Jan
27
The Faces of Popular Culture…
Posted by: Brian | January 27, 2009 | Comments Off on The Faces of Popular Culture…
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!
