Thanks so much for this, marcos, excellent distraction from the rather boring paid work I am supposed to be dong right now.
I find fascinating the way that social contradictions and tensions work themselves out in popular culture. (I use the word "contradiction" in the dialectical sense, as the inherently unstable expression of competing social forces and ideologies aka versions of the truth. These contradictions inevitably become the subject matter of jokes and other expressions of popular culture.)
Just before I left academia I was becoming interested in Mexican and Brazilian cultural studies.
Cultural studies developed originally in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to the inability of either traditional Marxist cultural analysis or mainstream sociology to come to terms with the insights of post-structuralism, post-modernism, semiotics and other attempts to grapple with the mutable and constructed nature of meanings in a media-saturated globalized world.
By the end of the last millennium, cultural studies was becoming institutionalised in academia and hence less interesting and critical -- I'm using "critical" in the social scientific sense as meaning questioning of assumptions -- so I turned my attention to the cultural studies of the borderlands, looking at the nature of social and symbolic action at physical, metaphorical, and cultural frontiers, and no surprise, the best work was coming out of the hybrid cultures Mexico and Brazil.
A good argument can be made that in many ways Mexico and Brazil were the first post-modern societies, fervently mixing cultures, ethnicities, and societies even before the advent of modern technology and communication.
Unfortunately for both countries, due to the contexts of power in which the hybridization was occurring, it led to rigidly hierarchical societies. IMO the extent to which these hierarchies can be dismantled without destabilizing the entire society will be the measure of both Mexico's and Brazil's future.
P.S. How to piss off United Statians -- point out that Brazil was the first "United States" in the New World, but rather than solipsistically adding "of America", they appended just "of Brasil".
LC |
