• Search for:

• Recent Posts

  • The end of popular culture?
  • The LAST Blog
  • Ftubol y telenovelas
  • Transculturacion
  • Mestizaje

• Blogroll

  • French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies
  • Latin American Studies
  • SPAN364: Survey of Spanish-American Literature to the 1820s
  • SPAN365: Magical Realism Reconsidered
  • SPAN401: Spanish-English Translation
  • SPAN404: Cinema of Mexico

• Contributors

  • Ana´s blog
  • Andrea Azcona
  • Annabelle693’s Blog
  • annamarieke
  • Cennet Bahcesi
  • Earth Lives Connection
  • El Rincon
  • Javier’s LAST 201 Blog
  • jen gebert’s blog
  • jtraynor
  • kieron_hodgson
  • L@sT 2001 –>PoPul@R CulTuRe iN L@tiN AmErIC@
  • LAST 201
  • Last two-oh-one…
  • Latin American Pop Culture
  • Latin American Studies
  • Latin American Studies 201
  • Lluvia
  • maite’s blog for LAST201
  • Mercy’s Blog
  • POPULAR CULTURE IN
  • Popular Culture in Latin America
  • Posthegemony
  • ree00
  • RF. LAST 201 pop culture in LA
  • Salvador’s Spanish Class Blog
  • Sebastian’s blog
  • Sush Mgush
  • Taylor Cole LAST 201
  • tithflo
  • Tory’s blog for LAST201

As a lot of you already said in your blogs, this text was amazingly long and dense! I am sorry to be late posting my comment but I have to say I really had a hard time this week trying to find time between my mid-terms and my medical appointments, …

In class yesterday, Salvador and Sophie came up with a couple of very good points in our discussion of William Rowe and Vivian Schelling’s Memory and Modernity. Indeed, their criticisms apply to a greater or lesser extent to much discussion of Latin A…

William Rowe and Vivian Schelling’s Memory and Modernity is a hugely ambitious undertaking. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone else who has tried to replicate it: they aim to provide a guide to Latin American popular culture that covers b…

I don’t know very much about Latin American popular culture either, and I agree that this article provided a lot of information. I still feel like there is so much more I’d need to know to really understand it though. I also wrote about popular Cat…

hi! it wouldn’t let me post my comment without a live journal account, so i’m just going to do it here.I also thought the article was very very long! I feel like it was a lot to take in at once, which may have hindered my comprehension a bit. I was gla…

Even after the class discussion, I still feel as though I am plodding aimlessly through “The Faces of Popular Culture”. The only way I am able to make sense of everything that Rowe and Shelling cover is to view popular culture in latin america as an im…

Even after the class discussion, I still feel as though I am plodding aimlessly through “The Faces of Popular Culture”. The only way I am able to make sense of everything that Rowe and Shelling cover is to view popular culture in latin america as an im…

I found this article very long… however also very interesting once I got into it. The way it describes various times in history, customs, traditions, art, ‘culture’ and ways of life really had my imagination working. I could really visualize the plays, poetry, and festivities. It is a difficult task to summarize a culture/popular culture of a single country let alone all of Latin America! I think that this is made possible by the extensive amount of media that people are subjected to and/or have available to them at all times. The media enables the spread of Latin American poplar culture and in turn allows various aspects of popular culture to spread over huge areas faster than ever before and makes the idea of a similar pop-culture covering such a huge land mass more understandable.

I think that Rowe and Schelling’s article did a good job of explaining the variety of different and sometimes very similar popular cultures present in Latin America. From this article I have gathered that…Popular Culture in Latin America consists of a medley or mixing of older and newer ways of living. Basically the way life was before colonization mixed with some new ideas and ways of being that the Spanish brought… and then again mixed with the even more contemporary ideas of today. The idea that popular culture is constantly evolving and developing became clearer throughout the article. Religion is an example of popular culture in Latin America specifically the mixing of indigenous beliefs and European Catholicism.

I really liked the descriptions on page 61 about music and who used the different instruments. I also love that music continues to be included in the cycle of the seasons in the southern highlands of Peru and the altiplano region of Bolivia still today. I found the connections between music and everyday life particularly interesting. The Journey to the museum starting on page 64 was also really interesting when you see the development or incorporation of modern world things like airplanes with the traditional forms of art.

It was hard for me to get through this article, but only because it was so long! I really enjoyed it and I think it will be a great reference for the rest of the semester. I didn’t know much about pop-culture in Latin America before taking this class, but after reading this article I feel like I have a basic idea and place to work from for the coming weeks!

 

After three weeks of class discussions and many pages of readings, I’m sure many people will be glad to finally get directly to the question, “What is popular culture in Latin America?”  In terms of beginning to answer this extremely complex question, I felt that Rowe and Schelling’s article, “The Faces of Popular Culture” brought up several excellent points that I hope we explore further in class. 

