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Strategies for Entering and
Leaving Modernity
NESTOR GARCIA CANCLINI
Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. L6pez
Foreword by Renato Rosaldo
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University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
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1 I From Utopias to the Market
What does it mean to be modern? It is possible to condense the current in-
terpretations by saying that four basic movements constitute modernity: an
emancipating project, an expansive project, a renovating project, and a de-
mocratizing project.
By the emancipating project we understand the secularization of cultural
fields, the self-expressive and self-regulated production of symbolic prac-
tices, and their development in autonomous markets. The rationalization of
social life and increasing individualism form part of this emancipating pro-
ject, especially in big cities.
We call the expansive project the tendency of modernity that seeks to ex-
tend the knowledge and possession of nature, and the production, circula-
tion, and consumption of goods. In capitalism, this expansion is motivated
chiefly by the increasing of profits; but in a broader sense it is manifested in
the promotion of scientific discoveries and industrial development.
The renovating project is comprised of two aspects, which are frequently
complementary: on the one hand, the pursuit of constant improvement and
innovation proper to a relation to nature and society that is liberated from
all sacred prescription over how the world must be; on the other hand, the
need to continually reformulate the signs of distinction that mass consump-
tion wears away.
We call the democratizing project that movement of modernity that trusts
in education, the diffusion of art, and specialized knowledge to achieve
12
From Utopias to the Market I 13
rational and moral evolution. This extends from the Enlightenment to
UNESCO, from positivism to education programs or the popularization of
science and culture initiated by liberal and socialist governments and alter-
native and independent groups.
Emancipated Imagination?
As these four projects develop, they enter into conflict. As a first entry into
this contradictory development, we will analyze one of the most potent and
constant utopias in modern culture, from Galileo to contemporary universi-
ties, from the artists of the Renaissance period to the vanguards: to construct
spaces in which knowledge and creation can ' unfold autonomously. How-
ever, economic, political, and technological modernization-born as part of
that process of secularization and independence-proceeded to form an all-
encompassing social fabric, which subordinates the renovating and experi-
mental forces of symbolic production.
To capture the meaning of this contradiction, I see no more favorable
place than the disjuncture between modern aesthetics and the socioeco-
nomic dynamic of artistic development. While theorists and historians exalt
the autonomy of art, the practices of the market and of mass communica-
tion-sometimes including museums-foment the dependence of artistic
goods upon non-aesthetic processes.
Let us begin with three authors-]iirgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and
HowardS. Becker-who have studied cultural autonomy as a defining com-
ponent of modernity in their respective countries: Germany, France, and the
United States. Despite diverse national histories and theoretical differences,
they develop complementary analyses of the secularizing meaning of the
formation of fields (Bourdieu) or worlds (Becker) of art. They find the dis-
tinctive indicator of the modern development of art to be the self-expressive
and self-regulated production of symbolic practices.
Habermas takes up Max Weber's affirmation that the modern is consti-
tuted when culture becomes independent of substantive reason conse-
crated by religion and metaphysics, and consists of three autonomous
spheres: science, morality, and art. Each one is organized in a regime struc-
tured by its specific problem-knowledge, justice, taste-and governed by
appropriate instances of valorization, that is, truth, normative rectitu&,
authenticity, and beauty. The autonomy of each dominion is gradually in-
stitutionalized, and generates specialized professionals who become expert
authorities in their area. This specialization accentuates the distance be-
tween the culture of the professional and that of the public, between scien-
tific or artistic fields and everyday life. Nevertheless, Enlightenment
philosophers, the protagonists of this enterprise, proposed at the same time
to extend specialized knowledge in order to enrich daily life and rationally
organize society. The growth of science and art, liberated from religious
tutelage, would help to control natural forces, broaden the understanding
of the world, progress morally, and make social institutions and relations
more just.
The extreme contemporaneous differentiation between hegemonic mor-
ality, science, and art, and the disconnection of all three from everyday life,
discredited the Enlightenment utopia. There has never been a lack of at-
tempts to join scientific knowledge with ordinary practices, art with life, the
great ethical doctrines with common conduct, but the results of these move-
ments have been poor, according to Habermas. Is modernity, then, a lost
cause or an inconclusive project? With respect to art, he maintains that we
must take up and deepen the modern project of autonomous experimenta-
tion so that its renovating power does not dry up. At the same time, he sug-
gests that we find other ways of inserting specialized culture into everyday
praxis so that the latter does not become impoverished through the repeti-
tion of traditions. Perhaps it is possible to achieve this with new policies of
reception and appropriation of professional knowledge, democratizing so-
cial initiative in such a way that people become "capable of developing insti-
tutions of their own that can set limits on the internal dynamic and the im-
peratives of an almost autonomous economic system and its administrative
complements" (1983, 13).
The Habermasian defense of the modern project has received criticism,
such as that of Andreas Huyssen, who objects that it facilely purifies moder-
nity of its nihilistic and anarchistic impulses. He attributes this omission to
the philosopher's aim of rescuing the emancipatory potential of the En-
lightenment in the face of the cynical that confuses reason with
domination in France and Germany at the beginning of the 1980s, when
Habermas read the lecture just cited (1983) in accepting the Adorno Prize
(Huyssen 1987). In both countries, artists abandoned the political commit-
ments of the previous decade, replacing documentary experiments in nar-
rative and theater with autobiographies, and political theory and the social
sciences with mythical and esoteric revelations. \\fhile for the French
modernity would be more than anything an aesthetic question, whose
source would be Nietzsche and and for many young Germans
getting rid of rationalism was equivalent to liberating themselves from
domination, Habermas attempts to recover the liberating version of ratio-
nalism that promoted the Enlightenment.
His Enlightenment reading of modernity would seem to be conditioned,
we would add, by two risks Habermas detected in modern oscillations. In
examining Marcuse and Benjamin, he noted that overcoming the autonomy
of art for political purposes could be harmful, as happened in the fascist cri-
tique of modern art and its reorganization in the service of a repressive mass
aesthetic (1985, 13tff.); in his recent critique of the postmodernists he shows
that the apparently depoliticized aestheticism of recent generations has
tacit, and sometimes explicit, alliances with neoconservative regression.' To
refute them, Habermas digs deeply into that reading of modernity
that he began in Knowledge and Human Interest with the goal of restricting
the Enlightenment legacy to its emancipating vocation. Thus he places out-
side of the modern project what it has of the oppressor and makes it difficult
to think what it means to say that modernity brings with it both rationality
and what threatens rationality.
Habermas's trajectory exemplifies how thought about modernity is con-
structed in dialogue with premodern and postmodern authors, according to
the positions those interpreters adopt in the artistic and intellectual field.
Would it not be consistent with the recognition Habermas himself makes
about the insertion of theory into social and intellectual practices to con-
tinue the philosophical reflection with empirical investigations?
Two sociologists, and Becker, reveal that modern culture is dis-
tinguished from all previous periods in that it constitutes itself in an au-
tonomous space within the social structure. Neither one deals extensively
with the question of modernity, but in fact their studies seek to explain the
dynamic of culture in secularized societies in which an advanced technical
and social division of labor exists and institutions are organized according
to a liberal model.
For Bourdieu, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a distinct period
in the history of culture was initiated as it integrated itself with relative in-
dependence into the artistic and scientific fields. As museums and galleries
are being created, works of art are valued without the coercion previously
imposed by religious powers in commissioning them for churches or by po-
litical powers in commissioning them for palaces. In those "specific in;
stances of selection and consecration;' artists no longer compete for theo-
logical approval or the complicity of the courtesans, but rather for "cultural
legitimacy" (1967, 135). The literary salons and the publishing houses will re-
organize literary practice in the same sense, beginning in the nineteenth
century. Each artistic field-the same as scientists with the development of
lay universities-becomes a space formed by intrinsic symbolic capitals.
The independence won by the artistic field justifies the methodological
autonomy of its study. Unlike most of the sociology of art and literature,
which deduces the meaning of works from the mode of production or from
the author's class origin, Bourdieu considers each cultural field to be guided
by its own laws. What the author does is conditioned not so much by the
global structure of society as by the system of relations established by the
agents linked to the production and circulation of the works. The sociologi-
cal investigation of art must examine how the cultural capital of each re-
spective field has been constituted and how the struggle for its appropria-
tion is carried out. Those who possess capital and those who aspire to
possess it unleash battles that are essential for understanding the meaning of
what is produced; but that competition involves a lot of complicity, and
through it the belief in the autonomy of the field is also affirmed. In modern
societies, when some power outside the field-the church or the govern-
ment-wants to intervene in the internal dynamics of artistic work by
means of censorship, artists suspend their confrontations in order to form
an alliance in defense of"freedom of expression."
How can the capitalist tendency to expand the market by increasing the
number of consumers be reconciled with this tendency to form specialized
audiences in restricted spheres? Is not the multiplication of products for
the purpose of increasing profits contradictory to the promotion of unique
works in modern aesthetics? Bourdieu gives a partial answer to this ques-
tion. He observes that the formation of specific fields of taste and knowl-
edge, in which certain goods are valued for their scarcity and limited to ex-
clusive consumers, serves to construct and renew the distinction of the
ehtes. In modern democratic societies, where there is no blood superiority
or titles of nobility, consumption becomes a fundamental area for estab-
lishing and communicating differences. In the face of the relative democra-
tization produced by mass access to products, the bourgeoisie needs
spheres that are separated from the urgencies of practical life in which ob-
jects are ordered-as in museums-for their stylistic affinities and not for
their utility.
To appreciate a work of modern art one has to know the history of the
field in which the work was produced, have sufficient competence to distin-
guish, by its formal characteristics, a Renaissance landscape from an Impres-
sionist or a hyperrealist one. This "aesthetic disposition:' which is acquired
through belonging to a social class-that is, by possessing economic and ed-
ucational resources that are also scarce-appears as a "gift," not as some-
thing one has but rather as something that one is. In this way, the separation
of the field of art serves the bourgeoisie by pretending that its privileges are
justified by something more than just economic accumulation. The differ-
ence between form and function-indispensable for modern art to be able
to advance in the experimentation of language and the renewal of taste-is
duplicated in social life in a difference between goods (efficient for material
reproduction) and signs (useful for organizing symbolic distinction). Mod-
ern societies simultaneously need exposure-to broaden the market and the
consumption of goods in order to increase the rate of profit-and distinc-
tion-which, in order to confront the massifying effects of exposure, re-
creates the signs that differentiate the hegemonic sectors.
Bourdieu's work, little attracted by the culture industry, does not help us
to understand what happens when even the signs and spaces of the elites are
massified and mixed with those of the popular. We have to start with Bour-
dieu but go beyond him in order to explain how the dialectic between expo-
sure and distinction is reorganized when museums receive millions of visi-
tors and classic or vanguard literary works are sold in supermarkets, or
made into videos.
But first let us complete the analysis of the autonomy of the artistic field
by looking at Howard S. Becker. As a musician, as well as a social scientist, he
is particularly sensitive to the collective and cooperative character of artistic
production. For that reason his sociology of art combines an affirmation of
the creative autonomy of art with a subtle recognition of the social ties that
condition it. Unlike literature and the visual arts, in which it was easier to
construct the illusion of the creator as a solitary genius whose work owed
nothing to anyone beyond himself or herself, a concert performance by an
orchestra requires the collaboration of a large number of people. It also im-
plies that the instruments have been made and maintained, that the musi-
cians learned to play them in schools, that the concert was publicized, and
that there is an audience educated by a musical history and with the avail-
able assets and time to attend and understand. In truth, all art presumes the
manufacture of the necessary physical artifacts, the creation of a shared con-
ventional language, the training of specialists and spectators in the use of
that language, and the creation, experimentation, or mix of those elements
to construct particular works. ,
It could be argued that in this constellation of tasks there are some excep-
tional ones that can only be carried out by especially gifted individuals. But
the history of art is full of examples in which it is difficult to establish such a
demarcation: sculptors and muralists who have part of their work done by
students or assistants; almost all jazz, in which composition is less important
than interpretation and improvisation; works like those of John Cage and
St<Yckhausen, which leave parts for the person who plays the work to create;
Duchamp when he puts a mustache on the Mona Lisa and makes Leonardo
da Vinci into "support personneV' Since the most advanced technologies in-
tervene creatively in the inspection and reproduction of art, the line between
producers and collaborators becomes less clear: a sound technician creates
montages of instruments recorded in different places, manipulates and elec-
tronically hierarchizes sounds produced by musicians of varying quality. Al-
though Becker maintains that the artist can be defined as "the person who
performs the central activity without which the work would not be art" (24-
25), he dedicates most of his work to examining how the meaning of artistic
acts is constructed in a relatively autonomous "art world"-not by the sin-
gularity of exceptional creators but rather by the agreements generated
among many participants.
At times "support groups" (interpreters, actors, editors, photographers)
develop their own interests and taste patterns such that they become protag-
onists in the creation and transmission of the works. As a result, what hap-
pens in the art world is a product of cooperation, but also of competition.
Competition tends to have economic limits but is organized mainly within
the "art world" according to the degree of adhesion to or transgression of the
conventions that regulate the practice. These conventions (for example, the
number of sounds that should be used as tonal resources, the appropriate
instruments for playing them, and the ways they may be combined) are ho-
mologous to what sociology and anthropology have studied as norms or
customs, and approximate what Bourdieu calls cultural capital.
Shared and respected by musicians, conventions make it possible for an
orchestra to function coherently and to communicate with the public. The
socioaesthetic system that guides the artistic world imposes heavy restric-
tions upon the "creators" and reduces to a minimum claims to be an indi-
vidual without dependencies. However, two features exist that differentiate
this conditioning in modern societies. One is that the restrictions agreed
upon within the artistic world do not derive from theological or political
prescriptions. The second is that in recent centuries there has been an in-
creasing opening up of possibilities for choosing nonconventional ways of
producing, interpreting, and communicating art, for which reason we find a
greater diversity of trends now than in the past.
This opening and plurality is peculiar to the modern epoch, in which eco-
nomic and political liberties and the greater diffusion of artistic techniques,
according to Becker, allow many persons to act, jointly or separately, to pro-
duce a variety of recurring acts. Liberal social organization (although Becker
does not call it that) gave the artistic world its autonomy and is the basis of
the modern way of making art: with a conditioned autonomy. At the same
time, the artistic world continues to have an interdependent relationship
with society, as is seen when modification of artistic conventions has reper-
cussions in social organization. Changing the rules of art is not only an aes-
thetic problem: it questions the structures with which the members of the
artistic world are used to relating to one another, and also the customs and
beliefs of the receivers. A sculptor who to make works out of earth,
in the open air, works that are not collectible, is challenging those who work
in museums, artists who aspire to display their work in them, and spectators
who see those institutions as supreme realms of the spirit.
While they establish shared forms of cooperation and comprehension,
the conventions that make it possible for art to be a social act also differenti-
ate those who are operating in already consecrated modes of making art
from those who find the artistic in breaking from what is agreed upon. In
modern societies, this divergence produces two forms of integration and
discrimination with respect to the audience. On the one hand, the artistic
work forms a "world" of its own around the knowledge and conventions
fixed by opposition to common knowledge, which is judged unworthy to
serve as the basis of a of art. The greater or lesser competition in the
apprehension of those specialized meanings distinguishes the "assiduous
and informed" from the "occasional" audience, and therefore the audience
that can or cannot "fully collaborate" with the artists in the common enter-
prise of staging and reception that gives life to a work (71).
On the other hand, innovators erode this complicity between a certain
development of art and certain audiences: at times, to create unexpected
conventions that increase the distance between themselves and the un-
trained sectors of the audience; in other cases-Becker gives many exam-
ples, from Rabelais to Philip Glass-incorporating into the conventional
language of the artistic world vulgar ways of representing the real. In the
midst of these tensions are constituted the complex and not at all schematic
relations between the hegemonic and the subaltern, the included and the eJ-
cluded. This is one of the causes for which modernity implies processes of
segregation as well as of hybridization between the various social sectors and
their symbolic systems.
Becker's anthropological and relativist perspective, which defines the
artistic not according to a priori aesthetic values but by identifying groups
of persons who cooperate in producing goods that at least they call art,
opens the way for nonethnocentric and nonsociocentric analyses of the
fields in which these activities are practiced. Their dedication to the work
and grouping processes, more than the works themselves, displaces the
question of aesthetic definitions-which never agree upon the repertory of
objects that merit the name of art--<>nto the social characterization of the
modes of production and interaction of artistic groups. It also makes it
possible to relate them comparatively among themselves and to other
classes of producers. As Becker says, in modernity the art worlds are multi-
ple and are not separated sharply among themselves nor from the rest of
social life; each one shares with other fields the management of personnel,
of economic and intellectual resources, and of mechanisms for distributing
goods and audiences.
It is curious that his examination of the internal structures of the artistic
\Vorld reveals centrifugal connections with society that are paid little atten-
tion by Bourdieu's external sociological analysis of the autonomy of cultural
fields. On the contrary, Becker's work is less solid when it deals with the con-
flicts between members of the art world and between distinct worlds, since
for hin1 the disputes-between artists and support personnel, for exam-
ple-are easily resolved through cooperation and the desire to bring artistic
labor to culmination in the work, or they remain a secondary tension with
respect to the mechanisms of collaboration that create solidarity among
members of the artistic world. For Bourdieu, each cultural field is essentially
a space of struggle for the appropriation of symbolic capital, and the trends
(conservative or heretical) are organized as a function of the positions they
have with respect to that capital (as either possessors or pretenders). The
place that cultural capital and competition for its appropriation occupy in
Bourdieu is filled in Becker's work by the conventions and accords that per-
mit the contenders to continue their work: "Conventions represent the con-
tinuous adjustment of the parts that cooperate with respect to the changing
conditions in which they are put into practice" (58).
The placement of artistic practices in the processes of social production
and reproduction, of legitimation and distinction, made it possible for
Bourdieu to interpret diverse practices as part of a symbolic struggle be-
tween classes and class fractions. He also studied the artistic manifestations
that Becker calls "nruve" and "popular" as an expression of the middle and
dominated sectors that are less integrated into the "legitimate," autonomous
culture of the elites.
In discussing the popular sectors, Bourdieu maintains that they are guided
by "a pragmatic and functionalist aesthetic" imposed "by an economic neces-
sity that condemns 'simple' and 'modest' people to 'simple' and ' modest'
tastes" (1979, 441); popular taste is opposed to the bourgeois and modern by
its incapacity to free certain activities of their practical meaning and give
them a different autonomous aesthetic meaning. For that reason, popular
practices are still defined, and devalued, by the same subaltern sectors, by al-
ways referring to them in terms of the dominant aesthetic, which is that of
those who supposedly know what true art is, namely, that which can be ad-
mired in accord with the freedom and disinterestedness of"sublime tastes."
Bourdieu relates diverse aesthetic and artistic practices in a scheme strati-
fied by the unequal appropriations of cultural capital. Although this gives
an explanatory power in relation to the global society that Becker does
not achieve, it is possible to wonder if the acts happen in this way today.
Bourdieu ignores the development of popular art itself, its capacity to man-
ifest autonomous nonutilitarian forms of beauty, as we will see in a later
chapter analyzing popular crafts and fiestas. He also does not examine the
restructuring of the classic forms of the cultured (the fine arts) and of pop-
ular goods upon being relocated within the media logic established by the
culture industry.
The Vanguards Are Gone, the Rituals of Innovation Remain
The vanguards took the search for autonomy in art to extremes, sometimes
trying to combine it with other movements of modernity-especially reno-
vation and democratization. Its ruptures, its conflictive relations with social
and political movements, its collective and personal failures can be read as
exasperated manifestations of the contradictions among modern projects.
Although today they are seen as the paradigmatic form of modernity,
some vanguards were born as attempts to stop being cultured and modern.
