Punk in Peru
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Soccer in the Sun & Shadow
As someone who does not have an affinity for any sport, reading about someone’s utter devotion to sport sure was intriguing. It is quite clear that soccer isn’t just a sport for its fans. It is their dream, their escape, a religion, and quite often a battlefield. Acknowledging this is important because when an artefact of popular culture is popularized by the people, especially to this extent, looking at why it reached this level of popularity is essential.
When describing becoming a professional player as one’s dream, Galeano emphasizes on the notoriety of the career. The author describes the way women desire the players and how children desire to be one of them. When a celebrity reaches this level of stardom is when fans begin to think of them in an non-human way. They become a figurehead, representative of all that encapsulates them, quite like the way players are described in this text. Galeano describes them and their different roles as if observing animals at a zoo. These aren’t real people, their sole vitality is on the turf. Even the ball is considered an animal that needs to be tamed. It is interesting because Galeano also suggests that a fanatic has the same sole purpose is on the field, but in this zoo, all participants are part of the animals.
This also ties into the way Galeano draws comparison between the duty of playing soccer and the duty of serving your country. The fans watch and attend the spectacle as a form of escapism and the player serves to engulf and entertain. This is the purpose of essentially anyone with a following. To maintain relevance, they need to please and perform. With this comparison, it seems as though the player is at the hands of the fans. However, Galeano says the fans are ‘led about like sheep by their class enemies’ (p. 33). This is an interesting quote that pertains to our class discussions of what makes popular culture. Here, the fans are the ones who uphold the spectacle while the upper class profits off of their love for soccer. The people popularize it and the corporations profit. It is an interesting interdependent dynamic, makes you question what threatens it.
My question for this week is who holds the power here? Is it the fans or the players?
The Fighting Cholitas
This documentary was really interesting because it led me to a lot of introspection about entertainment. This was a phenomenon that I didn’t know much about. The concept of ‘chola’ that I have known is quite different and not characterized by skirt wearing. I also thought it was interesting that one of las cholitas noted that it is an honour to be a chola, yet they experience a large amount of discrimination. As well, a parallel can be drawn between our discussions of popular/high culture and one of the mother’s saying her daughter can choose to be a cholita at her own accord. This shows how some elements of popular culture allow for free agency.
This documentary automatically made me draw comparisons to Western culture. I thought of how women’s fighting gains a fascination or following from the public because the women are often sexualized. Here, the fascination with lucha libre comes from las cholitas being a bit of a marginalized group, the interesting premise of fighting in petticoats, and the audience participation. The audience is imperative to lucha libre. Both the audience and the fighters use lucha libre as a means to destress.
Lucha libre shows how two phenomena of popular culture, las cholitas and wrestling, can intermingle. It can be seen that these fights are entertaining because the cholitas are regarded as more of a phenomenon than real humans. Humiliation is encouraged because these women are thought of as lower. Across cultures, capitalizing off of an ostracized group is a popular premise. This is exemplified when they talk about how audience says that they watch because they show everything underneath their skirt and criticize them, but in reality there is no flashing.
My question for this week: What devices are available to us to liberate ourselves within our society? How does culture impact our ability to liberate ourselves?
The Cultural Life of Coca/The Coca War
I took a couple anthropology classes last semester and learned about the coca rituals so these two pieces were something I was already interested in. However, I didn’t know the plant was culturally significant so recently as well. The tradition of a newly married couple planting and harvesting coca and raising the plant with their family was something I found very sentimental.
‘The Cultural Life of Coca’ depicts the cultural significance and just a few of the various ritualistic traditions that coca has in Latin American culture. The piece introduces the plant with the more grand uses of it, then finishes by describing its casual and social uses.
‘The Coca War’ describes the brutal ways in which the US War on Drugs destroyed coca crops and impacted Latin American lives. Militarization was introduced to stop production. This was a frustrating read because you can identify the source of a lot of problems. Of course, this is not the sole source, but it surely added to hundreds of years of prejudice. In the US, coca had no cultural bearings and was solely associated with cocaine. Thus, rather than looking intrinsically, they went to the source to try and stop problems within their own country. This led to the destruction of the livelihood for many innocent victims. This also led to an association with Central and South America with drugs.