The first of these is the concept of dual meanings and subversion in popular culture.  As a region of conquest and colonialism, Latin America is a region of extreme cultural interaction.  In the present day, several hundred years after the conquest, we can see a subversion or sublimation of many indigenous cultural concepts and ideologies into the predominating Western culture that was imposed upon them.  I felt that Schelling and Rowe did a wonderful job of highlighting the process of this sublimation and the dual meanings or hybridized culture that results without removing agency from indigenous people.  Too often, the results of the conquest are viewed in terms of victimizer and victimized—an idea that suggests a uni-directional transmission of culture from Europe to the Americas.  This article emphasizes the “exchange” part of the so-called “Columbian exchange” and demonstrates that important pieces of “traditional” indigenous culture have survived.  In addition, I appreciate that the article’s authors do not try to gloss over the negative aspects of conquest and colonization as well; they do well to point out the negative implications of European conquest while describing the resilience of popular indigenous culture. 

Secondly, I found the authors’ description of national “folk-culture” particularly interesting with regards to the way national identity is created.  Using the example of Mexico or Guatemala, I feel that when studying Latin America it is extremely important to recognize the national/political dialogue that appropriates indigenous culture and heritage and uses it to create an international image of the country as a whole.  Rowe and Schelling discuss the Mexican government’s efforts to represent the nation in terms of its “Aztec” heritage—a concept which seems at odds with the large percentage of the population which is descended from European heritage.  Another example of this can be seen in Guatemala’s use of indigenous Mayan identity to represent the nation, while simultaneously persecuting Mayan individuals during the 1980’s civil war. 

Although this article was extremely long, I found it extremely helpful in defining (what I hope to be) our course of study for much of the term. 

Hi everyone, I had some troubles finishing this reading, but I succeed at the end. I found this article really interesting and really complete, it described many aspects of the Latin America’s popular culture. Although it was very long with plenty of…

After doing the readings for this week, I was still not convinced that one could explain Latin American culture in a few months. For crying out loud, it would take an entire course to truly understand the popular country of a single Latin American country. HOWEVER, I think I found one factor that identifies popular […]

While this reading covers a large body of information I don’t think any article could represent the cultural identity or face of a region with so many backgrounds. I thought it was interesting how it focused on the middle ground between the traditiona…

Rowe and Schelling’s article, The Faces of Popular Culture does a remarkable job of communicating just how much the development of culture is a process. In some instances it seems that what functions as popular culture does so as a result of hybridization of syncretism. The popularity of a number of cultural elements […]

The text of Rowe William, who is a professor of religious philosophy, proposes to understand the concept of popular culture in Latin America. In class, we have already discussed about the concepts of culture and people. But, to what extent, popular culture in Latin America is unique?
First, popular culture in Latin America seems to be […]

 

This week’s reading "The Faces of Popular Culture" by Rowe and Schelling explored the way traditional indigenous cultures of Latin America and modern culture coexist. One often thinks that the isolated native Indian populations of Latin America live suspended in time, untouched by the characteristics of modernization that we in the West are familiar with: Capitalism, urbanization, globalization, etc. Rowe and Schelling show that this notion that these civilizations are unchanging and placid is not always true by exploring how native Latin American culture has evolved with Spanish conquest, religion, modernization, capitalism, etc.

My favourite part of the reading is the description of the transition of Mexican artefacts from everyday indigenous life to the museum. It is interesting to note that many decades ago, Mexico, along with most other Latin American countries, started using their indigenous cultures as the markers of its national identities. One can draw a clear parallel between this and the use of Native culture to represent Canada. It is unusual how the culture of the historically oppressed, low socio-economic indigenous populations is often commodified for tourism’s sake. Indigenous culture is used to represent the countries internationally (the first example coming to mind being the use of the Inuksuk as the Vancouver 2010 Olympic symbol). With regards to the commodification of Mexican artefacts, Rowe and Schelling state that “The urban and tourist consumption of these artefacts causes them to be increasingly decontextualized and resignified on their journey to the museum and the boutique” (p 65). The authors are talking about the way common vessels of indigenous cultures are not being used for practicality or ritual anymore, but for tourism consumption and anthropological examination. I cannot say whether this is a negative thing or not, as there are both pros and cons to the issue. This tourist and anthropological interest in indigenous cultures is not necessarily harmful (although it can be), on the contrary, it promotes protection and general respect of the cultures. However, the “decontextualizing” of the cultures is where there is a problem, as when the culture is commercialized, its physicality, purpose and cultural/spiritual meaning is altered, resulting in the non-original vessel of culture. Maybe the situation is not exclusively positive or negative, as the alteration of indigenous culture is, in some sense, development, as it is not becoming stale and static in the shadow of modernization. The authors go on to describe how Joaquin Lopez Antay, a great escultor creates retablos that have obviously evolved with the interests and demands of the public. I found interesting the claim that Lopez Antay is creative, inventive and even progressive in his craft while retaining the “richness of the tradition”. Alterations for commercial and investigative purpose to indigenous culture render it incongruent to the original, as it is “decontextualized”. However, perhaps this decontextualization is a more desirable alternative than the complete eradication of a culture, or its extinction due to its inability to evolve with the rest of the world.