Various artists and writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries re-
jected the cultural patrimony of the West and what modernity was doing
with it. They were little interested in the advances nf bourgeois rationality
and well-being; industrial and urban development seemed dehumanizing to
them. The most radical of them converted this rejection into exile. RimbalJd
went to Africa and Gauguin to Tahiti to escape from their "criminal" society
"governed by gold"; Nolde went to the South Seas and Japan; Segall to
Brazil. Those who stayed, like Baudelaire, attacked the "mechanical degrada-
tion" of urban life.
There were, of course, those who enjoyed the autonomy of art and were
excited by individual and experimental freedom. For some, the lack of social
commitment became the symptom of an aesthetic life. Theophile Gautier
used to say that "any artist who proposes something other than the beautiful
is not, in our eyes, an artist;' and "Nothing is more beautiful than that which
has no use at all:'
But in many trends aesthetic freedom is joined with ethical responsibility.
Beyond Dadaist nihilism arose surrealism's hope of uniting artistic and so-
cial revolution. The Bauhaus school tried to overturn formal experimenta-
tion in favor of a new industrial and urban design, and the advances of the
vanguards in everyday culture; it sought to create a "community of artifices
without class differentiation that raises an arrogant barrier between the arti-
san and the artist," in which the opposition between the cold rationalism of
technological development and the creativity of art would be transcended.
The constructivists pursued all this, but with better opportunities for insert-
iilg themselves into the transformations of postrevolutionary Russia: Tatlin
and Malevitch were put in charge of applying their innovations in monu-
ments, posters, and other forms of public art; Arvatov, Rodchenko, and
many other artists went into industries in order to reformulate design, pro-
moted substantial changes in art schools with the goal of developing in the
students "an industrial attitude toward form" and making them "design en-
gineers" that would be useful in socialist planning (Arvatov). Everyone
thought that it was possible to deepen the autonomy of art and at the same
time reinscribe it in life, to generalize cultured experiences and convert them
into collective acts.
We all know how things ended up. Surrealism was dispersed and diluted
in a dizzying fit of internal struggles and excommunications. Bauhaus was
repressed by Nazism, but before the catastrophe it was already beginning to
manifest its naive fusion of technologiCal rationalism and artistic intuition,
structural difficulties that existed for inse-rting its functional renovation of
urban production in the midst of capitalist property relations and of the real
estate speculation left intact by the Weimar Republic. Constructivism was
able to influence the modernization and socialization promoted in the first
decade of the Soviet Revolution, but it finally collapsed beneath the repres-
sive bureaucratization of Stalinism and was replaced by realist painters who
restored the iconographic traditions of premodern Russia and adapted
them to official portraiture.
The frustration of these vanguards was produced in part by the collapse of
the social conditions that encouraged their birth. We also know that their ex-
periences were prolonged in the history of art and in social history as a
utopian reserve in which later movements, especially in the 1960s, found a
stimulus for taking up the emancipating, renovating, and democratic pro-
jects of modernity. But the current situation of art and its social insertion ex-
hibit a languid legacy of those attempts of the twenties and the sixties to con-
vert the innovations of the vanguards into a source of collective creativity.
There is an unending bibliography of works that examine the social and
aesthetic reasons for this persistent frustration. We want to propose here an
anthropological approach, constructed from the starting point of the
knowledge that this discipline developed around ritual, in order to re-
think-since the failure of vanguard art-the flecline of the modern project.
There is a moment when artists' gestures of rupture, which are not able to
become acts (effective interventions in social processes), become rituals. The
original impulse of the vanguards brought them into association with the
secularizing project of modernity; their incursions sought to disenchant the
world and desacralize the conventional, beautiful, complacent ways in which
bourgeois culture represented it. But the progressive incorporation of their
insolence into museums, their reasoned digestion in the catalogs and in the
official teaching of art, made the ruptures into a convention. They estab-
lished, says Octavio Paz, "the tradition of the rupture" (1987, 19). It is not
strange, then, that the artistic production of the vanguards should be sub-
jected to the most frivolous forms of ritualism: vernissages, the presenting of
awards and academic consecrations.
But vanguard art was also converted into ritual in a different sense. To ex-
plain it, we must introduce a change in the generalized theory about ritual.
It tends to study them as practices of social reproduction. It is assumed that
they are places where society reaffirms what it is, defends its order and its
homogeneity. In part, this is true. But rituals can also be movements toward
a different order, which society still resists or proscribes. There are rituals for
confirming social relations and giving them continuity (celebrations at-
tached to "natural" acts: birth, marriage, death), and others are designed to
effect, in symbolic and occasional scenarios, impracticable transgressions in
real or permanent form.
In his anthropological studies of the Kabyle, Bourdieu (1990a) notes that
many rituals do not have the sole function of establishing the correct ways
of acting, and therefore of separating what is permitted from what is pro-
hibited, but rather also of incorporating certain transgressions while limit-
ing them. The ritual, "cultural act par excellence" (210), which seeks to im-
pose order in the world, fixes which conditions are legitimate "necessary
and inevitable transgressions of limits" (211). Historical changes that
threaten the natural and social order generate oppositions and confronta-
tions that can dissolve a community. Ritual is capable of operating, then,
not as a simple conservative and authoritarian reaction in defense of the
old order (as will be seen later with regard to traditionalist ceremonialism),
but rather as a movement through which society controls the risk of
change. Basic ritual actions are de facto denied transgressions. Ritual,
through a socially approved and collectively assumed operation, must re-
solve the contradiction that is established "by constructing, as separate and
antagonistic, principles that have to be reunited to ensure the reproduction
of the group" (212).
In light of this analysis we can look at the peculiar type of rituals the van-
guards establish. The literature on ritualism is concerned chiefly with rites
of entry or of passage: who, and with what requirements, may enter a house
or a church; what steps must be fulfilled in order to pass from one civil sta-
tus to another or to assume an office or an honor. The anthropological con-
tributions to these processes have been used to understand the discrimina-
tory operations in cultural institutions. The ritualization that museum
architecture imposes on the public is described: rigid itineraries, codes of
action to be strictly represented and performed. Museums are like lay tem-
ples that, like religious ones, convert objects of history and art into ceremo-
nial monuments.
When Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach study the Louvre Museum, they
observe that the majestic building, the monumental corridors and stair-
cases, the ornamentation of the roofs, the accumulation of works from di-
verse epochs and cultures, subordinated to the history of France, form an
iconographic program that ritually dramatizes the triumph of French civi-
lization, consecrating it as the heir to humanity's values. In contrast, the Mu-
seum of Modern Art in New York is housed in a cold building of iron and
glass with few windows, as if the separation from the external world and the
plurality of ways to go through the museum gave the feeling of being able to
go where one wants, of individual free choice-as if the visitor were able to
corroborate the creative liberty that distinguishes contemporary artists:
"You are 'nowhere; in an original nothing, a womb, a tomb, white but with-
out sun, which seems to be situated outside of time and history." As one ad-
vances from Cubism to surrealism to abstract expressionism, the forms be-
come more and more dematerialized, "just as the accent on such themes as
light and air proclaim the superiority of the spiritual and the transcenden-
tal" over everyday and earthly needs (cf. Duncan and Wallach 1980, 1978). In
short, the ritualism of the historical museum on the one hand, and that of
the museum of modern art on the other, in sacralizing the space and the ob-
jects and imposing an order of understanding, also organize the differences
between social groups: those that enter and those that remain outside; those
capable of understanding the ceremony and those who are not able to per-
form significantly.
The postmodern trends in the visual arts, from the happening to perfor-
mances and body art, as well as in theater and dance, accentuate this ritual
and hermetic sense. They reduce what they consider rational communica-
tion (verbalizations, precise visual references) and pursue new subjective
forms to express primary emotions smothered by dominant conventions
(force, eroticism, fright). They cut the codified allusions to the daily world in
search of the original manifestation of each subject and of magical encoun-
ters with lost energies. The cool form of this self-centered communication
that art proposes, in reinstalling ritual as the nucleus of aesthetic experience,
is the performances shown on video: to the absorption of the body itself in
the ceremony, with the intimate code, is added the semihypnotic and passive
relationship with the screen. Contemplation returns and suggests that the
maximum emancipation of artistic language is motionless ecstasy-anti-
modern emancipation, that is, given that it eliminates the secularization of
the practice and the image.
One of the most e v ~ r e crises of the modern is produced by this return of
ritual without myths. Germano Celant comments on a "happening" that
John Cage presented, together with Rauschenberg, Tudor, Richards, and
Olsen, at Black Mountain College:
Given that the first idea of action does not exist, this accumulation of materials
tends to liberate the different languages from their reciprocal condition of de-
pendency, and also tends to show a possible "dialogue" between them as au-
tonomous and self-significant entities. (32)
In lacking totalizing accounts to organize history, the succession of bodies,
actions, and gestures becomes a different ritualism than that of any other
ancient or modern society. This new type of ceremonialism does not repre-
sent a myth that integrates a community, nor the autonomous narration of
the history of art. It does not represent anything except the "organic narcis-
sism" of each participant. '
"We are on our way to living each moment for its unique quality. Impro-
visation is not historical;' declares Paxton, one of the most significant prac-
titioners of performances. But then how do we go from each intimate and
instantaneous explosion to the spectacle, which presupposes some kind of
ordered duration of images and dialogue with the viewers? How do we go
from loose pronouncements to discourse, from solitary pronouncements to
conimunication? From the artist's perspective, performances dissolve the
search for autonomy of the artistic field into the search for expressive eman-
cipation of the subjects and, as the subjects generally want to share their ex-
periences, they fluctuate between creation for their own sake and the specta-
cle; often this tension is the basis for aesthetic seduction.
This narcissistic exacerbation of discontinuity generates a new type of rit-
ual, which is in truth an extreme consequence of what the vanguards came
to do. We will call them rites of exit. Given that the maximum aesthetic value
is constant renovation, to belong to the art world one cannot repeat what
has already been done-the legitimate, the shared. It is necessary to initiate
noncodified forms of representation (from impressionism to surrealism),
invent unforeseen structures (from fantastic to geometric art), and relate
images that in reality belong to diverse semantic chains and that no one had
previously associated (from collages to performances). No worse accusation
can be made against a modem artist than to show repetitions in his or her
work. According to this sense of permanent escape, to be in the history of art
one has to be constantly leaving it.
On this point I see a sociological continuity between modern vanguards
and the postmodern art that rejects them. Although postmodernists aban-
don the notion of rupture-key in modern aesthetics-and use artistic im-
ages from other epochs in their discourse, their method of fragmenting and
dislocating them, the displaced or parodic readings of traditions, reestablish
the insular and self-referential character of the art world. Modern culture
was formed by negating traditions and territories. Its impulse is still guided
by museums that look for new audiences, by itinerant experiences, and by
artists who use urban spaces that are culturally dissimilar, produce outside
of their countries, and decontextualize objects. Poslmodern art continues to
practice these operations without claiming to offer something radically in-
novative, incorporating the past-but in an unconventional way-with that
which renews the capacity of the artistic field to represent the ultimate "le-
gitimate" difference.
Such transcultural experimentation engendered renovations in language,
design, urban forms, and youth practices. But the main fate of the vanguards
and of the disenchanted rituals of the postmodernists has been the ritualiza-
tion of museums and of the market. Despite the desacralization of art and
the artistic world, and the new open channels to other audiences, the exper-
imentalists accentuate their insularity. The primacy of form over function,
of the form of saying over what is said, requires from the spectator a more
and more cultivated disposition in order to understand the meaning. Artists
who inscribe in the work itself the questioning about what the work should
be, who not only eliminate the naturalist illusion of the real and perceptive
hedonism but who rather make the destruction of conventions, even those
of last year, their method of visual enunciation, are assured, on the one
hand, Bourdieu says, of dominion in their field, but on the other hand, they
exclude the spectator who is not disposed to make of his or her participation
in art an equally innovative experience. Modern and postmodern art pro-
pose a "paradoxical reading," since they presuppose "the dominion of the
code of a communication that tends to question the code of communica-
tion" (1971, 1352).
Are artists really assured of dominion in their field? Who remains as pro-
prietor of their transgressions? By having accepted the artistic market and
the museums, the rites of exit, and incessant flight as the modern way of
making legitimate art, do they not subject the changes to a framework that
limits and controls them? What, then, is the social function of artistic prac-
tices? Have they not been assigned-with success-the task of representing
social transformations, of being the symbolic scenario in which the trans-
gressions will be carried out, but within the institutions that demarcate their
action and efficacy so that they do not disturb the general order of society?
It is necessary to rethink the efficacy of artistic innovations and irrever-
ences, the limits of their sacrilegious rituals. Attempts to break the illusion in
the superiority and the sublime of art (insolence, destruction of one's own
works, the artist's shit inside the museum) are, in the final analysis, accord-
ing to Bourdieu, sacralizing desacralizations "that scandalize no one but the
believers." Nothing demonstrates better the tendency toward the self-
absorbed functioning of the artistic field than the fate of these apparently
radical attempts at subversion, which "the most heterodox guardians of
artistic orthodoxy" finally devour (1977, 8).
Is it possible to continue to affirm with Habermas that modernity is an
inconclusive but realizable project, or should we admit-along with dis-
enchanted artists and theorists-that autonomous experimentation and de-
mocratizing insertion in the social fabric are irreconcilable tasks?
,
If we want to understand the contradictions between these modern
projects, it is necessary to analyze how the links between autonomy and
dependency of art are reformulated in the current conditions of cultural
production and circulation. We will take four interactions of modern and
"autonomous" cultured practices with "different" spheres, such as premod-
ern art, naive and/or popular art, the international art market, and the cul-
ture industries.
Fascinated by the Primitive and the Popular
Why do the promoters of modernity, who announce it as an advance over
the ancient and the traditional, feel more and more attraction for references
to the past? It is not possible to answer this question in this chapter alone. It
will be necessary to explore the cultural need to confer a denser meaning on
the present and the political need to legitimize the current hegemony by
means of the prestige of the historical patrimony. We will have to investigate,
for example, why folklore finds an echo in the musical tastes of young peo-
ple and in the electronic media.
. Here we will be interested in the increasing importance critics and con-
temporary composers give to premodern art and the popular. The high
point that Latin American painters find at the end. of the eighties and the be-
ginning of the nineties in the markets of the United States and Europe can
only be understood as part of the opening to the nonmodern initiated some
years before.J
One way to verify what it is that the protagonists of contemporary art are
looking for in the primitive and the popular is to examine how they stage it
in museums and what they say to justify it in the catalogs. A symptomatic
exposition was the one presented in 1984 by the Museum of Modern Art in
New York entitled "'Primitivism' in 2oth century art." The institution, which
in the last two decades was the main instance for legitimating and conse-
Ciating new trends, proposed a reading of modern artists that emphasized
the formal similarities of their works with ancient pieces rather than their
autonomy and innovation. A woman by Picasso found her mirror in a
Kwakiutl mask; the elongated figures of Giacometti in others from Tanzania;
the Mask of Fear by Klee in a Zuni war god; a bird's head by Max Ernst in a
Tusyan mask. The exhibit revealed that the dependencies of the modernists
on the archaic encompass everyone from the Fauvists to the Expressionists,
from Brancusi to earth artists and those who develop performances inspired
by "primitive" rituals.
It is lamentable that the explanatory preoccupations of the catalog con-
centrated on detectivelike interpretations: establishing whether Picasso
bought masks from the Congo in the Paris flea market, or whether Klee used
to visit the ethnological museums of Berlin and Basel. The decentering of
Western and modern art remains halfway between being concerned only
with reconstructing the ways objects from Africa, Asia, and Oceania arrived
in Europe and the United States and with how Western artists assum;d
them, without comparing their original uses and meanings with those
modernity gave them. But what interests us above all is to note that this type
of collection of great resonance relativizes the autonomy of the cultural field
of modernity.
Another notable case was the 1978 exposition in the Museum of Modem
Art in Paris, which brought together so-called naive or popular artists: land-
scape painters, builders of personal chapels and castles, baroque decorators
of their everyday rooms, self-taught painters and sculptors, and makers of
unusual dolls and useless machines. Some, like Ferdinand Cheval, were
known through the efforts of historians and artists who knew how to value
works that were foreign to the art world. But the majority lacked any train-
ing or institutional recognition. They produced works of originality or nov-
elty, without any publicity, monetary, or aesthetic concerns-in the sense of
the fine arts or the vanguards. They applied unconventional treatments to
materials, forms, and colors, which the specialists who organized this expo-
sition judged presentable for a museum. The catalog prepared for the collec-
tion has five prologues, as if the museum had felt a greater need to explain
and forewarn than with other exhibits. Four of the prologues seek to under-
stand the works by relating them to trends in modem art rather than by
looking for anything specific to the artists being exhibited. They remind
Michael Ragon of the Expressionists and surrealists by their "delirious imag-
ination," and of Van Gogh by their "abnormality"; he declares them artists
because they are "solitary or maladjusted individuals"-"two characteristics
of all true artists:' The most delightful prologue is that of the director of the
museum, Suzanne Page, who explains her having entitled the exhibit "Les
singuliers de !'art" because the participants are "individuals who freely own
their desires and their extravagances, who impose upon the world the vital
seal of their irreducible uniqueness." She assures the reader that the museum
is not mounting the exhibition in order to look for an alternative to a "tired
vanguard;' but rather to "renovate the look and reencounter what there is of
the savage in this cultural art."
To what is owed this insistence on uniqueness, the pure, the innocent, the
savage, at the same time that they acknowledge that these men and women
produce by mixing what they learned from the pink pages of the Petit
Larousse, Paris Match, La Tour Eiffel, religious iconography, and the news-
papers and magazines of their time? Why does the museum that is trying to
free itself from the now untenable partialities of"the modern" need to clas-
sify that which escapes it not only in relation to legitimized art trends but
also to the boxes created for naming the heterodox? Raymonde Moulin's
prologue provides several keys. After pointing out that since the beginning
of the twentieth century the social definition of art has been extending itself
incessantly and that the uncertainty thus generated results in the also inces-
sant labeling of strange manifestations, she proposes to consider these works
as "unclassifiable;' and wonders about tile reasons why they were selected.
Above all because, for the cultured gaze, these naive artists "achieve their
artistic salvation" while "partially transgressing the norms of their class";
next, because
they rediscover in the creative use of free tinle-that of leisure or, frequently, of
retirement-the lost knowledge of individual work. Isolated, protected from all
contact and from all commitment with cultural or commercial circuits, they are
not suspected of having obeyed any other need than an interior one: neither
,
magnificent nor damned, but rather innocent .... In their works the cultivated
gaze of a society believes it perceives the reconciliation of the
pleasure principle and the reality principle.
High Art Is No Longer a Retail Trade
The autonomy of the artistic field, based on aesthetic criteria set by artists
and critics, is diminished by the new determinations that art suffers from a
rapidly expanding market in which extracultural forces are decisive. Al-
though the influence in the aesthetic judgment of demands outside of the
field is visible throughout modernity, since the middle of this century the
agents in charge of administrating the determination of what is artistic-
museums, biennial expositions, journals, big international awards-have
been reorganized in relation to the new technologies of commercial promo-
tion and consumption.
The extension of the artistic market from a small circle of"amateurs" and
collectors to a wide audience that is often more interested in the economic
value of the investment than in aesthetic values changes the ways art is ap-
praised. The journals that indicate the prices of works present their infor-
mation together with the advertising of airlines, automakers, antique deal-
ers, real estate companies, and manufacturers ofluxury products. A study by
Annie Verger of the changes in the processes of artistic consecration, follow-
ing the indexes published by Connaissance des arts, observes that for the first
of these, published in 1955, the journal consulted a hundred personalities se-
lected from among artists, critics, art historians, gallery directors, and mu-
seum conservators. For the subsequent lists, which are compiled every five
years, the group of informants changes; it includes non-French individuals
(taking into account the growing internationalization of aesthetic judg-
ment), and artists are disappearing (25 _percent in 1955 compared with 9.25
percent in 1961, and none in 1971); more collectors, museum conservators,
and dealers are included. The changes in the list of those consulted, which
express modifications in the struggle for artistic consecration, generate
other selection criteria. The percentage of vanguard artists is reduced while
there is a resurgence of the "great ancestors;' given that modernity and inno-
vation cease to be the supreme values (Verger 1987) .