You can notice the actor-observer effect at work here. The actor-observer effect is the notion of thinking other people do bad things because they’re bad, but when I do bad things, it’s situational. The US saw the popularity of coca in Bolivia as a 2-D issue and a reflection of bad character, lacking to take in the multifaceted nature of the plant. On the other hand, they took the multifaceted nature of their own country into consideration and deflected the issue onto others. This led to hostility and brutality. My second point is that this also has heavy notes of nationalism which had increasing significance, especially at this time.
Foreigners enter with a lack of awareness or cultural intelligence and their actions have fatal consequences. It is a narrative repeated over and over and over. My question this week is in the context of other cultures, what is the coca plant comparable to? Not only in the act of destruction, but also comparable in cultural significance and rituals.
Castalleno’s Cooking Lesson
As someone who’s favourite novel became ‘Gone Girl’ at too young of an age, I loved this piece. Someone please get Amy Dunne on this.
This piece details the dichotomy between the expectations of a ‘wife’ and the humanity of a woman. Rosario confirms that a woman’s place is in the kitchen and that she felt learning any skills outside the role of a domesticated woman was useless. She furthers this by explaining that domestication is supposed to be biologically engraved in women, yet she feels out of place in her role. She also compares herself to a slave by saying ‘I can’t change masters’. This emphasizes the feeling of permanent constraint and eternal domestication.
Rosario also emphasizes the objectification of women when she wants to remind her husband whom he is making love to. This shows that women are not viewed as human; a wife simply holds a place and they do not exist outside of it. This also leads to the realization of what is expected of a wife and their sexuality, (aka the Madonna-whore complex which is something that I could go on for days about). Rosario says ‘its rigidity is incompatible with the spontaneity needed for making love’. This shows how a wife is expected to be pure, poised, and perfect, yet her role requires contradictory qualities that seem animalistic in comparison. There seems to be no overlap in a woman being a wife whilst also maintaining a sexual identity. Castalleno ultimately compartmentalizes her identity to ‘wife’. Using this as her sole identifier, despite adding ‘self-sacrificing little Mexican’ before it at the beginning, has an impact on Castalleno’s self-image. She constantly takes self deprecating jabs and even calls herself an imbecile.
Castalleno consistently emphasizes that her marriage is loveless by comparing it to being as dull as broiled beef and her husband laying on top of her to a gravestone. She says ‘Our meeting was due to accident. A happy one? It’s still too soon to say’ (347). This provides insight on how marriage happens in her culture. She says she met him and was quickly married, and despite an obvious resentment, she hopes that they will fall in love with each other one day.
Rosario says her ‘husband will resent the appearance of my dominance’. Do you think a woman can be both liberated and live a domesticated lifestyle? How do higher education, a career, and personal ambitions challenge the traditional role of a wife? Can they co-exist?
Week 3: The Pongo’s Dream
José Maria Arguedas reminds readers that in the end, what you get is what you give in ‘The Pongo’s Dream’. Immediately, the dynamic between the two main characters is set as the Master consistently dehumanizes Pongo. He does so by insisting Pongo to act as an animal and only ever naming him ‘Indian’. The racism in this is quite apparent as it was a common racial stereotype to compare people of colour to animals. It is important to note that Pongo was polite and efficient at what he did. Arguedas says, ‘whatever he was told to do, he did well’. This demonstrates the impact of the brutality and control of the colonizers. This is also evident when Pongo says that he can’t know his worth later on which emphasizes the impact of domination on the people.
Something that I found interesting was that Pongo didn’t pray in the dream because he didn’t believe it was his place. My take on this was to emphasize that karma exists separately from religion. You do not need religion to be a good person, nor does it make you a good person, and it doesn’t protect you from the consequences of your actions. Arguedas follows Pongo saying that he didn’t believe it was his place by saying ‘nor did any place belong to him’. Again, this reiterates the immense feeling of displacement and defeat following colonization.
