Monthly Archives: March 2017

Reaction to readings on the End of Popular Culture

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I explain in this blog my reaction to the readings of the week: “In Search of a New Topography” by Guillermo Gómez-Peña; “The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle: Media Cinstructions of Stardom and Jennifer Lopez’s Cross-Over Butt’” by Mary C. Beltrán; and “The Embodiment of Salsa: Musicians, instruments and the Performance of a Latin Style and Identity” by Patria Román-Velázquez.

Gómez-Peña’s text deals with the Mexican revolutionary group of the 90s called the Zapatistas, and more precisely with its leader, the so-called Subcomandante Marcos. The extract explains that Marcos initially won popularity by trying to be a popular culture phenomenon: he used slang, references to urban culture and pop culture, theatrical performance… But he eventually lost this popularity: people simply got tired of his character with time, as if he was a pop star instead of a guerillero.

Beltrán’s text focuses on the fact that in the late 1990s, most of the popular attention devoted to Latina star Jennifer Lopez was centered around the shape of her butt. From this rather unconventional starting point, the author tries to develop an argumentation about how this could illustrate a media system that is still uncomfortable with promoting the body shape of non-white women or, to the contrary, an industry that continues to use and to extrapolate stereotypes from other ethnicities.

The last text, by Patria Román-Velázquez, is centered around the theme of salsa, a Latin dance/music that the author of the essay uses to reflect on ethnicity and culture. By taking the example of Salsa musicians who are not Latin and who play in London, the essay states that, though we consider salsa to be a pure element of Latin America popular culture, musicians from other backgrounds can learn it but, due to the differences in places, they will play it slightly differently: one does not need to be Latin to play Salsa but according to the place of learning the result will differ (not that there is a more authentic way, warns the writer). Additionally, salsa bands in English-speaking countries note the constrains imposed by the industry: to remain profitable, they have to cope with the expectations and the limited familiarity of their audience with this music. They must keep the Spanish lyrics fairly simple and restrain themselves to create a music to make people dance.

Reaction to Hybridity reading

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I explain in this blog my reaction to the readings of the week: two extracts from Néstor García Canclini ‘s Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity.

A thought I found interesting in the introduction is the fact that we have to nuance the idea of hybridization when it is understood as a fusion of two cultures. First of all, the idea of a peaceful fusion is too optimistic, in most cases hybridity is in fact a form of violence and of conflict. This is why names such as syncretism, mestizaje and creolization allow to describe more specifically the kind of process involved. Secondly, as the author takes the example of the hybrid language called Spanglish, we can say that the two components mixed in the process (here, English and Spanish) are pure themselves: each culture is itself the result of past hybridizations, and the idea of pure, absolute essence of one culture is in fact a biased vision of the process, when one observes the culture at a precise moment in time. The author suggests that better understanding the process of hybridization is a way to relativize conflicts between cultures, and to prevent conflicts predicted by Samuel Huntington in Clash of Civilizations.

With globalization, increased economic exchanges and economic segregations imply more phenomena of hybridization but with newer conditions. For instance, in Latin America, Spanish investments are considerably increasing, which represent both an opportunity and a challenge for Latin American culture to express itself. This doesn’t mean global and national cannot be reconciled: the process of glocalization hopefully manages to do it.

The chapter 7 lists several ways in which modernity challenges the way to see culture. It addresses urban culture in Latin America, evolving with the political situation (dictatorship, populism…), with globalization, with social protests,… “New” technologies (the author writes in the 1990s) endanger the very idea of collection (precious, unique, physical items). Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are other new processes that heavily modify the traditional way to perceive culture in Latin America, as some places lose a cultural trait that was attached to them or regain it or gain a new one (such as the maquiladoras along the border between the Mexico and the US). And even Latin American comic strips can now tackle with humor social problems.

Reaction to Mass Media readings

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I explain in this blog my reaction to the readings of the week: “Big Snakes on the Street and Never Ending Stories: The Case of Venezuelan Telenovelas” from Imagination Beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture, by Nelson Hippolyte Ortega; and an extract from Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, by Alex Bellos.

Hippolyte Ortega’s text deals with the history of telenovelas, a form of Latin American TV shows reminiscent of North American soap operas but with its own codes. The ancestors of the genre were radionovelas in the 1940s but the first telenovelas appeared in the 70s and the 80s, produced by several Latin American countries for their own domestic market. Enjoyed by the whole family, telenovelas deal with love triangles, Manichean stories and their plot is artificially lengthened for the show to last longer. However, in 1992, a Venezuelan telenovela, Por estas calles, managed to introduce new elements in this old formula: instead of relying on the traditional plot, it mirrored the scandals and the social problems of the country at that time, allowing the audience to identify strongly with the struggle of the characters. With time however, the telenovela eventually returned to the stereotypical formula but Hippolyte Ortega states that nonetheless it has managed to illustrate the ability of Latin America culture to combine opposite elements, such as mass distribution and popular appraisal.

Bellos’s text deals with football in the Brazilian imaginary. The first third of the extract is dedicated to the defeat of Brazil to Uruguay in the World Cup of 1950. The writer meets with different personalities (players from both teams, the designer of the Brazilian shirt…) to collect testimony and analyse the importance of this sport event in the mind of the country. From the reader’s perspective, the overemphasize on this football game can at times appear extravagant (it is described as a national disaster, while the country just had been freed from dictatorship and that WWII ended five years earlier) but nonetheless the text allows to realize the prominence of this memory in Brazil culture. Then the extract explains how indigenous culture has contributed to the Brazilian culture, and how indigenous players are able to reconcile this sport with their own traditions. Then Bellos describes the life of Garrincha, one of Brazil’s iconic footballers. The final part of the extract describes the supporter group called “the Hawks of the Faithful”, an example of a group gathering football fans that progressively turned into infamous hooligans.

Reaction to Transculturation

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I explain in this blog my reaction to the readings of the week: the chapter “On the Social Phenomenon of ‘Transculturation’ and its Importance in Cuba” from Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar by Fernando Ortiz; and “Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy” by Mark Millington, extracted from Bulletin of Latin American Research.

The first text is from Fernando Ortiz, a Cuban anthropologist from the first half of the twentieth century. He creates and justifies the new word “transculturation” (to replace the term “acculturation” that he believes is inadequate) and uses it to briefly summarize the history of Cuban culture. Transculturation describes the process of transition from one culture to another (with the loss of one’s original culture and the creation (instead of simple adoption) of another culture), with all the social repercussions associated. In Cuba, this process was undergone both by Spanish immigrants (Renaissance workers from poor background arriving in the island with high responsibility) and by African slaves (forcefully torn from their home culture to be used as labour in the new colony).

The second text takes place in the 21rst century. Now, the word “transculturation” is widely accepted, like the word “hybridisation”. The writer, Mark Millington, refers to the text of Ortiz. He criticizes the two words. He is harsher against “hybridisation” because it is conflicting with “hybridity”, its definition still remains imprecise and it has political connotations. Millington seems to agree more on transculturation, though he is not entirely convinced. Ortiz left some points unclear on the definition, such as the idea that transculturation can be experienced at different intensity (the migration of Spaniards / the enslavement of Africans). There is also some doubt about whether transculturation is completely separate from acculturation (movement into another culture). Other recent anthropologists have also argued that the word cannot fully explain the inequalities in Latin America, that it doesn’t offer a solution to this problem and it is hard to assess its relevance in today’s modern world, outside of only Latin America. Yet Millington admits the term transculturation, coined by Ortiz, does have its pros: it allows for an analysis that takes individual actions and realities, as well as local processes into account, so that the study does not remain abstract.