The most aggressive manifestations of these extra-aesthetic conditions on
the artistic field can be found in Germany, the United States, and Japan.
Willi Bongard, journalist with a financial magazine, published Kunst und
Kommerz in 1967, in which he criticizes the "badly administered retail trade"
tactics of galleries that lack display windows, are located on a building's
upper floor and seek confidential relations with their clientele, display the
products for only two or three weeks, and consider advertising to be a lux-
ury. He advises using advanced techniques of distribution and commercial-
ization, which were in fact adopted beginning in 1970 with the establishment
of of the most prestigious artists in the economic journal Kapital, and
the publication by the art world of its own journal, Art aktuel, which com-
municates the latest trends in the artistic market and suggests the best way to
administer the collection itself.
"What a pleasure;' says the company or uncultured millionaire eager for
prestige. "The pleasure is mine;' responds the critic or museum conservator.
Is that how the conversation goes? "Definitely not;' concludes the historian
Juan Antonio Ramirez in verifying that the highest prices paid at auctions
do not correspond to the works experts judge to be the best or the most sig-
nificant (1989). In no country is the power of impresarios, and thus of"art
administrators," so evident as in the United States, where this is a prosperous
career that can be studied at various universities. Graduates are instructed in
art and investment strategies and occupy special positions, along with the
artistic director, in big North American museums. When they plan their an-
nual programming, they make it known that the type of art that is promoted
influences the financial policies and the number of employees not only of
cultural institutions but of commerce, hotels, and restaurants. These multi-
ple repercussions of exhibits attract corporations, which are interested in fi-
nancing prestigious collections and using them as publicity. With the artistic
field subjected to these games between commerce, advertising, and tourism,
where did its autonomy, the intrinsic renewal of the aesthetic searches, and
the "spiritual" communication with the audience stop? If the self-portrait I,
Picasso can earn an annual profit of 19.6 percent-as it did for Wendell
Cherry, President of Humana, Inc., who bought it for $5.83 million in 1981
and sold it for $47.85 million in 1989-art becomes more than anything else
a privileged area of investment. Or, as Robert Hughes says in the article from
which this information is taken, "a full-management art industry."
In a society like that of the United States, in which tax evasion and public-
ity are euphemized as part of the national traditions of philanthropy and
charity, it continues to be possible that donations to museums "preserve" th,e
spirituality of art.
1
But even these simulacra begin to fall: in 1986 the Reagan
administration modified legislation that permitted tax deductions of dona-
tions, a key resource for the spectacular growth of museums in that country.
If works by Picasso and van Gogh are worth forty to fifty million dollars, as
The end of the separation between the cultured and the mass-based? Picasso and Umberto
Eco on the covers of international magazines. The artist who always breaks records at art
auctions,
and the scholar who is able to sell more than five million copies of his "semiotic" novel in
twenty-five languages. Destruction of the codes of cultured knowledge or the aestheticization
of the market?
,
they were sold for by Sotheby's at the end of 1989, then museums in the
United States-whose highest annual budgets range from two to five million
dollars-should transfer the most expensive pieces to private collectors. As
this skyrocketing of prices raises insurance costs to the point that a van
Gogh exhibit planned by the Metropolitan Museum in 1981 would now cost
five billion dollars just to insure the works, not even that museum is able to
move these paintings from personal collections into public display. A few of
the utopias of modernity that were part of the foundation of these institu-
tions-expand and democratize the great cultural creations, valued as com-
mon property of humanity-have become, in the most pernicious sense,
museum pieces.
If this is the situation in the metropolis, what remains of art and its mod-
ern utopias in Latin America? Mari-Carmen Ramirez, curator of Latin
American art at the Huntington Gallery of the University of Texas, ex-
plained to me how difficult it is for museums in the United States to expand
their collections by incorporating classic works and new trends from Latin
America (interview 1989) when paintings by Tarsila, Botero, and Tamayo are
worth between $3oo,ooo and $750,ooo.s Even more remote, obviously, is any
kind of program to update museums in Latin American countries that have
been abandoned by "austere" official budgets and bourgeoisies little accus-
tomed to making art donations. The result is that in the next few years the
best, or at least the most expensive, Latin American art will not be seen in
our countries; museums will become poorer and more ordinary because
they will not be able to pay even the insurance for private collectors to loan
works by the most important artists of their own country.
Annie Verger talks of a reorganization of the artistic field and of the pat-
terns of legitimation and consecration due to the advances in new agents in
the competition for monopoly of aesthetic estimation. In our view, we are
also confronted by a new system of connections between cultural institu-
tions and strategies of investment and appraisal of the commercial and fi-
nancial world. The strongest evidence for this is the way in which museums,
critics, biennial exhibitions, and even international art fairs lost importance
in the eighties as universal authorities of artistic innovations and became
followers of the leading galleries in the United States, Germany, Japan, and
France, which are united in a commercial net>vork "that presents the same
artistic movements in all the Western countries and in the same order of ap-
pearance;' using both the resources of symbolic legitimation of those cul-
tural institutions and the techniques of marketing and mass advertising
(Moulin, 315). The internationalization of the art market is more and more
associated with the transnationalization and general concentration of capi-
tal. The autonomy of the cultural fields is not dissolved in the global laws of
capitalism, but it is subordinated to them with unprecedented ties.
In centering our analysis on visual culture, especially on the visual arts, we
want to demonstrate the loss of symbolic autonomy of the elites in a field
that, together with literature, constitutes the nucleus that is most resistant to
contemporary transformations. But, since the beginning of this century,
modern high culture includes a good part of the products that circulate in
the culture industry, as well as the mass distribution and reelaboration that
the new media make of literary, musical, and visual works that heretofore
belonged exclusively to the elites. The interaction of high culture with pop-
ular tastes, with the industrial structure of the production and circulation of
almost all symbolic goods, and with business patterns of costs and effective-
ness, is rapidly changing the organizing devices of what is now understood
as "high culture" in modernity.
In the movies, records, radio, television, and video the relations between
artists, middlemen, and the public imply an aesthetic far removed from the
one that sustained the fine arts: artists do not know the public, nor can they
directly receive its appraisals of their works; businesspeople acquire a more
decisive role than any other aesthetically specialized mediator (critic, art
historian) and make key decisions on what should or should not be pro-
duced and communicated; the positions of these privileged middlemen are
adopted, giving the greatest weight to economic gain and subordinating aes-
thetic values to what they interpret as market trends; the information for
making these decisions is obtained less and less through personalized rela-
tions (of the type that exist between the gallery owner and his or her clients)
and more and more through electronic techniques of market research and
ratings calculations; the "standardization" of the formats and the changes
permitted are made according to the commercial dynamic of the system,
based on what ends up being manageable or profitable and not on the inde-
pendent choices of the artists.
One can wonder what Leonardo, Mozart, or Baudelaire would do today
within this system. The answer was given by a critic: "Nothing, unless they
played by the rules" (Ratcliff).
,
The Modern Aesthetic as Ideology for Consumers
Since these changes are still little known or assumed by the majority of the
public, the ideology of modern high culture-autonomy and practical dis-
interest of art, singular and tormented creativity of isolated individuals-
subsists more among mass audiences than among the elites who originated
these beliefs.
This is a paradoxical situation: at the moment when artists and "cultured"
spectators abandon the aesthetic of the fine arts and of the vanguards be-
cause they know that reality works differently, the very culture industry that
broke down those illusions in artistic production is rehabilitating them in a
parallel system of advertising and dissemination. Through biographical in-
terviews with artists, inventions about their personal life or about the "an-
guished" work involved in making a film or a theatrical work, it keeps alive
Romantic arguments about the lonely and misunderstood artist and of
work that exalts the values of the spirit in opposition to generalized materi-
alism. This has occurred to such an extent that aesthetic discourse has ceased
to be a representation of the creative process and instead has become a com-
plementary resource destined to "guarantee" the verisimilitude of artistic
experience at the moment of consumption.
The overview presented in this chapter demonstrates another paradoxical
disjuncture, between the sociology of modern culture and the artistic prac-
tices of the last twenty years. While philosophers and sociologists like
Habermas, Bourdieu, and Becker see in the autonomous development of the
artistic and scientific fields the explanatory key to its contemporary struc-
ture, and influence research with this methodological approach, practition-
ers of art base reflection on their work on the decentering of the fields, on
the inevitable dependencies of the market and the culture industry. This ap-
pears not only in the works themselves but also in the work of museologists,
organizers of international and biennial expositions, and journal editors,
who find in the interactions of the artistic and the nonartistic the funda-
mental nucleus of what has to be thought and exhibited.
What is the cause of this discrepancy? In addition to the obvious differ-
ences in focus between one discipline and another, we see a key in the de-
crease of creativity and innovative force of art at the end of the century. That
works of the visual arts, theater, and cinema are increasingly collages of cita-
tions of past works cannot be explained solely by certain postmodern princi-
ples. If museum directors make use of retrospectives as a frequent resource in
assembling exhibits, if museums seek to seduce the public through architec-
tural renovation and staging techniques, it is also because contemporary arts
no longer generate trends, great figures, or stylistic surprises as they did in the
first half of the century. We do not wish to leave this observation with the
simple critical flavor it has as we have presented it We think that the innova-
tive and expansive impulse of modernity is reaching its limit, but perhaps this
allows us to think about other forms of innovation that are not an unceasing
evolution toward the unknown. We agree with Huyssen when he says that the
culture that comes out of the seventies is "more amorphous and diffuse,
more rich in diversity and variety than that of the sixties in that the trends
and movements evolved in a more or less ordered sequence" (1988, 154).
Finally, we have to say that the four openings of the high artistic field de-
scribed here show how they relativize their autonomy, their confidence in
cultural evolutionism, and the agents of modernity. But it is necessary to
distinguish between the forms in which modern arts interact with the other
in the first two cases and in the last two.
With respect to ancient and primitive art, and with respect to naive or
popular art, when the historian or the museum takes possession of them the
subject of enunciation and appropriation is the cultured and modern sub-
ject. William Rubin, director of the exhibit on primitivism in twentieth-
century art, says, in his extensive introduction to the collection, that he is
not concerned with understanding the original function and meaning of
each of the tribal or etlmic objects, but rather "in terms of the Western con-
text in which 'modern' artists discovered them." We saw in the exhibit "Les
singuliers de I' art" the same difficulty historians and critics had to stop talk-
ing in an elitist way about modern culture when they encounter the differ-
ence between it and the a i v e or the popular.
In contrast, the art of the West, confronted by the forces of the market
and of the culture industry, is not able to sustain its independence. The
other of the same system is more powerful than the otherness of far-off cul-
tures, already economically and politically subject to the West, and also
stronger than the difference of the subalterns or margirlalized groups in
their own society.
Notes
1. See also the prologue by the French translators of The Philosophical Discourse of Moder-
nity, Christian Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz, who show how the Habermasian work
of the last decade was formed in a polemic with the German uses of the critiques of the modem
world made by Derrida, Foucault, and Bataille (1988).
2. Other texts on Bourdieu's theory of fields are u marche des b1ens symboliques and
"Quelques proprietes des champs." The Spanish version of the latter work, titled Soaologia y
cultura, includes an introduction in which we expand the analysis ofBourdieu we make h e r ~
3 Various critics also attribute this effervescence of Latin American a.rt to the expansion of
the "Hispanic" clientele in the United States, to the greater availability of investments in the art
market, and the proximity of the QuincentenniaL See Sullivan, "Mito y realidad," and Goldman,
"El esplritu latinoarnericano."
4 It is understandable that the eighty billion dollars "donatedn annually by people of the
United States to religious activities (47.2 percent), educational activities (13.8 percent), and the
arts and humanities (6-4 percent) help them to believe that disinterest and gratuity continue to
be leading ideological centers of art. See the excellent issue u6 of Daedalus, dedicated to "Phil-
anthropy, Patronage, the articles by Stephen R. Graubard and Alan Pifer,
from which these data are taken.
5 For more data, see Seggerman 1989; 164-65.
2 I Latin American Contradictions:
Modernism without Modernization?
The most-reiterated hypothesis in the literature on Latin American moder-
nity may be summarized as follows: we have had an exuberant modernism
with a deficient modernization. We have already seen this position in the ci-
tations from Paz and Cabrujas. It also circulates in other essays and in his-
torical and sociological studies. Given the fact that we were colonized by the
most backward European nations, subjected to the Counter-Reformation
and other antimodern movements, only with independence could we begin
to bring our countries up-to-date. From then on there have been waves of
modernization.
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, it
was driven by the progressive oligarchy, alphabetization, and Europeanized
intellectuals; between the 1920s and 1930s by the expansion of capitalism, the
democratizing ascent of the middle classes and liberalism, the contribution
of immigrants, and the massive spread of schools, the press, and radio; since
the 1940s by industrialization, urban growth, greater access to intermediate
and higher education, and the new cultural industries.
But these movements could not fulfill the operations of European moder-
nity. They did not form autonomous markets for each artistic field, nor di;::l
they achieve an extensive professionalization of artists and writers, or an
economic development capable of sustaining efforts at experimental re-
newal and cultural democratization.
Some comparisons are illustrative, as Renato Ortiz demonstrates. In
41
42 I Latin American Contradictions
France the literacy rate rose from 30 percent in the ancien regime to 90 per-
cent in 1890. The 500 periodicals published in Paris in 1860 grew to 2,ooo in
1890. England at the beginning of the twentieth century had a 97 percent lit-
eracy rate; the Daily Telegraph doubled its circulation between 1860 and
1890, reaching 300,ooo; Alice in Wonderland sold 150,000 copies between
1865 and 1898. A double cultural space is created in this way. On the one
hand, that of restricted circulation, with occasional high sales, as with Lewis
Carroll's novel, in which literature and the arts are developed; on the other
hand, the wide distribution network, led by daily papers in the first decades
of the twentieth century, which begin the training of mass audiences in the
consumption of texts {Ortiz 1988, 23-28).
The case of Brazil is very different. How could writers and artists have a
specific audience if 84 percent of the population was illiterate in 1890, 75 per-
cent in 1920, and 57 percent as late as 1940? The average print run for a novel
was only a thousand copies as late as 1930. For several more decades, writers
would not be able to live from literature and had to work as docents, civil
servants, or journalists, a situation that made literary development depen-
dent upon the state bureaucracy and the mass information market. For that
reason, Ortiz concludes, no clear distinction was created in Brazil between
artistic culture and the mass market, nor did their contradictions take on as
antagonistic a form, as in European societies (29).
Works on other Latin American countries show a similar or worse pic-
ture. Since modernization and democratization include only a small minor-
ity, it is impossible to form symbolic markets in which autonomous cultural
fields can grow. If being cultured in the modern sense is above all to be let-
tered, that was impossible for more than half the population in our conti-
nent in 1920. That restriction was especially acute at the higher levels of the
educational system-those that truly give access to modern high culture. In
the 1930s fewer than 10 percent of secondary school students were admitted
into the university. A "traditional constellation of elites:' Brunner says, refer-
ring to the Chile of that era, is required to belong to the leading class in order
to participate in literary salons and write in cultural journals and news-
papers. Oligarchic hegemony is based on divisions in society that limit its
modern expansion; "against the organic development of the state, it opposes
its own constitutive limitations (the narrowness of the symbolic market and
the Hobbesian fractionalization of the leading class)" (1985, 32).
Modernization with restricted expansion of the market, democratization
for minorities, renewal of ideas but with low effectiveness in social
processes-the disparities between modernism and modernization are use-
Latin American Contradictions I 43
ful to the dominant classes in preserving their hegemony, and at times in not
having to worry about justifying it, in order simply to be dominant classes.
In written culture, they achieved this by limiting schooling and the con-
sumption of books and magazines; in visual culture, through three opera-
tions that made it possible for the elites, against every modernizing change,
to reestablish over and over their aristocratic conception: (a) spiritualize
cultural production under the guise of artistic "creation," with the conse-
quent division between art and crafts; (b) freeze the circulation of symbolic
goods in collections, concentrating them in museums, palaces, and other ex-
clusive centers; (c) propose as the only legitimate form of consumption of
these goods the also spiritualized, hieratic method of reception that consists
in contemplating them.
If this was the visual culture that the schools and museums reproduced,
what could the vanguards do? How could they represent in another way-in
the double sense of converting reality into images and being representative
of reality-heterogeneous societies with cultural traditions that coexist and
contradict each other all the time, with distinct rationalities unevenly ac-
quired by different sectors? Is it possible to impel cultural modernity when
socioeconomic modernization is so unequal? Some art historians conclude
that innovative movements were "transplants:' "grafts:' disconnected from
our reality. In Europe
Cubism and futurism correspond to the admiring enthusiasm of the first van-
guard against the physical and mental transformations provoked by the first
mechanization boom; surrealism is a rebellion against the alienations of the
technological era; the concrete movement arose together with functional ar-
chitecture and industrial design with the intention of programmatically and
integrally creating a new human habitat; informalism is another reaction
against the rationalist rigor, asceticism, and assembly-line production of the
functional era, and corresponds to an acute crisis of values and to the existen-
tial vacuum provoked by the Second World War .... We have practiced all these
trends in the same sequence as in Europe but without having entered the "me-
chanical kingdom" of the futurists, without having reached any industrial
peak, without having entered fully into consumer society, without being in-
vaded by assembly-line production or restrained by an excess of functional-
ism; we have had existential anguish without Warsaw or Hiroshima.
(Yurkievich, 179)
Before questioning this comparison, I want to say that I too cited-and ex!
tended-it in a book published in 1977. Among other disagreements I now
have with that text (which is why it is not being reprinted) are those deriving
from a more complex view of Latin American modernity.
Why do our countries fulfill badly and late the metropolitan model of
modernization? Is it only because of the structural dependency to which we
are condemned by the deterioration of the terms of economic exchange, be-
cause of the petty interests of leading classes that resist social modernization
and dress themselves up with modernism in order to lend elegance to their
privileges? In part, the error of these interpretations issues from measuring
our modernity with optimized images of how that process happened in the
countries of the center. It is necessary to examine, first, whether so many dif-
ferences exist between European and Latin American modernization. Then
we will determine whether the view of a repressed and postponed Latin
American modernity, complete with mechanical dependency on the me-
tropolis, is as certain and as dysfunctional as the studies of our "backward-
ness" are accustomed to saying.
How to Interpret a Hybrid History
A good path for rethinking these questions. begins with an article by Perry
Anderson that, in speaking about Latin America, nevertheles.s repeats the
tendency to view our modernity as a belated and deficient echo of the coun-
tries of the center ("Modernity and Revolution"). He maintains that Euro-
pean literary and artistic modernism reached its highest moment in the first
three decades of the twentieth century, and then persisted as a "cult" of that
aesthetic ideology, without either works or artists of the same vigor. The
subsequent transfer of the creative vitality to our continent could be ex-
plained because
For in the Third World generally, a kind of shadow configuration of what once
prevailed in the First World does exist today. Pre-capitalist oligarchies of vari-
ous kinds, mostly of a landowning character, abound; capitalist development is
typically far more rapid and dynamic, where it does occur, in these regions
than in the metropolitan zones, but on the other hand is infinitely less stabi-
lized or consolidated; social revolution haunts these societies as a permanent
possibility, one indeed already realized in countries dose to home-Cuba or
Nicaragua, Angola or Vietnam. These are the conditions that have produced
the genuine masterpieces of recent years that conform to Berman's categories:
novels like Gabriel Garda Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Salman
Rushdie's Midnight's Children, from Colombia or India, or films like Yilrniz
Giiney's Yo/ from Turkey. (109)
This long quote is useful because it exhibits the mix of accurate observations
with mechanical and hasty distortions that frequently are used to interpret
us in the metropolis, and that too often we repeat as shadows. Nevertheless,
Anderson's analysis of the relations between modernism and modernity is
so stimulating that what interests us least is to critique it.