The eternal licking exchange between Pongo and the Master epitomizes the overall message I took from this reading. In their exchange, Pongo is in undesirable circumstances, but ultimately has it better than the Master. The colonized is treated like sh*t, the colonizer is given privilege and false grandiosity, yet faces sh*t (literally). I also thought that this was intended to be endearing and uplifting for those facing the devastating impacts of colonization.
Class question: Magical realism is quite popular in Latin American works. Which elements of this work do you think are magical realism (if any) and how do they tie to the religious aspect?
Week 2: Postage Stamps
Jack Child’s article on Latin American Postage Stamps was truly enlightening. Postage stamps were something that I had always taken for face value and never thought too deeply about. Little did I know that they often facilitate propaganda.
Child introduced me to 3 levels of popular culture; folk, mass, and high. He says that postage stamps fall into the broader definition of popular culture as they derive from the government, not the people. This illustrates that even though the government is intended to represent and serve the people, their output is not necessarily a direct reflection of the people. Yet, postage stamps are essential and, therefore, popularized by the people. This challenges popular culture as this element of ‘popular culture’ is popularized by necessity, not purely by choice. (Side note: are masks considered part of pop culture now?)
This emphasizes the historical element of popular culture. Historical context is imperative to understanding what Child calls ‘the Trichotomy of Signs’. For example, the Argentine postage stamps in response to the US government refusing to import their cattle. It would be obtuse if they were issued today, yet they were a direct reflection of current issues at the time. With historical significance in mind, how do we determine when something is no longer considered popular culture? I think that popular culture can easily become ahistorical based on its level of popularity. Of course, that becomes subjective again, but the point that I am trying to make is that the more relevant in the people, the more likely something is to become a staple to pop culture.
Another problem arises with the term ‘the people’. Postage stamps began to contain nationalistic messages following the rise in prevalence of nationalism. Nationalism is considered a newer concept and gave the people a new ‘community’ to resonate or identify with. Presently, there are an umpteen number of groups for people to identify with. Each group can engage with its own culture, thus creating their own popular culture within their group. This challenges the definition of pop culture because there can be popular culture within a subgroup that has not been spread to the larger group. So, who do we classify as ‘the people’? Is it on a nation-state basis? How specific can we get with demographics when discussing popular culture with it still being ‘popular’? Does popular carry the connotation of mutual agreeance within a population (meaning that popular culture is a direct reflection of the wants of the people)? In this article, nationalistic messages are essentially forced onto citizens through postage stamps.
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Black Orpheus Comments
At the beginning of Black Orpheus, a sense of unity and community is established as everyone recognizes and acknowledges each other while walking down the streets. Following this, there is a clip of a little boy flying a kite. The kite begins to fly beyond his control and there is a minor struggle. Introductions are typically very important in revealing themes in films so it made me wonder if it was a metaphor. However, with lack of context in the first few minutes it would be hard to decipher the meaning and symbolism of this ‘potential’ metaphor.
Then, a woman – the main character, I am guessing – is called a ‘caged bird’ by a man on the street. This is a commonly used term and is similar to the saying ‘a damsel in distress’. I predict that this will be important because, immediately after, there is a clip of a woman being trapped in a crowd of men, looking lost and anxious.
Something important to note was the flamboyancy of the crowd. There was a lot of dancing, singing, and drums in the streets which is a stereotype of Latin American culture. These scenes, loud in more than one way, juxtapose clips of silent, empty streets. This had me wondering if this was intended to represent some sort of dichotomy or rather to put emphasis on the potential metaphor of the ‘caged bird’.
My question is: how do stereotypes in representation aid and affect a culture?
Personal Introduction
Hello!
My name is Jada and I am a first year student. I was born in the US, but live in Canada. I studied Spanish for many years and even studied in Spain for a bit. I have Chilean family and am very interested in the culture. I am very excited for this class! I took Japanese Popular Culture last term and am curious to see if this course uses similar approaches to the subject.