive concept – there are different globalization processes and interactions.
(C1) Advantages/disadvantages: cultural commentators such as Alberto Fuguet (2001) and Ortiz (2001) have noted that one of the effects of globalization is a strengthening of national and local cultural enterprises (such as the Chilean television and film industries). (See McOndo group novelist Alberto Fuguet’s article ‘Magical Neoliberalism’: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2001/fuguet.html.)
Global-local: García Canclini’s (1999, 51) concept of glocalización.
(1) Linda Hutcheon’s (1989, 13) idea of ‘complicitous critique’: postmodernism’s relationship with mass culture is not just of implication, but one of critique.
(2) Fredric Jameson (1992, 29): even the most ‘degraded’ mass culture can be critical of the social order of which it is a product/commodity.
(3) McOndo: Latin America should be represented in terms of ‘lo bastardo, lo híbrido’ and ‘McDonalds, computadoras Mac y condominios’; in the (internet) article ‘Magical Neoliberalism’, Alberto Fuguet defines McOndo:
McOndo is a global, mixed, diverse, urban, 21st-century Latin America, bursting on TV and apparent in music, art, fashion, film, and journalism, hectic and unmanageable. Latin America is quite literary, yes, almost a work of fiction, but it’s not a folk tale. It’s a volatile place where the 19th century mingles with the 21st. More than magical, this place is weird. Magical realism reduces a much too complex situation and just makes it cute. [5]
Latin American Cultural Studies
(A) Cultural studies is a field which developed from reactions to modernity and in particular to its technological advances between the 1930s and the 1950s – and is closely linked to postmodern thinking in that it also challenges the stability of concepts and boundaries, especially in terms of the object of study.
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological and more narrowly humanistic conception of culture. Unlike traditional anthropology, however, it has grown out of analyses of modern industrial societies. It is typically interpretative and evaluative in its methodologies, but unlike traditional humanism it rejects the exclusive equation of culture with high culture and argues that all forms of cultural production need to be studied in relation to other cultural practices and to social and historical structures. Cultural studies is thus committed to the study of the entire range of a society's arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices. (See Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler (1992, 4)). [6]
(B) Latin American Cultural Studies: Sarlo (2002) underscores the need for cultural studies to address the local and the particular, and to reflect the economic downturn and crises of the state in Latin America. García Canclini (2002) argues that globalization has stimulated what might be termed a ‘New Latin Americanism’ and that any study of culture in Latin America in the late 1990s requires an awareness of a broader social context and of frontier/transnational cultural exchange.
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© Robert Ruz, 2003