It is necessary to question above all that mania that has almost fallen out
of use in Third World countries: to speak of the Third World and include in
the same package Colombia, India, and Turkey. The second annoyance lies
in his attributing to One Hundred Years of Solitudt'--dazzling coquetry with
our supposed magical realism-the status of symptom of our modernism.
The third is to reencounter in Anderson-one of the most intelligent writers
to enter the debate on modernity-the crude determinism according to
which certain socioeconomic conditions "proquced" the masterpieces of art
and literature.
Although this residue contaminates and infects several parts of Ander-
son's article, there are more subtle exegeses in it as well. One is that cultural
modernism does not express economic modernization; he demonstrates
that his own country, England, the precursor to capitalist industrialization,
which dominated the world market for a hundred years, "didn't produce
any native movement of the modernist type of any significance in the first
decades of this century." The modernist movements arose in continental
Europe, not where structural modernizing changes occur, Anderson says,
but rather where complex conjunctures exist, "the intersection of different
historical temporalities" (104). That type of conjuncture presented itself in
Europe as a cultural force field triangulated by three decisive coordinates:
(a) the codification of a highly formalized academicism in the visual and
other arts, institutionalized by states and societies in which aristocratic or
landowning classes dominated, overcome by economic development but
that still set the political and cultural tone before the First World War;
(b) the emergence in those same societies of technologies generated by the
second industrial revolution (telephone, radio, automobile, etc.); (c) the
imaginative proximity of the social revolution, which began to manifest
itself in the Russian Revolution and in other social movements of Western
Europe (104):
The persistence of the ' anciens regimes' and the academicism that accompanied
them provided a critical set of cultural values against which the insurgent
forces of art could be measured, but also in terms of which they could partially '
articulate themselves to themselves. (105)
The old order, precisely with what it still possessed of the aristocratic, of-
fered a set of codes and resources from which intellectuals and artists, even
the innovators, saw it possible to resist the devastations of the market as the
organizing principle of culture and society.
Although the energies of mechanization were a potent stimulus for the
imagination of Parisian Cubism and Italian futurism, these currents neu-
tralized the material sense of technological modernization by abstracting
the techniques and artifacts of the social relations of production. When the
entirety of European modernism is observed, says Anderson, we are warned
that it flourished in the first decades of the century in a space in which were
combined "a classic past still usable, a technical present still undetermined
and a political future still unforeseeable .... In the intersection of a domi-
nant semi-aristocratic order there arose a semi-industrialized capitalist
economy and a semi-emergent or semi-insurgent workers' movement"
(ibid.).
If modernism is not the expression of socioeconomic modernization but
the means by which the elites take charge of the intersection of different histori-
cal temporalities and try to elaborate a global project with them, what are
those temporalities in Latin America and what contradictions does their
crossing generate? In what sense do these contradictions obstruct the real-
ization of the emancipating, e}.:pansive, renovating, and democratizing pro-
jects of modernity?
Latin American countries are currently the result of the sedimentation,
juxtaposition, and interweaving of indigenous traditions (above all in the
Mesoamerican and Andean areas), of Catholic colonial hispanism, and of
modern political, educational, and communicational actions. Despite at-
tempts to give elite culture a modern profile, isolating the indigenous and
the colonial in the popular sectors, an interclass mixing has generated hy-
brid formations in all social strata. The secularizing and renovating im-
pulses of modernity were more effective in the "cultured" groups, but cer-
tain elites preserve their roots in Hispanic-Catholic traditions, and also in
indigenous traditions in agrarian zones, as resources for justifying privi-
leges of the old order challenged by the expansion of mass culture.
In houses of the bourgeoisie and of middle classes with a high educational
level in Santiago, Lima, Bogota, Mexico City, and many other cities, there
coexist multilingual libraries and indigenous crafts, cable TV and parabolic
antennas with colonial furniture, and magazines that tell how to carry out
better financial speculation this week with centuries-old family and reli-
gious rituals. Being cultured-including being cultured in the modern
era-implies not so much associating oneself with a repertory of exclusively
modern objects and messages, but rather knowing how to incorporate the
art and literature of the vanguard, as well as technological advances, into
traditional matrices of social privilege and symbolic distinction.
This multitemporal heterogeneity of modem culture is a consequence of a
history in which modernization rarely operated through the substitution of
the traditional and the ancient. There were ruptures provoked by industrial
development and urbanization that, although they occurred after those of
Europe, were more accelerated. An artistic and literary market was created
through educational expansion, which permitted the professionalization of
some artists and writers. The struggles of the liberals of the end of the nine-
teenth century and the positivists of the beginning of the twentieth- which
culminated in the university reform of 1918, initiated in Argentina and soon
extended to other countries-achieved a lay and democratically organized
university before many European societies did. But the constitution of those
autonomous scientific and humanistic fields was confronted with the illiter-
acy of half of the population and with premodern economic structures and
political habits.
These contradictions between the cultured and the popular have received
greater importance in the artistic and literary works themselves than in the
histories of art and literature, which are almost always limited to recording
what those works mean for the elites. The explanation of the disparities be-
tween cultural modernism and social modernization, taking into account
only the dependency of intellectuals on the metropolis, disregards the
strong preoccupations of writers and artists with the internal conflicts of
their societies and with the obstacles they face in communicating with their
audiences.
From Sarmiento to Sabato and Piglia, from Vasconcelos to Fuentes and
Monsivais, literary practices are conditioned by questions about what it
means to make literature in societies that lack a sufficiently developed market
for an autonomous cultural field to exist. In the dialogues of many works, or
in a more indirect way in the preoccupation with how to narrate, there is an
investigation of the meaning of literary work in countries with a precarious
development of liberal democracy, scarce state investment in cultural and
scientific production, and in which the formation of modern nations over-
comes neither ethnic divisions nor the unequal appropriation of an appar;
ently shared patrimony. These questions appear not only in essays, in
polemics between "formalists" and "populists;' and if they do appear it is be-
cause they are constitutive of the works that differentiate Borges from Arlt
and Paz from Garcia Marquez. It is a plausible hypothesis for the sociology of
reading that someday in Latin America it will be thought that these questions
contribute to organizing relations between these writers and their audiences.
To Import, Translate, and Construct One's Own
To analyze how these contradictions between modernism and moderniza-
tion condition the works and the sociocultural function of artists, what is
necessary is a theory freed from the ideology of reflection and from any sup-
position about a direct mechanical correspondence between the material
base and symbolic representations. I see an inaugural text for this rupture in
Roberto Schwarz's introduction to his book on Machado de Assis, Ao Vence-
dor as Batatas, the splendid article "As ideias fora do Iugar."
How was it possible that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was written
into part of the Brazilian Constitution of 1824 while slavery still existed
there? The dependency of the latifundista agrarian economy on the external
market brought to Brazil bourgeois economic rationality with its require-
ment that work be done in a minimum amount of time, but the ruling
class-which based its domination on the complete disciplining of the life
of the slaves--preferred to extend work to a maximum amount of time, and
thus to control the entire day of the subjugated. If we want to understand
why those contradictions were "unessential" and could coexist with a suc-
cessful intellectual diffusion of liberalism, says Schwarz, we have to take into
account the institutionalization of the favor.
Colonization produced three social sectors: the latifundista, the slave, and
the "free man." Between the first two the relation was clear. But the multi-
tude of members of the third sector, who were neither property owners nor
workers, depended materially on the favor of the powerful. Through that
mechanism a wide sector of free men was reproduced; in addition, the favor
was extended to other areas of social life and involved the other two groups
in administration and politics, commerce and industry. Even the liberal pro-
fessions such as medicine, which in the European conception did not owe
anything to anyone, were governed in Brazil by this process, which becomes
"our almost universal mediation."
The favor is as antimodern as slavery, but "more pleasant" and susceptible
to being joined to liberalism because of its element of compromise and the
fluid play of esteem and self-esteem to which material interest is subjected. It
is true that while European modernization is based on the autonomy of the
person, the universality of the law, disinterested culture, objective remuner-
ation, and the work ethic, the favor practices personal dependency, the ex-
ception to the rule, interested culture, and the remuneration of personal ser-
vices. But given the difficulties of surviving, "no one in Brazil would have the
idea or, more important, the power to be, let us say, a Kant of the favor," bat-
tling against the contradictions that implied.
The same thing happened, Schwarz adds, when the desire arose to create a
modern bourgeois state without breaking with clientelist relations; when
European decorative papers were posted or Greco-Roman architectural mo-
tifs were painted on adobe walls; and even the lyrics to the hymn of the
republic, written in 1890, full of progressive sentiments but unconcerned
about whether they corresponded to reality: "Nos nem creemos que es-
cravos outrora!Tenha havido en tao nobre pais" ("We don't believe that in a
person's time, slaves could have existed in such a noble land") (outrora was
two years earlier, since abolition occurred in 1888).
We advance little if we accuse liberal ideas of being false. Perhaps they
could have been discarded? It is more interesting to go along with their si-
multaneous playing with truth and falsity. Liberal principles are not asked to
describe reality but to give prestigious justifications for the adjudication exer-
cised in the exchange of favors and for the "stable coexistence" that the latter
permits. Referring to "dependence as independence, caprice as utility, excep-
tions as universality, kinship as merit, privilege as equality" might seem in-
congruous to someone who believes that liberal ideology has a cognitive
value, but not for those who are constantly living moments of"loaning and
borrowing-particularly in the key instant of reciprocal recognition" because
neither of the two sides is disposed to denounce the other in the name of
abstract principles, even though they might have the elements for doing so.
This manner of adopting foreign ideas with an inappropriate meaning is
at the basis of the majority of our literature and our art, in Machado de Assis
as analyzed by Schwarz; in Arlt and Borges, as Piglia reveals in his examina-
tion to which we will refer later; in the theater of Cabrujas, for example, El
dfa que me quieras (The day you love me), when he presents a conversation
in a typical Caracas house of the 1930s between a couple obsessed with going
to live in a Soviet kolkhoz in front of a visitor who is as much admired as the
Russian Revolution: Carlos Garde!.
Are these contradictory relations between the culture of the elite and their
society a simple result of their dependency on the metropolises? In reality,
says Schwarz, this dislocated and discordant liberalism is "an internal and
active element of [national] culture," a mode of intellectual experience des-
tined to assume jointly the conflictive structure of society itself, its depen-
dency on foreign models, and the projects to change it. What artistic works
do with this triple conditioning-internal conflicts, external dependency,
and transforming utopias-using specific material and symbolic proce-
dures, cannot be explained by means of irrationalist interpretations of art
and literature. Far from any "magical realism" that imagines there to be a
formless and confusing material at the base of symbolic production, so-
cioanthropological study demonstrates that the works can be understood if
we include at the same time the explanation of the social processes that
nourish the methods that the artists rework.
If we move to the visual arts we find evidence that this inadequacy be-
tween principles conceived in the metropolises and local reality is not always
an ornamental resource of exploitation. The first phase of Latin American
modernism was promoted by artists and writers who were returning to their
countries after a period of time in Europe. It was not so much the direct-
transplanted-influence of the European vanguards that gave rise to the
modernizing vein in the visual arts on the continent, but rather the ques-
tions of the Latin Americans themselves about how to make their inter-
national experience compatible with the tasks presented to them by devel-
oping societies, and in one case-Mexico--a society in full revolution.
Aracy Amaral notes that the Russian painter Lazar Segall did not find an
echo in the overly provincial artistic world of Sao Paulo when he arrived in
1913, but Oswald de Andrade had a great reception among the Italian immi-
grants living in Sao Paulo upon returning that same year from Europe with
Marinetti's futurist manifesto and confronting the industrialization that was
beginning to take off. Together with Mario de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, who
became a Fauvist after her stay in Berlin, and other writers and artists, they
organized the Week of Modern Art in 1922, the same year the centennial of
independence was celebrated.
Here is a suggestive coincidence: to be cultured it is no longer indispens-
able, as it was in the nineteenth century, to imitate European behaviors and
reject "neurotical ly our own characteristics;' Amaral says; the modern is
joined with the interest in knowing and defining the Brazilian. The mod-
ernists drank from double and facing fountains: on the one hand, inter-
national information, above all French; on the other, "a nativism that would
be evidenced in the inspiration and search for our roots (research into our
folklore also began in the twenties)." That confluence is seen in the
Muchachas de Guarantingueta of Di Cavalcanti, in which Cubism provides
the vocabulary for painting mulattas; also in the works of Tarsila, which
modify what he learned from Lhote and Leger, imprinting upon the con-
structivist aesthetic a color and atmosphere representative of Brazil.
In Peru, the break with academicism is made in 1929 by young artists con-
cerned as much with formal liberty as with commenting artistically on the
national questions of the moment and painting human types that corre-
sponded to the "Andean man." For that reason they were called "indigenists;'
although they went beyond the identification with folklore. They wanted to
establish a new art and represent the national by locating it within modern
aesthetic development (Lauer 1976).
The agreement of social historians of art is significant when they relate
the rise of cultural modernization in various Latin American countries. It is
not a question of a transplant, above all in the main artists and writers, but
rather of reelaborations eager to contribute to social change. Their efforts at
constructing autonomous artistic fields, secularizing their image, and pro-
fessionalizing their work do not imply that they encapsulated themselves in
an aestheticist world, as some European vanguards did who opposed social
modernization. But in all the histories, individual creative projects run into
the rigidity of the bourgeoisie, the lack of an independent art market, the
provincialism (even in large cities like Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Lima, and
Mexico City), the arduous competition with academics, the harmful colo-
nial legacy, and ingenuous Indianism and regionalism. Faced with the diffi-
culties of taking on at once the indigenous traditions, the colonial traditions
and the new trends, many feel what Mario de Andrade synthesizes at the end
of the decade of the twenties: he said that the modernists were a group "iso-
lated and shielded in their own convictions;'
the only sector of the nation that makes the national artistic problem a case of
almost exclusive preoccupation. In spite of this, it does not represent anything
of Brazilian reality. It is outside of our social rhythm, outside of our economic
inconstancy, outside of Brazilian preoccupation. If this minority is acclima-
tized within Brazilian reality and lives intimately with Brazil, Brazilian reality,
in contrast, did not get used to living intimately with this minority. (Quoted
in Amaral, 274)
Complementary information allows us to be less harsh today in our evalua-
tion of those vanguards. Even in countries where ethnic history and many
ethnic traditions were wiped out, as in Argentina, artists "addicted" to Euro-
pean models are not mere imitators of imported aesthetics; nor can they l}e
accused of denationalizing their own culture. Nor, in the long run, do these
minorities always end up being insignificant, as they were assumed to be in
their texts. A movement as cosmopolitan as that of the journal Martin Fierro
in Buenos Aires, nourished by Spanish extremism and the French and Ital-
ian vanguards, redefines those influences in the midst of its country's social
and cultural conflicts: emigration and urbanization (so in evidence in the
early Borges), the polemic with previous literary authorities (Lugones and
the criollista tradition), and the social realism of the Boedo group. If we at-
tempt to continue to use
the metaphor of translation as the image of the typical intellectual operation
of the literary elites of capitalist countries that are peripheral with respect to
the cultural centers, say Altamirano and Sarlo, it is necessary to observe that it
is the entire field that generally operates as the matrix of translation. (Altami-
rano and Sarlo 1983, 88-89)
However precarious the existence of this field might be, it functions as a
scene of reelaboration and as a reorganizing structure of external models.
In several cases, cultural modernism, instead of being denationalizing,
has given impulse to, and the repertory of symbols for, the construction of
national identity. The most intense preoccupation with "Brazilianness" be-
gins with the vanguards of the 1920s. "We will be modern only if we are na-
tional," seems to be its slogan, says Renato Ortiz. From Oswald de Andrade
to the construction of Brasilia, the struggle for modernization was a move-
ment for critically raising a nation opposed to what the oligarchic or conser-
vative forces and the external dominators wanted. "Modernism is an out-of-
place idea that is expressed as a project" (Ortiz 1988, 34-36).
After the Mexican Revolution, various cultural movements simultane-
ously carry out a work of modernization and autonomous national devel-
opment. They take up again the project of the literary forum begun, with
sometimes disjointed efforts during the Porfiriate-for example, when
Vasconcelos tries to use the popularization of classical culture to "redeem
the Indians" and liberate them from their "backwardness." But the con-
frontation with the Academy of San Carlos and the insertion in the
postrevolutionary changes has, for many artists, the aim of reestablishing
key divisions of unequal and dependent development: those that oppose
high and popular culture, culture and work, vanguard experimentation,
and social consciousness. In Mexico, the attempt to overcome these critical
divisions of capitalist modernization was linked to the formation of the na-
tional society. Together with the educational and cultural diffusion of
Western knowledge among the popular classes, an effort was made to in-
corporate art and Mexican handicrafts into a patrimony that would, was
hoped, be shared. Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco proposed iconographic
syntheses of the national identity simultaneously inspired by Maya and
Aztec works, church altarpieces, the decorations in cantinas, the designs
and colors of Pueblan pottery, Michoacan lacquers, and the experimental
advances of European vanguards.
This hybrid reorganization of the language of visual art was aided by
changes in the professional relations between artists, the state, and the pop-
ular classes. Murals on public buildings, calendars, and widely distributed
posters and magazines were the result of a powerful affirmation of the new
aesthetic trends within the incipient cultural field and of the novel links that
artists were creating with the administrators of official education, unions,
and movements from below.
Mexican cultural history of the 1930s through the 1950s demonstrates the
fragility of that utopia and the attrition it was suffering as a result of intra-
artistic and sociopolitical conditions. The visual arts field, hegemonized by
dogmatic realism, the dominance of content, and the subordination of art to
politics, loses its former vitality and produces few innovations. In addition,
it was difficult to promote the social action of art when the revolutionary
impulse was being "institutionalized" or barely survived in marginal opposi-
tion movements.
Despite the singular formation of the modern cultural fields in Mexico
and the exceptional opportunities to participate in the transformative proc-
ess with monumental and massive works, when the new modernizing phase
erupts in the 1950s and. 1960s, the Mexican cultural situation was not radi-
cally different from that of other countries in Latin America. The legacy of
nationalist realism remains, although it produces almost no important
works. A richer and more stable state than the average one on the continent
continues to have resources for building museums and cultural centers, and
giving scholarships and subsidies to intellectuals, writers, and artists. But
these aids are constantly becoming diversified to foster new trends. The
main polemics are organized around axes similar to those in other Latin
American societies: how to articulate the local and the cosmopolitan, the
promises of modernity and the inertia of tradition; how cultural fields can
achieve greater autonomy and at the same time make that will for indepen-
dence compatible with the precarious development of the artistic and liter-
ary market; and in what ways the industrial reordering of culture re-creates
inequalities. ,
We must conclude that in none of these societies has modernism been the
mimetic adoption of imported models, or the search for merely formal solu-
tions. Even the names of the movements, Jean Franco observes, show that
the vanguards had a social rooting; whereas in Europe the renovators chose
names that indicated their rupture with the history of art-Impressionism,
symbolism, Cubism-in Latin America they prefer to refer to themselves
with words that suggest responses to factors external to art: modernism,
New Worldism, indigenism (1986, 15).
It is true that these projects of social insertion were diluted partially in
academicisms, variants of official culture or market games, as occurred to
different degrees with Peruvian indigenism, Mexican muralism, and Porti-
nari in Brazil. But their frustrations are not due to a fatal destiny of art, nor
to the disorder of socioeconomic modernization. Their internal contradic-
tions and discrepancies express sociocultural heterogeneity and the diffi-
culty of being realized in the midst of conflicts between different historical
temporalities that coexist in the same present It would seem, then, that un-
like stubborn readings in taking the side of traditional culture or of the van-
guards, it is necessary to understand the sinuous Latin American modernity
by rethinking modernisms as attempts to intervene in the intersection of a
semi-oligarchic dominant order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy,
and semitransformative social movements. The problem lies not in our
countries having badly and belatedly fulfilled a model of modernization that
was impeccably achieved in Europe; nor does it consist in reactively seeking
how to invent some alternative and independent paradigm with traditions
that have already been transformed by the worldwide expansion of capital-
ism. Especially in the most recent period, when the transnationalization of
the economy and culture makes us "contemporaries of all people" (Paz), and
nevertheless does not eliminate national traditions, choosing exclusively be-
tween dependency or nationalism, between modernization or local tradi-
tionalism, is an untenable simplification.