 

Reading Rowe & Schelling work was very interesting to me because I believe it not only touched on many aspects of popular culture in Latin America, but also they demonstrated the complexity of it. I could spend hours discussing about futbol, music and …

Creo que definir la cultura Latino Americana es imposible hacerlo en unas cuantas páginas, porque tal y como se describe en el ensayo, cada ciudad, cada región y cada pequeña parte del continente tiene rasgos, ideas, costumbres, etc. Que forman par…

After reading the text, we could define popular culture in Latin America as a mix between the rural and the urban culture. Popular culture is both traditional art but also what Rowe and Schelling call the “culture industry”. Peasants who immigrated in cities have imported their handicraft which has been mixed then with the urban mass-media culture. However, it’s worth noticing that even traditional culture is a kind of mixture; for instance, the Indians also import their own music instruments so there is a mix between modernity and tradition. But the problem is when traditional art is decontextualized and turned into a timeless piece of art, “object of aesthetic appreciation”. All this folklore is removed from the historical and social contexts. The authors speak about “folklorization, standardization in conformity with Western tonality and internationalization”.
I would like to focus on the terms “folklorization” and “standardization”. Folklore refers to what is produced by the people: song, ceremonies… and folklorization implies that some people choose what they want to be folklore in a particular culture. What the authors mean by folklorization and standardization is that popular culture in Latin America is always modified in order to fit to the Western standards.  Indigenous art is standardized to fit to what the Westerners think it should be so it is no longer art in sense of a true creation.  Handicraft is produced to be consumed so the traditional culture does no longer have any sense. Urbanization and the development of the market create a standardized art.
However, Rowe and Schelling show that a traditional rural society could survive by mixing rural and urban culture which means that modernization and urbanization didn’t destroy traditional culture but just changed it. Urbanization created a new kind of popular culture. Most of the peasants who settle in town become very poor and are the main consumers of the culture industry promoted by the communication technologies like the TV or the radio. Football is another aspect of popular culture in Latin America. At the beginning football grounds have been constructing by authorities and factory owners to calm down the strikes led against the expulsion of the poor from the city centre so all these examples show that urbanization provoked a lot of cultural shifts and disruptions. Popular culture has various faces: a traditional, rural, urban and modern one. Culture is not fixed but changing and adapts itself to the society changes.  Popular culture is made by the people and evolves with them.

While this article was very long and covered an incredibly large body of information that was at times a bit daunting, it was nonetheless, very interesting. It would be impossible to attempt to comment on everything so I will comment on a few key theme…

When I entered this class I sported a very limited amount of knowledge about Latin American Culture and I can honestly say that this article has helped immensely. I enjoyed the article, some areas lost me a bit, like the part about theatrical performan…

The Faces of Popular Culture. Chapter 2. Before I started reading this weeks reading I counted how many pages it were, as I usually tend to do. 101 pages. I already anticipated a long read. 101 pages. This is going to take me hours I thought. I should …

Although a bit long-winded at times, I think this article did a great job in summing up the many facets of Latin American popular culture. I feel like the readings from the past 2 weeks have led up to the reading of this article on “The Faces of Popula…

What is Popular Culture in Latin America?“The Faces of Popular Culture” reveals several facets of Latin American culture, so for my blog I will comment on only a few main points. I thought it was interesting how the authors portrayed the moderniza…

How do you describe the popular culture of a place as large and as diverse as Latin America? By writing A LOT. This weeks reading was long, but it was interesting. I’m not exactly sure how to go about writing a 400 word response to over 100 pages, so…

This week’s assigned reading concerns the origins of modern popular culture in Latin America and the forces that shaped it. The authors take into account the effects of exposure to Spanish and African cultures, and thoroughly examine the nuances of L…

keep looking »

• 

• Categories

  • Administration
  • Arguedas and Asturias
  • Bellos and Hippolyte Ortega
  • Campbell and Taussig
  • Garcia Canclini
  • Gomez Peña etc.
  • Introductions
  • Ortiz etc.
  • Overview
  • Peron and Borges
  • Responses
  • Review
  • Rowe and Schelling
  • Vasconcelos and Wade
  • Williams and Keesing

• Recent Comments