The Expansion of Consumption and Cultural Voluntarism
In the 1930s a more autonomous system of cultural production begins to be
organized in Latin American countries. The middle classes that arose in
Mexico after the revolution, those that gain access to political expression
with Argentine radicalism, or in similar social processes in Brazil and Chile,
constitute a cultural market with its own dynamic. Sergio Miceli, who stud-
ied the Brazilian process, speaks of the beginning of"import substitution" in
the publishing sector (1972, 72). In all these countries, immigrants with ex-
perience in the area and emergent national producers begin to generate a
culture industry with commercialization networks in the urban centers. To-
gether with the expansion of cultural circuits produced by growing literacy,
writers, businesspeople, and political parties stimulate a considerable na-
tional production.
In Argentina, the workers' libraries, popular study centers and literary fo-
rums started by anarchists and socialists at the beginning of the century, ex-
pand in the 1920s and 1930s. The publishing house Claridad, which pub-
lishes editions of ten to twenty-five thousand copies during those years,
responds to a rapidly growing readership and contributes to the formation
of a political culture, as do the newspapers and magazines that intellectually
elaborate national processes in relation to renovating tendencies of interna-
tional thought (Romero 1986; Corbiere).
But it is at the beginning of the second half of this century that the elites
in the social sciences, art, and literature e n c o ~ t e r signs of solid socioeco-
nomic modernization in Latin America. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, at
least five classes of events indicate structural changes:
a) the takeoff of a more sustainable and diversified economic develop-
ment, based on the growth of advanced technology industries and the in-
crease in industrial imports and salaried employment;
b) the consolidation and expansion of urban growth begun in the 1940s;
c) the expansion of the market for cultural goods, in part due to the
greater urban concentrations but especially to the rapid increase in school
attendance at all levels: illiteracy is reduced to 10 or 15 percent in most
countries and the university population in the region increases from
250,000 students in 1950 to 5,380,000 at the end of the 1970s;
d) the introduction of new communications technologies, especially
television, which contribute to the massification and internationalization
of cultural relations and support the dizzying sale of"modern" products
now made in Latin America: cars, electrical home appliances, and so on;
e) the advance of radical political movements, which trust in a modern-
ization that can include profound changes in social relations and a more
just distribution of basic goods.
Although the articulation of these five processes was not easy, as we know,
today it is clear that they transformed the relations between cultural mod-
ernism and social modernization, and between the autonomy and depen-
dencies of symbolic practices. There was a secularization perceptible in
,
everyday culture and political culture; careers in social science were created
that replaced essayistic and often irrationalist interpretations with empirical
studies and explanations more consistent with Latin America societies. Soci-
ology, psychology, and studies of mass media contributed to modernizing
social relations and planning. In alliance with industrial firms, and with the
new social movements, they converted the structural-functionalist version
of the opposition between tradition and modernity into a core of common
sense among the educated. Confronted with rural societies governed by sub-
sistence economies and archaic values, they preached the benefits of urban,
competitive relations in which individual free choice thrived. Developmen-
talist policy promoted this ideological and scientific turn and used it to cre-
ate a consensus among new generations of politicians, professionals, and
students for their modernizing project.
The growth in higher education and the artistic and literary market con-
tributed to professionalizing cultural functions. Even writers and artists who
were not able to live from their books and paintings-the majority-began
to get into teaching or specialized journalistic activities in which the auton-
omy of their trade was acknowledged. In various capitals the first museums
of modern art and numerous galleries were created that established specific
spaces for the selection and valorization of symbolic goods. Museums of
modern art were born in 1948 in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, in 1956 in
Buenos Aires, in 1962 in Bogota, and in 1964 in Mexico City.
The expansion of the cultural market favors specialization, experimental
cultivation of artistic languages, and a greater synchrony with the interna-
tional vanguards. As high art becomes absorbed in formal searches, a more
abrupt separation is produced between the tastes of the elites and those of
the popular and middle classes controlled by the culture industry. Although
this is the dynamic of the expansion and segmentation of the market, the
cultural and political movements of the left generate opposing actions des-
tined to socialize art, communicate the innovations of thought to larger au-
diences, and make them participate in some way in the hegemonic culture.
A confrontation occurs between the socioeconomic logic of the growth of
the market and the voluntaristic logic of political culturalism, which was
particularly dramatic when it was produced inside a particular movement
or even \\-ithin the same persons. Those who were carrying out the expansive
and renovating rationality of the sociocultural system were the same ones
who wanted to democratize artistic production. At the same time that they
were taking to extremes the practices of symbolic differentiation-formal
experimentation, the rupture with common knowledges-they were seek-
ing to fuse with the masses. At night, artists would go to the vernissages at
vanguard galleries in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, to the happenings at the
Institute di Tella en Buenos Aires; the next morning they would take part in
the distributing and "consciousness-raising" actions of the Popular Centers
of Culture or of militant unions. This was one of the schisms of the 1960s.
The other--complementary-one was the growing opposition between the
public and private sectors, with the resulting need of many artists to divide
their loyalties between the state and private enterprise, or between private
enterprise and social movements.
The frustration of political voluntarism has been examined in many
works, but that is not the case with cultural voluntarism. Its decline is attrib-
uted to the suffocation or crisis of the insurgent forces in which it was in-
serted-which is partly true but which fails to analyze the cultural causes of
the failure of this new attempt to link modernism with modernization.
A first key is the overestimation of the transformative movements with-
out considering the logic of development of the cultural fields. Almost the
only social dynamic that attempts to understand this in the critical literature
on art and culture in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s is that of de-
pendency. But this ignored the reorganization that was being produced be-
ginning two or three decades earlier in the cultural fields, as well as in their
relations with society. This failure becomes clear when one rereads now the
manifestos, political, and aesthetic analyses and polemics of that era.
The new perspective on the communication of culture that has been con-
structed in the last few years derives from two basic trends in social logic: on
the one hand, the specialization and stratification of cultural productions;
on the other, the reorganization of relations between the public and private
sectors, to the benefit oflarge companies and private foundations.
I see the initial symptom of the first trend in the changes in Mexican cul-
tural policies during the 1940s. Taking Germanism as its starting point, the
state that had promoted an integration of the traditional and the modern,
the popular and the cultured, pushes a project in which popular utopia gives
way to modernization, revolutionary utopia to the planning of industrial
development. In this period, the state differentiates its cultural policies in re-
lation to social classes: the National Institute of Fine Arts (NIFA) is created,
which is dedicated to "erudite" culture, and almost in the same years the Na-
tional Museum of Popular and Industrial Arts and the National Indigenist
Institute are founded. The separate organization of bureaucratic appara-
tuses institutionally expresses a change in direction. However much the
NIFA may have had periods in which it sought to de-elitize high art, and
some organisms dedicated to popular cultures sometimes reactivate the r&-
olutionary ideology of multiclass integration, the divided structure of its
cultural policies reveals how the state conceives of social reproduction and
the differential renovation of consensus.
In other countries, state policies collaborated in the same way with the
segmentation of symbolic universes. But it was the increase in differentiated
investments in the elite and mass markets that most accentuated the dis-
tance between both. Joined to the growing specialization of the producers
and the audiences, this bifurcation changed the meaning of the split be-
tween the cultured and the popular. It was no longer based-as it had been
until the first half of the twentieth century-on the separation of cl&Sses, be-
tween well-educated elites and illiterate or semiliterate majorities. High cul-
ture became an area cultivated by fractions of the bourgeoisie and the mid-
dle classes, while the majority of the upper and middle classes, and virtually
all of the popular classes, were becoming attached to the mass programming
of the culture industry.
The culture industry provides the visual arts, literature, and music with a
more extensive scope than they would have achieved with the most success-
ful campaigns of popular distribution originating in the goodwill of the
artists. The multiplication of concerts in folk music get-togethers and polit-
ical acts reaches a minimal audience compared to what is offered to the same
musicians by discos, cassettes, and television. Cultural serials and fashion or
decoration magazines sold at newsstands and supermarkets bring innova-
tions in literature, the visual arts, and architecture to those who never visit
bookstores or museums.
Along with this change in the relations between "high" culture and mass
consumption comes a modification of the access different classes have to the
innovations of the metropolises. It is not indispensable to belong to the fam-
ily clans of the bourgeoisie or to receive a foreign scholarship to be aware of
the variations in artistic or political taste. Cosmopolitanism is democra-
tized. In an industrialized culture, which constantly needs to expand con-
sumption, the possibility of reserving exclusive repertories for minorities is
reduced.' Nevertheless, the differential mechanisms are renewed when di-
verse subjects appropriate the novelties.
The State Cares for the Patrimony, Companies Modernize It
The procedures of symbolic distinction move on to operate in a different
way. This occurs by means of a double separation: on the one hand, between
the traditional administered by the state and the modern supported by pri-
vate corporations; on the other, the division between modern or experimen-
tal high culture for elites promoted by one type of corporation and mass
culture organized by another type. The general tendency is that the modern-
ization of culture for elites and for masses remains in the hands of private
enterprise.
While traditional patrimony continues to be the responsibility of states,
the promotion of modern culture is increasingly the task of private corpora-
tions and organizations. From this difference two styles of cultural action
derive. While governments understand their policies in terms of protection
and preservation of the historical patrimony, innovative initiatives remain
in the hands of civil society, especially of those with the economic power to
finance risk. Both seek two types of symbolic yield in art: states seek legiti-
macy and consensus in appearing as representatives of national history; cor-
porations seek to obtain money and, through high, renovating culture, to
construct a "disinterested" image of their c o n ~ m i c expansion.
As we saw in our analysis of the metropolises in the last chapter, the mod-
ernization of visual culture, which historians of Latin American art tend to
conceive of only as an effect of the artists' experimentation, has been heavily
dependent on big corporations for the past thirty years. Above all this has
been through the role these corporations play as patrons of producers in the
artistic field or transmitters of these innovations to mass circuits through
industrial and graphic design. A history of the contradictions of cultural
modernity in Latin America would have to demonstrate to what degree this
was the work of that policy that has so many premodern characteristics,
which is patronage. It would have to begin with the subsidies with which the
oligarchy of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth
supported artists and writers, literary forums, literary and visual arts salons,
concerts, and musical associations. But the decisive period is that of the
1960s. The industrial bourgeoisie accompanies the productive moderniza-
tion and the introduction of new habits in consumption that it itself pro-
motes with foundations and experimental centers destined to win for pri-
vate initiative the leading role in the reordering of the cultural market. Some
of these actions were promoted by transnational corporations and arrived as
exports of aesthetic currents of the postwar period, born in the metropo-
lises-especially in the United States. Thus the critiques of our dependency
that multiplied in the 1960s were justified; among them, the studies of Shifra
Goldman stand out in particular. Documented with North American
sources, she was able to see the links between the large consortia (Esso
1
Standard Oil, Shell, General Motors) and museums, magazines, artists, and
North and Latin American critics in order to disseminate on our continent a
"depoliticized" formal experimentation that would replace social realism
(Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, especially chapters 2
and 3). But interpretations of history that place all the weight on the con-
spiratorial intentions and Machiavellian alliances of the dominant powers
impoverish the complexity and the conflicts of modernization.
In those years, the radical transformation of society, education, and cul-
ture summarized in the preceding pages was taking place in the countries of
Latin America. The adoption of new materials (acrylic, plastic, polyester)
and constructive procedures (lighting and electronic techniques, serial mul-
tiplication of works) in artistic production was not a simple imitation of the
art of the metropolises, since such materials and technologies were being in-
corporated into industrial production and therefore into daily life and taste
in Latin American countries. We can say the same about the new icons of the
visual arts of the vanguards: television sets, fashion clothing, mass commu-
nication personalities.
These material, formal, and iconographic changes were consolidated with
the appearance of new spaces for exhibiting and valuating symbolic produc-
tion. In Argentina and Brazil, the representative institutions of the agro-
export oligarchy-the academies, magazines, and traditional newspapers-
were displaced and the di Tella Institute, the Matarazzo Foundation, and
sophisticated weeklies like Primera Plana gained ground. A new system of
circulation and appraisal was set up that, at the same time that it proclaimed
more autonomy for artistic experimentation, was displaying it as part of the
general process of modernization in industry, technology, and the daily en-
vironment, under the guidance of the businessmen who were managing
those institutes and foundations.'
In Mexico, the cultural action of the modernizing bourgeoi$ie and of the
vanguard artists did not arise in opposition to the traditional oligarchy,
which was marginalized by the revolution at the beginning of the century,
but rather by contradicting the nationalist realism of the Mexican school
backed by the postrevolutionary state. The polemic was bitter and long
among those who were taking over the hegemony of the visual arts field and
the new painters (Tamayo, Cuevas, Gironella, Vlady ), who were struggling to
transform figurative representation.
3
But the quality of the latter and the
rigidity of the former resulted in the new currents being acknowledged in
galleries, in private cultural spaces, and by the state apparatus itself, which
began to include them in its policies. To the creation of the Museum of
Modern Art in 1964 were added other official instances of consecration: the
vanguards were receiving awards, national and foreign exhibits promoted by
the government, and commissions for public works.
Until the mid-1970s, state sponsorship and private sponsorship of art in
Mexico were in equilibrium. Despite the irladequacy of the patronage of
both in relation to the demands of the producers, that equilibrium gave the
artistic field a profile that was less dependent on the market than irl coun-
tries like Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, or Argentirla. At the end of the sev-
enties, but especially begirlning with the economic crisis of 1982, the neo-
conservative trends that reduce the size of the state and end the
developmentalist policies of modernization bring Mexico closer to the situ-
ation irl the rest of the continent. As soon as broad sectors of production are
transferred to private companies, sectors that were heretofore under the
control of public power, one type of hegemony-based on subordinating
different classes to the nationalist unification ~ the state-is replaced by an-
other, in which private companies appear as promoters of the culture of all
sectors of society.
The cultural competition between private enterprise and the state is con-
centrated irl a large corporate complex: Televisa. This corporation manages
four national television channels with many affiliated stations in Mexico
and the United States, video producers and distributors, publishing houses,
radio stations, and museums in which high and popular art are exhibited
(unti1 1986, they included Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art,
and still include the Cultural Center of Contemporary Art). Such diversified
activity, but under one monopolistic admirlistration, structures the relations
between cultural markets. We said that from the 1950s to the 1970s the split
between elite and mass c{titure was deepened by the investments of different
types of capital and the growirlg specialization of producers and audiences.
In the 1980s, large corporations appropriated at once cultural programming
for elites and for the mass market. Something similar happened in Brazil
with the Rede Globo--owner of television networks, radio stations, soap
operas for national audiences and for export, and creator of a new business
mentality toward culture that establishes highly professional relations be-
tween artists, technicians, producers, and the public.
These corporations' simultaneous ownership of large exposition halls,
advertising and critical spaces afforded by TV and radio chains, magazines,
and other institutions allows them to program cultural activities that have
an enormous impact and are very expensive, to control the networks over
which they will be broadcast, the critiques, and even to a certain extent thJ.
decodification that different audiences will make.
What does this change mean for elite culture? If modern culture is
achieved by making autonomous the field formed by the specific agents of
each practice-in art, artists, galleries, museums, critics, and the public-
the all-encompassing sponsoring foundations attack something central to
that project. In subordinating the interaction between the agents of the
artistic field to a single corporate will, they tend to neutralize the au-
. tonomous development of the field. As for the question of cultural depen-
dency, although the imperial influence of the metropolitan corporations
does not disappear, the enormous power of Televisa, Rede Globo, and other
Latin American organisms is changing the structure of our symbolic mar-
kets and their interaction with those of the countries of the center.
A notable case of this evolution of sponsoring monopolies is that of the
almost one-man institution run by Jorge Glusberg-the Center of Art and
Communication ( CAYC) in Buenos Aires. Owner of one of the largest light-
fixture companies in Argentina-Modulor- he has at his disposal resources
for financing the activities of the center, of the artists he brings together
(first the Group of Thirteen, later the CAYC Group), and of others who ex-
hibit their works in this institution or who are sent abroad by the center.
Glusberg pays for the catalogs, the publicity, the shipping of the works, and
sometimes the materials if the artists lack the means. Thus he establishes a
dense network of professional and paraprofessional loyalties with artists, ar-
chitects, city planners, and critics.
In addition, CAYC acts as an interdisciplinary center that combines these
specialists with communications researchers, serniologists, sociologists, tech-
nologists, and politicians, which gives Glusberg great versatility in playing a
role in different fields of Argentine cultural and scientific production, as well
as in connecting him to institutes on the international cutting edge (his cata-
logs tend to be published in Spanish and English). For the past two decades
he has been organizing annual exhibits of Argentine artists in Europe and the
United States. He also organizes exhibitions of foreign artists and colloqui-
ums in Buenos Aires, with the participation of prominent critics (Umberto
Eco, Giulio Carlo Argan, Pierre Restany, etc.). At the same time, Glusberg has
deployed a many-faceted critical activity, which includes almost all of CAYC's
catalogues, the management of art and architecture pages in the main news-
papers (La Opinion, later Clarin), and articles in international magazines of
both specialties, which publicize the work of the center and suggest readings
of art in keeping with the proposals of the expositions. A key resource for
maintaining this multimedia activity has been the permanent control that
Glusberg has had as president of the Argentine Association of Art Critics and
as vice president of the International Association of Critics.
Through this management of several cultural fields (art, architecture, the
press, professional associations) and their links with economic and political
forces, in twenty years CAYC has achieved an astonishing continuity in a
country where only one constitutional government was able to complete its
mandate during the last four decades. It also seems to be a consequence of
his control over so many instances of artistic production and circulation
that the center has received nothing but confidential critiques, none of
which has questioned it seriously enough to diminish its recognition in the
country, despite its having passed through at least three contradictory
phases.
In the first, from 1971 to 1974, it carried out a combined action with artists
and critics of diverse orientations. Its work contributed to autonomous aes-
thetic innovation in sponsoring experiments that still lacked value in the
artistic market, such as the conceptualists. In some cases it sought a wider
audience--for example, with the planned expositions in Buenos Aires
plazas, of which only one took place in 1972, and which was repressed by the
police. Beginning in 1976, Glusberg changed his approach. He had excellent
relations with the military government established that year until1983, as is
proven, for example, by the official promotion his exhibitions received, and
the telegram from the president, General Videla, which congratulated him
on his having won the award of the Fourteenth Bienal of Sao Paulo in 1977,
to which he replied by committing himself, in front of the general, to "repre-
sent the humanism of Argentine art abroad." The third phase opens in De-
cember of 1983, the week following the end of the dictatorship and the as-
sumption of power by Alfonsin, when Glusberg organized the Workdays for
Democracy in CAYC and other Buenos Aires galleries.
4
In the 1960s, the growing importance of gallery owners and art sellers
brought about talk in Argentina of "distributors' art" to refer to the inter-
vention of these agents in the social process whereby aesthetic meanings are
constituted (Slemenson and Kratochwill). The recent foundations include
much more since they not only deal with the circulation of the works but
also reformulate the relations between artists, middlemen, and the public.
To achieve this they subordinate to one or a few powerful figures the inter-
actions and conflicts between agents who occupy diverse positions in the
cultural field. It thus passes from a structure in which the horizontal links,
the struggles for legitimacy and renovation, were effected with predomi-
nantly artistic criteria and constituted the autonomous dynamic of the cWr-
tural fields, to a pyramidal system in which the lines of power are obliged to
converge under the will of private patrons or corporations. Aesthetic inno-
vation is converted into a game within the international symbolic market,
where the national profiles that were the concern of some vanguards until
the middle of this century are diluted, just as they are in the arts that are
most dependent upon advanced and "universal" technologies (cinema, tele-
vision, video). Although the internationalizing trend has been characteristic
of the vanguards, we note that some united their experimental search in ma-
terials and languages with an interest in critically redefining the cultural tra-
ditions from which they were being expressed. This interest is now giving
way to a more mimetic relation with hegemonic trends in the international
market.
In a series of interviews we did with Argentine and Mexican visual artists
about what an artist should do to sell and gain recognition, what we heard
more than anything were insistent references to the depression of the Latin
American market of the 1980s and the "instability" to which artists are sub-
jected, as much by the continuous obsolescence of aesthetic currents as by
the economic variability of demand. In these conditions, the pressure is very
strong to be in tune with the uncritical and playful style of art at the end of
this century, without social concerns or aesthetic daring, "without too much
stridency, elegant, not very passionate:' The most successful artists point out
that a work of significance must be based both on visual discoveries or skill
and on journalistic resources, publicity people, clothing, trips, huge tele-
phone bills, and following international journals and catalogs. There are
those who resist having extra-aesthetic implications occupy the main place,
but even so they say that these complementary resources are indispensable.
Being an artist or a writer, producing significant works in the midst of this
reorganization of global society and of the symbolic markets, and commu-
nicating with broad audiences have become much more complicated. In the
same way that artisans or popular producers of culture-as we shall see
later-can no longer refer only to their traditional universe, artists too can-
not carry out socially acknowledged projects if they enclose themselves in
their field. The popular and the cultured, mediated by an industrial, com-
mercial, and spectacular reorganization of symbolic processes, require new
strategies.
Arriving at the 1990s, it is undeniable that Latin America has modernized,
as a society and as a culture: symbolic modernism and socioeconomic mod-
ernization are no longer so divorced. The problem lies in modernization's
having been produced in a different way from what we expected in earlier
decades. In this second half of the century, modernization was not made so
much by states as by private enterprise. The "socialization" or democratiza-
tion of culture has been achieved by the culture industry- almost always in
the hands of private corporations-more than by the cultural or political
goodwill of the producers. There continues to be inequality in the appropri-
ation of symbolic goods and in access to cultural innovation, but that in-
equality no longer takes the simple and polarized form we thought we
would encounter when we were dividing every country into dominant or
dominated, or the world into empires and dependent nations. Having ex-
amined structural changes, it is necessary to ascertain how various cultural
actors-producers, middlemen, and audiences-relocate their practices in
the face of such contradictions of modernity, or how they imagine they
could do so.
Notes
1. Almost no work has been done on these transformations, but Durand is a pathbreaking
text on this topic.
2. We extensively study this process in Argentina in La producci6n simb61ica, especially the
chapter "Estrategias simb6licas del desarrollismo econ6mico."
3- Outstanding in the literature on this period is the documentation and analysis presented
in Rita Eder's book, Gironella, especially chapters 1 and 2.
4- judgments ofCAYC and ofGlusberg are divided between artists and critics, as can be seen
in the research of Luz M. Garda, M. Elena Crespo, and M. Cristina L6pez.
,
144 I The Future of the Past
of innovations. At the same time, it offers the opportunity to rethink the
modern as a project that is relative, doubtable, not antagonistic to traditions
nor destined to overcome them by some unverifiable evolutionary law. It
serves, in short, to make us simultaneously take charge of the impure itiner-
ary of traditions and of the disjointed, heterodox achievement of our
modernity.
Notes
1. The formulation appears in a speech by the Secretary of Culture, Raw Casa, but it was
quite common in the official discourse of that time. See Andres Avellaneda's study and docu-
mentary compilation.
2. To name just a few titles: those of Hudson, Le6n, Binni and Pinna, Poulot. And of course
the collection of the journal Museum, published by UNESCO. The best anthology in Spanish
can be found in Schmilchuk.
3 Information provided by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologfa e Historia.
4 A famous example, the dispute between the federal government and the government of
Oaxaca over the treasure of Tomb 7 from Monte Alban, is presented in all its political and cul-
tural complexity in the account Daniel Rubin de Ia Borbolla gave in an inerview with Ulises
Laclislao (14-15).
5. We are enunciating a general principle, established by investigating the social laws of cul-
tural diffusion; see especially the works ofBourdieu and Passeron and ofBourdieu and DarbeL
I do not affirm a mechanical determination of the economic or educational level over theca-
pacity of each subject to appropriate the patrimony, but rather what polls and statistics reveal
about the unequal way in which the institutions that transmit the patrimony permit its appro-
priation, as a result of how they are organized and of their articulation with other social in-
equalities.
6. I adopt here the concept of cultural capital utilized by Bourdieu to analyze cultural and
educational processes, although this author does not employ it in relation to the patrimony.
Here I indicate its richness for dynamizing the notion of patrimony and situating it in social re-
production. A more systematic use should-as with any importation of concepts from one
field to another-state the epistemological conditions and limits of its metaphoric use in an
area for which it was not developed. Cf. Bourclieu 1979, especially chapters 2 and 4, and 198oa,
chapters 3, 6, and 7.
5 I The Staging of the Popular
In this history the popular is the excluded: those who have no patrimony or
who do not succeed in being acknowledged and conserved; artisans who do
not become artists, who do not become individuals or participate in the
market for "legitimate" symbolic goods; spectators of the mass media who
remain outside the universities and museums, "incapable" of reading and
looking at high culture because they do not know the history of knowledge
and styles.
Artisans and spectators-are these the only roles assigned to popular
groups in the theater of modernity? The popular tends to be associated with
the premodern and the subsidiary. In production, it maintains relatively
suitable forms for the survival of preindustrial enclaves (artisanal work-
shops) and local forms of recreation (regional forms of music, neighbor-
hood forms of entertainment). In consumption, the popular sectors are al-
ways at the end of the process, as addressees, spectators obligated to
reproduce the cycle of capital and the ideology of the dominators.
The constitutive processes of modernity are thought of as chains of oppo-
sitions juxtaposed in a Manichaean fashion:
modern = cultured hegemonic
~
+
+ +
traditional = popular subaltern
145
The bibliography on culture tends to assume that there is an intrinsic in-
terest on the part of the hegemonic sectors to promote modernity and a fatal
destiny on the part of the popular sectors that keeps them rooted in tradi-
tions. From this opposition, modernizers draw the moral that their interest
in the advances and promises of history justifies their hegemonic position:
meanwhile, the backwardness of the popular classes condemns them to sub-
alternity. If popular culture modernizes, as indeed happens, this is a confir-
mation for the hegemonic groups that there is no way out of its traditional-
ism; for the defenders of popular causes it is fur ther evidence of the way in
which domination prevents them from being themselves.
The preceding chapter documented the fact that traditionalism is today a
trend in many hegemonic social layers and can be combined with the mod-
ern, almost without conflict, when the exaltation of traditions is limited to
culture, whereas modernization specializes in the social and the economic. It
must now be asked in what sense and to what ends the popular sectors ad-
here to modernity, search for it, and mix it with their traditions. A first
analysis will consist in seeing how the oppositions modern/traditional and
cultured/popular are restructured in changes occurring in handicrafts and
fiestas. Next I will stop to analyze some manifestations of urban popular cul-
ture where the search for the modem appears as part of the productive
movement of the popular sphere. Finally, we will have to examine how, to-
gether with the traditional, other features that had been fatally identified
with the popular are being transformed: their local character, their associa-
tion with the national and the subaltern.
To refute the classic oppositions from which popular cultures are defined,
it is not enough to pay attention to their current situation. It is necessary to
deconstruct the scientific and political operations that staged the popular.
Three currents play roles in this theatricalization: folklore, the culture in-
dustry and political populism. In the three cases we will see the popular as
something constructed rather than as preexistent. The pitfall that often im-
pedes our apprehending the popular and problematizing it consists in pre-
senting it as an a priori proof for ethical and political reasons: who is going
to dispute a people's way of being, or doubt its existence?
Nevertheless, the late appearance of studies and policies referring to pop-
ular cultures shows that they became visible only a few decades ago. The
constructed character of the popular is even clearer upon reviewing the con-
ceptual strategies with which it was formed and their relations with the var-
ious stages in the establishment of hegemony. In Latin America, the popular
is not the same if it is staged by folklorists and anthropologists for museums
The Staging of the Popular I 147
(beginning in the twenties and thirties), by communications specialists for
the mass media (since the fifties), and by political sociologists for the state or
for opposition parties and movements (since the seventies).
In part, the current theoretical crisis in research on the popular derives
from the indiscriminate attribution of this notion to social subjects formed
in different processes. The artificial separation among disciplines that set up
disconnected paradigms collaborates in this juxtaposition of discourses that
allude to diverse realities. Are the ways in which anthropology, sociology,
and communications studies treat the popular incompatible or comple-
mentary? The attempts of the last few years to develop unifying views will
also have to be discussed; we choose the two most commonly used ap-
proaches, that is, the theory of reproduction and the neo-Gramscian con-
ception of hegemony. But through this itinerary we should be concerned
above all with the schism that conditions interdisciplinary divisions and op-
poses tradition to modernity.
Folklore: A Melancholic Invention of Traditions
Elaborating a scientific discourse on the popular is a recent problem in
modern thinking. Except for pioneering works like those of Bakhtin and
Ernesto de Martino, knowledge dedicated in a specific way to popular cul-
tures, locating them in a complex and consistent theory of the social and
using rigorous technical procedures, is a novelty of the last three decades.
Some will accuse this affirmation of being unjust because they will re-
member the long list of studies on popular customs and folklore that have
been carried out since the nineteenth century. We acknowledge these works
for having made visible the question of the popular and for having estab-
lished uses of this notion that are still common today. But their gnosiologi-
cal tactics were not guided by a precise delimitation of the object of study,
nor by specialized methods, but rather by ideological and political interests.
The people begin to exist as a referent in the modern debate at the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, with the for-
mation in Europe of national states that tried to embrace all levels of the
population. However, the Enlightenment believes that this people, to whom
recourse was necessary in order to legitimize a secular and democratic gov..,.
ernment, is also the bearer of that which reason wants to abolish: supersti-
tion, ignorance, and turbulence. Therefore, a complex device was developed,
in Martin Barbero's words, one "of abstract inclusion and concrete exclu-
sion" (1987a, 15-16). The people are of interest as legitimators of bourgeois
hegemony, but bothersome as the locus of the uncultured because of every-
thing they lack.
The Romantics are aware of this contradiction. Preoccupied with welding
together the split between the political and the quotidian, between culture
and life, various writers are busy getting to know "popular customs" and pro-
moting folkloric studies. Renato Ortiz has synthesized their innovative con-
tribution in three points: against Enlightenment, which saw cultural pro-
cesses as intellectual activities, restricted to the elites, the Romantics exalted
feelings and popular ways of expressing them; in opposition to the cos-
mopolitanism of classic literature, they were dedicated to particular situa-
tions and emphasized the differences and value of the local; in the face of the
contempt of classical thought for "the irrational," they reclaimed that which
surprises and alters social harmony, passions that transgress the order of"de-
cent men," the exotic habits of other peoples and also of peasants themselves
(Ortiz 1985).
The restlessness of writers and philosophers-the Grimm brothers,
Herder-to know popular cultures empirically was formalized when the
first Folklore Society was founded in 1878. In France and Italy, that name
later comes to refer to the discipline that specializes in subaltern knowledge
and expressions. In the face of the requirements of positivism that guided
the new folklorists, the works of the Romantic writers remained as lyrical
uses of popular traditions to promote their artistic interests. Now knowl-
edge of the popular wants to be situated within the "scientific spirit" that
drives modern knowledge. To achieve this, in addition to distancing them-
selves from the amateur "connoisseurs;' they need to critique popular
knowledge. The intention also existed among the positivists to unite the sci-
entific project with a social redemption enterprise. According to Rafaelle
Corso, folkloric work is "a movement of elite men who, through persistent
propaganda, strive to awaken the people and enlighten them in their igno-
rance." Knowledge of the popular world is no longer required only to form
modern integrated nations but also to free the oppressed and to resolve the
struggle between classes.
Along with positivism and sociopolitical messianism, the other feature of
the folkloric task is the apprehension of the popular as tradition-that is,
the popular as praised residue: deposit of peasant creativity, of the supposed
transparency of face-to-face communication, of the profundity that would
be lost by the "external" changes of modernity. The precursors of folklore
saw with nostalgia that the role of oral transmission was diminishing in the
face of the reading of daily newspapers and books; beliefs constructed by
ancient communities in search of symbolic pacts with nature were lost when
technology taught them how to dominate those forces. Even in many posi-
tivists there remains a Romantic restlessness that leads to defining the popu-
lar as traditional. It acquires the taciturn beauty of that which is becoming
extinguished and that we can reinvent, outside present-day conflicts, by fol-
lowing our desires for what we should have been. Antiquarians had strug-
gled against what was being lost by collecting objects; folklorists created mu-
seums of popular traditions.
A key notion for explaining the methodological tactics of the folklorists
and their theoretical failure is that of survival. The perception of popular
objects and customs as remains of an extinguished social structure is the
logical justification of their decontextualized analysis. If the mode of pro-
duction and the social relations that gave rise to those "survivals" disap-
peared, why worry about finding their socioeconomic meaning? Only re-
searchers affiliated with idealist historicism are interested in understanding
traditions in a wider framework, but they reduce them to testimonies of a
memory that they presuppose to be useful for strengthening historical con-
tinuity and contemporary identity.'
In the end the Romantics become accomplices to the enlightened. In de-
ciding that the specific character of popular culture resides in its faithfulness
to the rural past, they are blinded to the changes that were refining it in in-
dustrial and urban societies. In assigning to it an imagined autonomy, they
suppress the possibility of explaining the popular by the interactions it has
with the new hegemonic culture. The people are "rescued" but not known.
I remember the European trajectory of classic folkloric studies because
the motivations of their interest in the popular, its uses and its contradic-
tions, are being repeated in Latin America. In countries as different as Ar-
gentina, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico, folkloric texts since the end of the nine-
teenth century have produced a vast body of empirical knowledge about
ethnic groups and their cultural expressions: religiosity, rituals, medicine, fi-
estas, and handicrafts. In many works a profound interpenetration with the
Indian and mestizo world can be seen, an effort to give it a place within na-
tional culture. But their theoretical and epistemological difficulties, which
seriously limit the value of their reports, persist in current folkloric studies.
Even in the countries that are the most up-to-date in the analysis of popul
culture-such as the four named-this current controls most of the special-
ized institutions and bibliographic production.
A first obstacle to folkloric knowledge proceeds from the delineation of
the object of study. The folk is seen, in a way similar to Europe, as a property
of isolated and self-sufficient indigenous or peasant groups whose simple
techniques and little social differentiation preserve them from modern
threats. Cultural goods--objects, legends, musical forms-are of greater in-
. terest than the actors who generate and consume them. This fascination
with the products-the neglect of the social processes and agents that en-
gender them, and of the uses that modify them-leads to the objects being
valued more for their repetition than for their change.
In the second place, many folkloric studies in Latin America were born
through the same impulses that gave rise to them in Europe: on the one
hand, the need to root the formation of new nations in the identity of their
past; on the other hand, the Romantic inclination to rescue popular senti-
ments in the face of the Enlightenment and liberal cosmopolitanism. Thus
conditioned by political nationalism and Romantic humanism, it is not easy
for studies on the popular to produce a scientific body of knowledge.
The association of folklorists and anthropologists with nationalist move-
ments converted scholars of popular cultures into recognized intellectuals
during the first half of the century, as can be appreciated, for example, in the
official functions entrusted to Peruvian and Mexican 1ndigenists. Since the
1940s and 1950s, with the advance of modernizing trends in cultural politics
and social research, the fondness for traditional cultures becomes a resource
of those who need to relocate their intervention in the academic field.
Rena to Ortiz finds that the development of Brazilian folkloric studies owes
much to objectives with as little scientific basis as those that fixed the terrain
of nationality in a fusion of black, white, and Indian; gave intellectuals
working in popular culture a symbolic resource through which to raise their
consciousness and express the peripheral situation of their country; and
made it possible for those intellectuals to affirm themselves professionally in
relation to a modern system of cultural production from which they feel ex-
cluded (in Brazil the study of folklore is done mainly outside of universities,
in traditional centers like the Geographic Historical Institutes, which have
an anachronistic view of culture and ignore modern techniques of intellec-
tual work). Ortiz adds that the study of folklore is also associated with ad-
vances in regional consciousness, which is opposed to the centralization of
the state:
At the moment when a local elite loses power, a flourishing of studies of popu-
lar culture is produced; an author like Gilberto Freyre could perhaps be taken
as a paradigmatic representative of the elite that endeavors to reequilibrate its
symbolic capital through a regional ideology. (1985, 53)
In Mexico a large body of anthropological and folkloric studies was condi-
tioned by the postrevolutionary objective of constructing a unified nation
beyond the economic, linguistic, and political divisions that were fracturing
the country. The influence of the Finnish school on folklorists-under the
slogan "Leave theory behind; what is important is to collect"-promoted a
flat empiricism in the cataloging of materials, the analytical treatment of in-
formation, and a poor contextual interpretation of the facts, even among the
most conscientious authors. Therefore, most of the books on traditional
handicrafts, fiestas, poetry, and music enumerate and exalt popular products
without locating them in the logic present in social relations. This is even
more visible in the museums of folklore or popular art. They exhibit vessels
and textiles while stripping them of any reference to the daily practices for
which they were made. Those that include the social context are the excep-
tions, such as the National Museum of Cultures in Mexico City, created in
1982. Most limit themselves to listing and classifying those pieces that repre-
sent traditions and stand out for their resistance or indifference to change.
Despite the abundance of descriptions, folklorists give few explanations
about the popular. Their perceptive gaze at what for a long time escaped
macrohistory and other scientific discourse, and their sensitivity to the pe-
ripheral, must be acknowledged. But they almost never say why it is impor-
tant or what social processes give traditions a current function. They do not
succeed in reformulating their object of study in accord with the develop-
ment of societies where cultural facts rarely have the features that define and
valorize folklore. They are neither produced manually or artisanally, nor are
they strictly traditional (transmitted from one generation to another), nor
do they circulate in oral form from person to person, nor are they anony-
mous, nor are they learned and transmitted outside of educational and mass
communications institutions or programs. Undoubtedly, the folkloric ap-
proximation remains useful for knowing facts that in contemporary soci-
eties retain some of these features. It has little to say as soon as we want to in-
clude the industrial conditions in which culture is now produced.
The main thing missing in works on folklore is that they do not ask about
what happens to popular cultures when society becomes mass-based. Folk-
lore, which arose in Europe and America as a reaction agairlst aristocratic
blindness toward the popular and as a response to the first irldustrializatio.11
of culture, is almost always a melancholic attempt at subtracting the popular
from the massive reorganization of society, fixing it iri artisanal forms of
production and communication, and guarding it as an imaginary reserve of
nationalist political discourses.
If one wants to have a global synthesis of the ideology of work, the strate-
gies of study and cultural policy with which the folkloric current succeeded
in staging the popular, not only in many countries but in international orga-
nizations, one has to read the Charter of American Folklore, drawn up by a
representative group of specialists and approved by the Organization of
American States ( OAS) in 1970. How does it characterize the future of folk-
lore in the face of the advance of what it identifies as its two biggest adver-
saries-the mass media and "modern progress"? We can summarize its basic
affirmations in this way:
Folklore is constituted by a series of traditional goods and cultural
forms, mainly of an oral and local character, that are always unalterable.
Changes are attributed to external agents, for which reason it is recom-
mended to train functionaries and specialists so that they"do not adul-
terate folklore" and "know which are the traditions that there is no rea-
son to change."
Folklore, understood in this way, constitutes the essence of the identity
and the cultural patrimony of each country.
Progress and modern communications media, in accelerating the "final
process of the disappearance of folklore;' destroy the patrimony and
make it "lose its identity" for American peoples.
From this curious exaltation of local culture on the part of an interna-
tional organization, the charter traces some policy guidelines for the "con-
servation;' "rescue;' and study of traditions. Its proposals concentrate on
museums and schools, festivals and contests, legislation and protection. The
brief treatment of the mass media is limited to suggesting "use them well;'
disqualifying what they broadcast as being "a false folklore."
Prosperous Popular Cultures
The persistence of these notions in cultural policies, curating or tourist
strategies, and even in research centers is incompatible with the current de-
velopment of the symbolic market and the social sciences. The reformula-
tion of the popular-traditional that is occurring in the self-criticism of some
folklorists and in new research by anthropologists and communications
specialists allows us to understand the place of folklore in modernity in a
different way. It is possible to construct a new perspective for analyzing the
popular-traditional by taking into account its interactions with elite culture
and the culture industries. I will begin to systematize it in the form of six
refutations of the classic view of the folklorists.
a) Modern development does not suppress traditional popular cultures. In
the two decades that have passed since the issuing of the charter, the sup-
posed process of folklore's extinction did not become more marked, despite
advances in mass communications and other technologies that either did
not exist in 1970 or were not used then in the culture industry: video, cas-
settes, cable television, satellite transmission-in short, the series of tech-
nological and cultural transformations that result from the combining of
microelectronics and telecommunication.
Not only did this modernizing expansion nQt succeed in erasing folklore,
but many studies reveal that in the last few decades traditional cultures have
developed by being transformed. This growth is the result of at least four types
of causes: (a) the impossibility of incorporating the entire population into
urban industrial production; (b) the need of the market to include tradi-
tional symbolic structures and goods in the mass circuits of communication
in order to reach even the popular layers least integrated into modernity; (c)
the interest of political systems in taking folklore into account with the goal
of strengthening their hegemony and legitimacy; (d) continuity in the cul-
tural production of the popular sectors.
Studies on handicrafts show a growth in the number of artisans, the vol-
ume of production, and its quantitative weight: a report by Sistema
Econ6mico Latinoarnericano (SELA) calculates that the artisans of the four-
teen Latin American countries analyzed represent 6 percent of the general
population and 18 percent of the economically active population (cited in
Lauer 1984, 39).J One of the main explanations for this increase, given by
Andean as well as Mesoamerican authors, is that the deficiencies of agrarian
exploitation and the relative impoverishment of products from the country-
side drive many communities to search for an increase in their incomes
through the sale of handicrafts. Although it is true that in some regions the
incorporation of peasant labor power into other branches of production re-
duced artisanal production, there exist, inversely, communities that had
never made handicrafts or only made them for their own consumption, and
in the last few decades they were drawn into that work in order to ease the
crisis. Unemployment is another reason why artisanal work is increasin81
both in the countryside and in the cities, bringing into this type of produc-
tion young people from socioeconomic sectors that never before were em-
ployed in this field. In Peru, the largest concentration of artisans is not in
areas of low economic development but in the city of Lima: 29 percent
(Lauer 1982). Mexico shares its accelerated industrial reconversion with an
intense support of artisanal production-the greatest volume on the conti-
nent and with a high number of producers: 6 million. It is not possible to
understand why the number of handicrafts continues to increase, nor why
the state keeps adding organizations to promote a type of work that, while
employing 28 percent of the economically active population, barely repre-
sents 0.1 percent of the gross national product and 2 to 3 percent of the
country's exports, if we see it as an atavistic survival of traditions confronted
by modernity.
The incorporation of folkloric goods into commercial circuits, which
tends to be analyzed as if their only effects were to homogenize designs and
eliminate local brands, demonstrates that the expansion of the market needs
to concern itself also with the sectors that resist uniform consumption or
encounter difficulties in participating in it. With this goal, production is
diversified and traditional designs, handicrafts, and folkloric music are
utilized that continue to attract indigenous people, peasants, the masses of
migrants, and new groups, as well as intellectuals, students, and artists.
Through the varied motivations of each sector-to affirm their identity,
stress a national-popular political definition or the distinction of a culti-
vated taste with traditional roots-this broadening of the market con-
tributes to an extension of folklore.
4
As debatable as certain commercial uses
of folkloric goods may seem, it is undeniable that much of the growth and
diffusion of traditional cultures is due to the promotion of the record indus-
try, dance festivals, fairs that include handicrafts and, of course, their popu-
larization by the mass media. Radio and television amplified local forms of
music on a national and international scale, as has happened with the Peru-
vian criollo waltz and the chicha, the chamame and the quartets in Argen-
tina, the music of the Northeast and gaucho songs in Brazil, and the corridos
of the Mexican Revolution, which are included in the repertory of those who
promote New Song in the electronic media.
In the third place, if many branches of folklore are growing it is because in
the last few decades Latin American states have increased their support to its
production (credits to artisans, scholarships and subsidies, contests, etc.),
conservation, trade, and diffusion (museums, books, sales tours, and halls
for popular events). The state has various objectives: to create jobs that re-
duce unemployment and the exodus from the countryside to the cities, to
promote the export of traditional goods, to attract tourism, to take advan-
tage of the historical and popular prestige of folklore to cement hegemony
and national unity in the form of a patrimony that seems to transcend the
divisions among classes and ethnic groups.
But all these uses of traditional culture would be impossible without one
basic fact: the continuity in the production of popular artisans, musicians,
dancers, and poets interested in maintaining and renewing their heritage.
The preservation of these forms of life, organization, and thought can be ex-
plained by cultural reasons but also, as we said, by the economic interests of
the producers, who are trying to survive or increase their income.
We are not overlooking the contradictory character that market stimuli
and governmental bodies have on folklore. The studies we cite talk of fre-
quent conflicts between the interests of the producers or users of popular
goods and the merchants, promoters, mass media, and states. But what can
no longer be said is that the tendency of modernization is simply to promote
the disappearance of traditional cultures. The problem, then, cannot be re-
duced to one of conserving and rescuing supposedly unchanged traditions.
It is a question of asking ourselves how they are being transformed and how
they interact with the forces of modernity.
b) Peasant and traditional cultures no longer represent the major part of
popular culture. In the last few decades, Latin American cities came to con-
tain between 6o and 70 percent of their country's inhabitants. Even in rural
areas, folklore today does not have the dosed and stable character of an ar-
chaic universe, since it is developed in the variable relations that traditions
weave with urban life, migrations, tourism, secularization, and the symbolic
options offered both by the electronic media and by new religious move-
ments or by the reformulation of old ones. Even recent migrants, who main-
tain forms of sociability and celebrations of peasant origin, acquire the
character of "urbanoid groups," as the Brazilian ethnomusicologist Jose
Jorge de Carvalho puts it. Hence current folklorists feel the need to be con-
cerned at once with local and regional production and with salsa, African
rhythms, indigenous and Creole melodies that dialogue with jazz, rock, and
other genres of Anglo-Saxon origin. Traditions are reinstalled even beyond
the cities: in an interurban and international system of cultural circulation.
Although there was always a current of traditional forms that united the
Ibero-Arnerican world, Carvalho adds, now ,
there exists a flood of hybrid forms that also unite us, it being possible to iden-
tify relationships between new Brazilian popular rhythms and new expressions
from Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, the Caribbean, Mexico, and so on. It is not pos-
sible to understand tradition without understanding innovation. (8-10)
c) The popular is not concentrated in objects. The current study of culture
by anthropology and sociology situates popular products in their economic
conditions of production and consumption. Folklorists influenced by semi-
otics identify the folk in behaviors and communicational processes. In none
of these cases is it accepted that the popular is congealed in patrimonies of
stable goods. Not even traditional culture is seen as an "authoritative norm
or static and immutable force," writes Martha Blache, "but as a wealth that is
utilized today but is based on previous experiences of the way a group has of
responding to and linking itself with its social environment." Rather than a
collection of objects or objectivized customs, tradition is thought of as "a
mechanism of selection, and even of invention, projected toward the past in
order to legitimize the present" (27).
The interactionist and ethnomethodological influence also contributes to
conceiving of the formation and the changes of social signification as a
product of interactions and rituals. From its perspective, popular art is not a
collection of objects, nor the subaltern ideology a system of ideas, nor cus-
toms fixed repertories of practices: all are dynamic dramatizations of collec-
tive experience. If rituals are the domain in which each society manifests
what it wants to situate as perennial or eternal, as Roberto da Matta explains
(24), then even the most durable aspects of popular life manifest themselves
better than in the inert objects in the ceremonies that bring them to life. (Al-
though da Matta does not establish an exclusive relation benveen ritual and
the past, he emphasizes that even what is tradition in society is better re-
vealed in interactions than in motionless goods.)
d) The popular is not a monopoly of the popular sectors. In conceiving of the
folk as social practices and communicational processes more than as pack-
ages of objects, the fatalist, naturalizing link is broken that associated certain
cultural products with fixed groups. Folklorists pay attention to the fact that
in modern societies the same person may participate in diverse folkloric
groups, and is capable of being synchronically and diachronically integrated
into various systems of symbolic practices: rural and urban, neighborhood
and factory, microsocial and mass media-based. There is no folklore belong-
ing only to the oppressed classes; nor are the only possible types of inter-
folkloric relations those of domination, submission, or rebellion. In the last
instance, we are coming to no longer consider
groups as orga.>'lizations that are stable in their composition and in their per-
manence, endowed with common characteristics. There is no set of individuals
that is folkoric in itself; there are, however, situations that are more or less fa-
vorable for a person to participate in folkloric behavior. (Blache, 29)
The evolution of traditional fiestas and of the production and sale of handi-
crafts reveals that these are no longer exclusive tasks of ethnic groups, nor of
broader peasant sectors, nor even of the agrarian oligarchy; ministries of
culture and commerce, private foundations, beverage companies, and radio
and television stations also intervene in organizing them (cf., e.g., Strom-
berg; Good Eshelman; Lauer 1982). Folk or traditional cultural facts are
today the multidetermined product of actors that are popular and hege-
monic, peasant and urban, local, national, and transnational.
By extension, it is possible to think that the popular is constituted in hy-
brid and complex processes, using as signs of identification elements origi-
nating from diverse classes and nations. At the.same time, we may become
more perceptive in the face of the ingredients of so-called popular cultures
that are a reproduction of the hegemonic, or that become self-destructive
for the popular sectors, or contrary to their interests: corruption and re-
signed or ambivalent attitudes in relation to hegemonic groups.
e) The popular is not lived by popular subjects as a melancholic complacency
with traditions. Many subaltern ritual practices that are apparently devoted
to reproducing the traditional order humorously transgress it. Perhaps an
anthology of the scattered documentation on ritual humor in Latin America
would make it clear that people resort to laughter in order to have a less op-
pressive relation with their past. We propose the hypothesis that the attitude
is most antisolemn when it is a matter of crossed traditions in conflict. In the
carnivals of various countries, dances by indigenous and mestizo people
parody the Spanish conquistadores, making grotesque use of their costumes
and the warlike paraphernalia they brought along for the conquest. In the
Brazilian carnival there is a reversal of the traditional orders of a society
where the intersection of blacks and whites, and old ethnic groups and mod-
ern groups, seeks resolution in severe hierarchies: night is used as if it were
day, men dress up as women, and the ignorant, the blacks, and the workers
appear to be "showing the pleasure of living the latest fashions in song,
dance, and the samba" (da Matta, 99).
It is unnecessary to optimize these transgressions to the point of believ-
ing that, by vindicating people's own histories, they undo the fundamental
tradition of domination. Da Matta himself recognizes that in carnival h e r ~
is a play benveen.the reaffirmation of hegemonic traditions and the parody
that subverts them, since the explosion of the illicit is limited to a short, de-
fined period after which reentry into the established social organization
takes place. The rupture of the fiesta does not eliminate hierarchies and
inequalities, but its irreverence opens a freer, less fatalistic relation to inher-
ited conventions.
In Mexico too, in the Highlands of Chiapas, carnival is a moment of sym-
bolic and humorous working out of superimposed conflicts. Blacks carica-
ture ladinos, some Indians caricature other Indians, and ethnic tensions are
staged, ironically recalling the Caste War of 1867-70. Parody is used in Zina-
cantan, Chamula, and Chenalh6, as in other areas, to disparage those who
are different (other Indians, ladinos, whites) and to disapprove of deviations
in conduct within the group itself, that is, as an ethnocentric self-affirmation
(Bricker). But the interpretation is also possible that this is done to reduce
the oppressive character of centuries-old forms of domination.
Because intercultural conflicts have been similar in other areas of
Mesoamerica, it is not strange that similar parodying tactics are found in
many communities. Nevertheless, the exegesis of these fiestas tends to em-
phasize only what in ritual humor serves to make fun of the authorities and
caricature foreigners. Some authors, such as Bricker, in observing the fre-
quent relation of ritual humor to deviant behaviors, suggest another func-
tion: social control. Ridiculing someone who wears ladino clothing or a cor-
rupt functionary would, for indigenous communities, serve to anticipate the
sanctions that would be suffered by those who diverge from traditional be-
haviors or attack the group itself. But no one, this author notes, proves that
there is a causal link between ceremonial caricature and a reinforcement of
rules. It cannot be affirmed that in societies that make fun of certain types of
conduct these types of conduct occur less frequently, nor that the fear of
being ridiculed rather than some other fear-supernatural or legal-is the
motivation for avoiding them.
To our way of seeing things, this generalized concern with normality goes
together with the symbolic elaboration of change and of the relations be-
tween tradition and modernity. This is the interpretation suggested to us by
fieldwork done in the Pun!pecha region of Michoacan. I will dwell on one
example among the many that manifest this function of humor in fiestas
and handicrafts: the devils of Ocurnicho.
I again turn my attention to the devils of Ocumicho, a subject I analyzed
eight years ago (1989a, chapter 6), taking into account the fact that since
then they have become one of the most successful ceramic products in all of
Mexico, and that several additional works were published in the 1980s.
Today the devils are a tradition as useful to the inhabitants of Ocumicho in
identifying themselves in relation to others as are their language and their
ancient ceremonies, even though they were born only thirty years ago. Why
did they begin to make them? They give an economic explanation and relate
two myths.
In the 1960s, the rains diminished and some nearby ejido peasants appro-
priated some of their most fertile lands. Thus they had to expand pottery
production-produced until then by a few families for the daily needs of the
community-with the aim of selling it and obtaining income to compensate
for what had been lost in the countryside. To this explanation they add two
myths. One says that the devil-an important figure in the pre-Cortes be-
liefs of the region as well as during the colonial period-
passed through Ocumicho and was bothering everyone. He got into the trees
and killed them. He entered into dogs and they woUld do nothing but shake
and yelp. Then he followed people, who would get sick and go crazy. It occurred
to someone that he had to be given places where he could live without bother-
ing anyone. That's why we made clay devils, so that he could have a place to be.
The other account refers to Marcelino, an orphan child and homosexual ini-
tiated into ceramics by his grandmother, who began to make "beautiful fig-
ures" thirty years ago; first he made angels and then he dedicated himself to
devils following an encounter with the devil in a ravine. Seeing how quickly
his sales grew, and that he was invited to handicraft fairs in Mexico City and
New York, his neighbors learned and perfected the technique and continued
to vary the images, even after Marcelino's death, which happened when he
was still young.
Both accounts are told with multiple variants, as happens when different
members of a community contribute to giving diverse emphases to the story
and updating it. In this way they renew the value of foundational myths for
an unstable activity that within a few years brought prosperity to a few fam-
ilies and afforded many others a better survival. Now the devils circulate
throughout the entire country and abroad. Their images-which mix ser-
pents, trees, and Purepecha houses with elements of modern life and with
biblical and erotic scenes-won a place in urban shops through the attrac-
tiveness of this ambivalence. The devils are seen both in sacred scenes-in
Nativity scenes and in the Last Supper, replacing the apostles-and in the re-
production of the most everyday scenes of Ocurnicho: selling food, a birth,
conversation in the door of a house. They pilot airplanes or helicopters, talk,
on the telephone, work as ambulant salespeople in the cities, fight with the
police, and make love with mermaids or with a Purepecha woman mounted
on an animal with seven heads. It is an art that speaks of their own life and
their migrations (devils up on the roofs of buses going to the United States).
Carmela Martinez, after Liberty Leading the People, July 28, 1830, by Eugene Delacroix.
It makes fun of Catholic rites (which are practiced syncretically) and se-
duces by the freedom with which it re-creates the comings and goings be-
tween the traditional and the modern. It is an art that represents but that is
made for others (no residents use devils in decorating their houses); it refers
to others as adversaries whom the devils laugh at. The least mimetic images
Antonia Martlne2, after the anonymous acid engraving, Bombardment of All the Thrones of
Europe and the Fall of All the Tyrants, for the Happiness of the Universe.
of their traditions represent what the inheritors of those traditions experi-
ence when some member of each family travels to the United States for tem-
porary work. Or their experiences when the National Handicrafts Fund and
the National Indigenist Institute teach them how to organize in cooperatives
("solidarity groups"), manage credit, and change the themes and the varnish
of the pieces, using synthetic paints but with a treatment that simulates an-
tiquity when the work is finished.
In a very few years, the people of Ocumicho succeeded in developing a so-
phisticated technique, a set of images that were constantly being renewed,
and even a mythic support that relates changes to a distant history. For their,
part, official institutions contribute to staging this art through extensive dis-
tribution, invitations to display it at international fairs, contests, and awards
that legitimize this mode of producing and innovating.
Is it the opening-whether critical or mocking- toward modernity, and
Guadalupe Alvarez, after Berthaud's engraving, The Storming of the Bastille.
not the simple self-affirmation, that better roots the people in traditions? In
part, it seems so. But there is something more. It is revealed in a comparative
study of Ocumicho and another nearby community that is also a successful
producer of ceramics: Patamban (Gouy-Gilbert). The artisans of the latter,
who produce earthenware for daily use, having generated their own market
based on the quality of their work and in independent marketing actions,
consider official institutions as a type of intermediary between them and
others. Gouy-Gilbert finds a correspondence between this greater commer-
cial autonomy and the lesser concern with securing a political power of their
own or their traditional religious system. On the other hand, as with
Ocumicho, access to the market occurs almost exclusively through govern-
mental institutions, and the precariousness of their commercial links and
their dependency on outside economic agents make them more sensitive to
the reaffirmation of the signs of identity (language, dress, system of religious
duties) and to the defense of a communally controlled civil power.
Along this line, we can read the humorous meaning of the devils as sym-
bolic resource for elaborating the abrupt transitions between one's own and
Virginia Pascual, after the anonymous engraving, Caricature against Marie Antoinette.
the foreign, between the reproduction of the known and the incorporation
of new elements into a reformulated perception of oneself:
The mobilization of all the cultural resources within an ethnic minority (acti-
vation of the relations of kinship, of the duty system, of the fiestas, etc.) may
correspond as much to an ultimate form of resistance-a kind of congealing of
the ethnic cultural patrimony-as to a resource that permits the community
to find ways of adapting. (Gouy-Gilbert, 57)
,
Carmela Martinez, after the anonymous engraving, The Executioner Guillotines Himself
In 1989 we proposed to ten potters of Ocumicho that they make figures
using the theme of the French Revolution. Mercedes Iturbe, director of the
Cultural Center of Mexico in Paris, brought them images with revolution-
ary scenes and related the history of the Revolution to them. Like so many
painters and filmmakers who constructed from their own imagination the
iconography that shows how to see that founding event of modernity, the
,
Anonymous amate, produced in Maxela.
Sale of a mates in Cuernavaca.
,
Negotiating with a retailer.
Purepecha artisans gave their version of the storming of the Bastille, of
Marie Antoinette, and of the guillotine.
Fernando del Paso wrote in the exposition catalog that "no people or na-
tion of the world has a monopoly on barbarism and cruelty." The indige-
nous artisans who produced these works did not know much about the
French Revolution but they have a memory of the horrors carried out by the
Spanish conquistadores-who were alarmed by the sacrifices taking place in
these lands- in order to impose modernity. The long relation of these pot-
ters to devils and serpents in their works undoubtedly facilitated their por-
traying what could have been contradictory and grotesque in the revolution
that sought liberty and brotherhood. The presence of the infernal, says del
Paso, distances these pieces from naive risk: despite the rustic appearance of
their figures, the Purepechas show that they know that "the cruelty of man
against man and ingenuousness are not compatible" (61-62).
f) The pure preservation of traditions is not always the best populo.r resource
for reproducing itself and reelo.borating its situation. "Be authentic and you'll
earn more" is the slogan of many promoters, handicrafts merchants, and
cultural functionaries. The studies that some undisciplined folklorists and
anthropologists have finally ended up doing on impure handicrafts demon-
strate that sometimes the opposite happens.
In an analogous way to the potters of Ocurnicho, a mate painters are mak-
ing us rethink the apocalyptic alarms about "the inevitable extinction" of
handicrafts and the nexus between the cultured and the popular. Thirty years
ago, when several Guerrero communities began to produce and sell paintings
made on amate paper, in part influenced by artists, some folklorists predicted
the decline of their ethnic traditions. Catherine Good Eshelnlan began a
study on these crafts in 1977, starting from the then predominant theory
about the place of peasant production in Mexican capitalist formation:
handicrafts would be a specific form of participation in this unequal system,
one more way to extract surplus and weaken ethnic organization. After living
for several years in the producing communities and following the cycle of
their adaptations, she had to admit that the growing commercial interaction
with the national society and market not only allowed them to improve eco-
nomically, but they were also strengthening their internal relations. Their in-
digenous origin was not "a folkloric detail" that gave an exotic attraction to
their products, nor was it an obstacle to incorporating themselves into the
capitalist economy; rather, it was "the mobilizing and determining force in
the process" (18). As the author's historic work demonstrates, those commu-
nities spent long periods experimenting with strategies, which were often
frustrated, until they arrived at the economic and aesthetic achievements of
painting on amate. Their origin is multidetermined: they were born in the
1950s, when the Nahuas of Arneyaltepec-potters since before the conquest
who sold their masks, flowerpots, and ashtrays in nearby cities-transferred
the decorations of their ceramics to amate paper. The drawings were ancient
but their national and international diffusion began when they were put on
amate, which-in addition to allowing for more complex compositions-
weighs less than clay, is less fragile, and is easier to transport.
The "paintings" are made by men and women, adults and children. They
show scenes of their work and their fiestas, valorizing in this way ethnic and
fanliliar traditions that they continue to reproduce in their peasant tasks.
The artisans themselves control almost all their trade, allow middlemen less
interference than in other artisanal branches of production, and take advan-
tage of their stands and itinerant sales to offer works from other communi-
ties (masks, carved rocks, and copies of pre-Hispanic pieces).
According to the poll done by Good Eshelman in Arneyaltepec in 1980-81,
41 percent of families earned more than four minimum-wage salaries, and
another 42 percent from two to four minimum-wage salaries. There con-
tinue. to be middlemen who appropriate part of the profit; those who specu-
late the most are the ones who pay between ten and twenty dollars for each
amate and resell them in the United States as "genuine Aztec tribal art" for
three hundred or four hundred dollars. There are also companies that use
the designs of these communities on tablecloths, postcards, and facial tissue
boxes, without paying them anything in return. Despite these forms of ex-
ploitation, which are common in other types of handicrafts, their incomes
and level of consumption are much higher than those of the average Mexi-
can peasant.
5
Although these artisans engage in profuse commercial activity, which ex-
tends across almost the entire country, they are organized so as not to ne-
glect agriculture, nor ceremonial obligations, nor community services. They
invest the profits from their crafts in land, animals, housing, and internal fi-
estas. Inasmuch as all families are employed in the sale of handicrafts, it is in
no one's interest to use their resources and labor power as commodities. In
commerce they move individually or by family, but they carry out their sales,
by using collective netvvorks for sharing information about faraway cities
and settling in them by reproducing the material and symbolic conditions of
their daily life. Dozens of Nahua artisans arrive at a tourist center, rent part
of a cheap hotel and inlmediately put up ropes to hang clothes instead of
keeping them in closets, store water in clay jugs inside the room, erect altars,
and prepare food or convince someone in the market to cook it their way.
Through the purchase of materials and the consumption of alien goods,
they transfer part of their profit to the national and international market,
but the more or less egalitarian control of their sources of subsistence and of
the handicraft trade allows them to maintain their ethnic identity. Thanks
to their concern for certain traditions (collective control of land and the
system of reciprocity), the renewal of their artisanal trade, and the readjust-
ment to a complex interaction with modernity, they have achieved a flour-
ishing independence that they would not have obtained by enclosing them-
selves in their ancestral relations.
Hegemonic Reconversion and Popular Reconversion
The increase of handicrafts in industrialized countries reveals, as I indicated
earlier, that modern economic progress does not imply eliminating the pro-
ductive forces that do not directly serve their expansion if those forces com-
prise a numerous sector, and even satisfy sectoral needs or those of a bal-
anced reproduction of the system. Inversely and complementarily, the
reproduction of traditions does not demand closing oneself off to modern-
ization. In addition to these Mexican cases, others in Latin America-for ex-
ample, that of Otavalo in Ecuador (Walter)-show that the heterodox (but
self-managed) reelaboration of traditions can be a simultaneous source of
economic prosperity and symbolic reaffirmation. Modernization does not
demand the abolition of traditions; nor is it the fatal destiny of traditional
groups to remain outside of modernity.
It is known that in other areas of Mexico and Latin America indigenous
people have not achieved this successful adaptation to capitalist develop-
ment. Voracious middlemen, archaic and unjust structures of peasant ex-
ploitation, antidemocratic or repressive governments, and difficulties of the
ethnic groups themselves in relocating in modernity keep them in a state of
chronic poverty. If it is calculated how many artisans or ethnic groups have
achieved a decent standard of living with their traditions or managed to in-
corporate themselves into modern development and reduce their asymme-
try with the hegemonic groups, the results are deplorable. Even worse: the
recent reconversion of Latin American economies aggravates the unequal
segmentation in the access to economic goods, middle and higher educa-
tion, new technologies, and more sophisticated consumption. The question
we want to ask is whether the struggles to enter these scenes of moderniza-
tion are the only ones that are in the interest of popular movements in Latin
America.
The accumulation of earlier examples does not refute anything of what is
known about the labor exploitation and educational inequality. Nor am I
suggesting that things would go better for poor artisans if they were to imi-
tate the potters of Ocumicho and the painters of Ameyaltepec-among
other reasons, because the unequal structures that order the relations be-
tween peasant and industrial production, between handicrafts and art, make
it impossible for the fifteen million artisans on the continent to gain access
to the economic and symbolic benefits of the upper and middle classes. But
to repeat this would not add another title to the bibliography.
Rather it is a question of ascertaining if, in this framework of injustice,
what it means to maintain traditions or participate in modernity has the
meaning for the popular sectors that traditionalists and modernizers imag-
ine that it does. In following temporary or permanent migrants to the big
cities, in hearing them talk about the habits of other nations, about the op-
portunities and disadvantages of urban life or of the new technologies, and
how they skillfully insert themselves into modern commercial rules, what
Good Eshelman affirms about the Nahuas that produce and sell amates be-
comes applicable to many of them:
They are very mundane and sophisticated ... , they use the life of their com-
munity and their customs as a norm for processing information and under-
standing others .... Their commercial success is due precisely to this mental at-
titude, which is so open and flexible that it allows them to move around in a
complicated, varied world in which they have very diverse experiences and
economic relations. (52-53)
This fluid relationship of some traditional groups to modernity is also ob-
served in political and social struggles. In view of the invasion of industries
and dams, or against the arrival of transnational systems of communication
in their daily life, indigenous people and peasants have had to inform them-
selves about the most advanced scientific and technological discoveries in
order to develop their own positions. The Brazilian Indians who are standing
up to the destruction of the Amazon forest, and the Tarascans of Santa Fe de
Ia Laguna in Mexico who, at the beginning of the eighties, succeeded in
blocking the installation of a nuclear power plant on their communal lands,'
show how traditions of production and interaction with nature can be af-
firmed in relation to the challenges of this end of the century. The Organiza-
tion for the Defense of the Natural Resources and Social Development of the
Juarez Mountain Range, in which Zapotecs and Chinantecs united to protect
their forests against the paper industries, does not limit itself to the simple
preservation of their resources: it has given form to an education based on
their communal forms of work and on a complex ecological vision of the de-
velopment of the region and of Mexico, supported by their beliefs in nature
but shaped in step with those who build roads thinking only of their profits,
"not in order to communicate to the communities" (Martinez Luna).
At the same time as the official reconversion, the reconversion with which
the popular classes adapt their traditional knowledge and habits is produced.
In order to understand the links that are woven between both, it is necessary
to include in the analyses of the popular condition-dedicated to the opposi-
tions between isolated subalterns and dominating cosmopolitans--these un-
conventional forms of integrating themselves into modernity that are heard
in commw1ities like Ocumicho, Ameyaltepec, and so many others. The arti-
sans exchange information about buyers in Mexico City and the United States,
taxi and hotel rates in Acapulco, how to use telephones for long-distance
commwlication, from whom traveler's checks can be accepted, where the
best place is to buy the electronic equipment that they will bring home.
The hard conditions of survival reduce this adaptation, in most cases, to a
commercial and pragmatic apprenticeship. But frequently, especially in the
new generations, the cultural crossings that we are describing include a rad-
ical restructuring of the links between the traditional and the modern, the
popular and the cultured, the local and the foreign. It is enough to pay at-
tention to the growing place that images from contemporary art and the
mass media have in artisanal designs.
Let me say that when I began to study these changes, my in1mediate reac-
tion was to lament the subordination of the producers to the tastes of urban
consumers and tourists. Then eight years ago I went into a shop in Teo titian
del Valle-a Oaxacan town dedicated to weaving-where a fifty-year-old
man was watching television with his father while exchanging phrases in
Zapotec. When I asked him about the tapestries with images by Picasso,
Klee, and Mir6 that he had on display, he told me they started to make them
in 1968, when some tourists visited who worked in the Museum of Modern
Art in New York and proposed that they renovate their designs. He showed
me an albwn of photos and newspaper clippings in English that analyzed
the exhibitions this artisan had done in California. In a half hour I saw him
move with ease from Zapotec to Spanish and to English, from art to crafts,
from his ethnic group to the information and entertainment of mass cul-
ture, passing through the art criticism of a metropolis. I understood that my
The Staging of ilie Popular I 173
worries about the loss of their traditions was not shared by this man who
moved without too many conflicts between three cultural systems.
6
Art versus Crafts
Why do so few artisans come to be recognized as artists? The oppositions
between the cultured and the popular and between the modern and the tra-
ditional are condensed in the distinction established by modern aesthetics
between art and crafts. In conceiving of art as a disinterested symbolic
movement, a set of" spiritual" goods in which form predominates over func-
tion and the beautiful over the useful, crafts arpear as the other, the king-
dom of objects that could never be detached from their practical meaning.
Social art historians, who revealed the dependencies of high art with respect
to social context, almost never question the division between the cultured
and the popular, which in part is superimposed upon the schism between
the rural and the urban and between the traditional and the modern. Art
corresponds to the interests and tastes of the bourgeoisie and cultivated sec-
tors of the petite bourgeoisie; it is developed in cities, speaks of them, and
when it represents landscapes from the countryside it does so with an urban
perspective. (Raymond Williams said it well: "Land that is worked is almost
never a landscape; the very idea oflandscape presupposes the existence of a
separated observer" (31].) Crafts, on the other hand, are seen as products of
Indians and peasants in accord with their rusticity, the myths that inhabit
their decoration, and the popular sectors that traditionally make and use
them.
Is it not astonishing to read that in the colloquium on the dichtomy be-
tween high art and popular art one of the quickest historians of the West,
Marta Traba, said that popular artists remain reduced to "the practical-
picturesque" and are incapable of"thinking of a meaning different from that
transmitted and used habitually by the community, whereas the 'high' artist
is a solitary one whose primary happiness is to satisfy himself or herself
thanks to his or her own creation" (68-71)? It is not possible to talk like this
when an art historian knows that for more than half a century the construc-
tivists, the Bauhaus movement, and theatrical and visual arts groups have
been demonstrating that creativity can also spring from collective messagesy
The other common argun1ent that opposes Art to popular art says that
producers of the former are singular and solitary whereas popular artists are
collective and anonymous. In that same colloquiwn in Zacatecas we read
that Art produces "unique works" that are unrepeatable, whereas crafts are
made in series, in the same way that popular music repeats identical struc-
tures in its songs, as if they lacked "a project" and were limited "to wearing
out a prototype to the point of fatigue, without ever getting to present it as a
. worldview, and, as a result, to defend it aesthetically through all its variables"
(ibid., 70). We already referred to the ways and reasons why popular devils
vary as much as or more than those of modern art (not to mention those of
earlier art, which was obliged by the church to reproduce theologically
approved models). We saw that artisans play with the iconic matrices of
their community as part of aesthetic projects and creative interrelations
with urban audiences. The myths that sustain the most traditional works
and modern innovations indicate to what extent popular artists go beyond
prototypes, put forward worldviews, and are capable of defending them
aesthetically and culturally.
In another time, the Teotitlan del Valle weaver would have been an excep-
tion; persons like him were artisans who out of a peculiar creative necessity
produced their works by distancing themselves from their own group, with-
out gaining access to the world of high art either. They painted or engraved
with high aesthetic value despite being ignorant of the history of the disci-
pline, the conventions adopted in the international market, and the techni-
cal language for explaining them. Their personal style coincided at times
with the goals of contemporary art, and that made them attractive in muse-
ums and galleries.
Today the intense and persistent relations between the communities of
artisans and national and international culture make it "normal" for their
members to be linked with modern visual culture, even though those who
obtain fluent connections are still the minority. I remember the conversa-
tion I had with a producer of devils in his house in Ocumicho. We were talk-
ing about how the images occurred to him and I suggested that he explain
how the devil was conceived among the Purepecha. He told me the myth
that I recounted earlier, but he said that that was not all. I asked if they took
scenes from their dreams; he down played the question and began to take out
an illustrated Bible, religious and art books (one on Dali), and weekly news-
papers and magazines in Spanish and English that were rich in graphic ma-
terial. He did not know the history of art but had a lot of information about
contemporary visual culture, which he organized less systematically but
controlled with an associative freedom sinlilar to that of any artist.
In tl1e chapter in which we described the transformations of the high arts
in the second half of the twentieth century, we concluded that art can no
longer be presented as useless or gratuitous. It is produced within a field
crisscrossed by networks of dependencies that link it with the market, the
culture industry, and with those "primitive" and popular referents that are
also the nourishing source of the artisanal. If perhaps art never succeeded in
being fully Kantian-finality without end, stage of gratuitousness-now its
parallelism with crafts or popular art obliges us to rethink its equivalent
processes in contemporary societies, its disconnections and its crossings.
There is no shortage of authors who attack this division. But they have
almost always been folklorists and anthropologists concerned with vindicat-
ing the artistic value of indigenous cultural production, art historians will-
ing to acknowledge that things of value also exist outside of museum collec-
tions. That phase already produced aesthetic and institutional results. It was
demonstrated that in popular ceramics, textiles, and altarpieces one can find
as much formal creativity, generation of original meanings, and occasional
autonomy with respect to practical functions as in high art. This recognition
has given certain popular artisans and artists entree into museums and gal-
leries. But the difficulties in redefining what is specific to art and to crafts,
and in interpreting the links between each one and the other, are not
arranged with goodwill openings onto what the neighbor is thinking. The
way out of the deadlock in which this question is caught is a new type of re-
search that reconceptualizes the global changes in the symbolic market by
taking into account not only the intrinsic development of the popular and
the cultured, but also its crossings and convergences. With the artistic and
the artisanal being included in mass processes of message circulation, their
sources of appropriation of images and forms and their channels of distrib-
ution and audiences tend to coincide.
Knowledge of culture and of the popular would be advanced more if the
sanitary preoccupation with distinguishing the pure and the uncontami-
nated in art and crafts were abandoned and if we were to study them starting
from the uncertainties that provoke their crossings. Just as the analysis of the
high arts requires us to free ourselves from the presumption of absolute au-
tonomy from the field and the objects, the examination of popular cultures
demands that we rid ourselves of the assumption that its proper space is self-
sufficient indigenous communities isolated from the modern agents that
today constitute them as much as their traditions: the culture industries,
tourism, economic and political relations with the national and trans-,
national market of symbolic goods.
There are indigenous groups in which aesthetic acts are still given form
with considerable independence starting from exclusive traditions, and in
which rituals and daily practices of pre-Columbian and colonial origin are
reproduced. A risk of the sociology of culture that specializes in modern and
urban development-as does almost all sociology-and enunciates general
affirmations about Latin America based on censuses, statistics, and polls is
to forget this diversity and the perseverance of the archaic.
But the opposite risk-a frequent one among folklorists and anthropolo-
gists-is to isolate themselves in those minority groups as if the vast major-
ity of the indigenous people of the continent had not for decades been living
processes of migration, mestizaje, urbanization, and diverse interactions
with the modern world. In this way the examination of the crossings be-
tween artisans and art leads into a profound debate over the oppositions be-
tween tradition and modernity, and therefore between the two disciplines
that today, through their separation, stage that divorce: sociology and an-
thropology.
Before getting into that polemic, I want to say that another reason for
being interested in the art/craft opposition as a sociocultural process-and
not only as an aesthetic question-is the need to encompass a more extensive
universe than that of singular products consecrated as (cultured or popular)
art. In the same way that many works with pretensions of being Art agree on
repeating aesthetic models from earlier centuries-and thus in settings with
low legitimacy: art gardens, supermarkets, neighborhood cultural centers-
most artisanal production has no aesthetic aspirations. In the Latin Ameri-
can countries that are richest in handicrafts-Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala,
Mexico-most artisans produce in order to survive; they are not looking for
ways to renew the forms or the meaning of their work. What we call art is not
only that which culminates in great works, but rather a space where society
carries out its visual production. It is in this broad sense that artistic work, its
circulation, and its consumption shape an appropriate place for understand-
ing the classifications with which the social is organized.
-\nthropology versus Sociology
The differences, and the reciprocal ignorance, between these two disciplines
derive from their opposed ways of exploring the traditional and the mod-
ern. Anthropology was dedicated chiefly to studying indigenous and peasant
communities; its theory and method were formed in relation to rituals and
myths, customs and kinship in traditional societies. Meanwhile, sociology
was developed most of the time through a knowledge of macrosocial prob-
lems and processes of modernization.
They have also been opposed in the valorization of what remains and
what changes. Today we cannot easily generalize, but for decades anthro-
pologists, along with folklorists, have been experts of the archaic and the
local, of premodern forms of sociality and the rescue of survivals. It is not
fair to homogenize sociology either, but we know that its origin as a scien-
tific discipline was associated with industrialization, and many still con-
tinue to view traditional organization of social and political relations-for
example, compadrazgo and kinship relationships-as simple "obstacles to
development."
In order to justify their studies' preference for the indigenous and peasant
world, anthropologists remind us that thirty million Indians continue to
exist in Latin America, with separate territories,'their own languages (whose
speakers are increasing in some regions), histories that predate the conquest,
and work and consumption habits that distinguish them from the rest of the
population. Their resistance to oppression and deculturation for five cen-
turies continues to be expressed in autonomous social and political organi-
zations: it cannot be thought that this is "a residual phenomenon, an inex-
plicable anachronism, not even a feature of folkloric color without major
importance" (Bonfil1981, 27). It must be recognized, affirmed, that "ethnic
groups are 'potential nations': units capable of being the social field of con-
crete history" (ibid., 30-31).
This delimiting of the universe of study leads us to concentrate ethno-
graphic description on the traditional features of small communities and to
overestimate their internal logic. In focusing so closely on what distinguishes
one group from others or resists Western penetration, the growing processes
of interaction with the national society and even with the transnational eco-
nomic and symbolic market are neglected. Or they are reduced to a sterile
"contact between cultures." Hence the fact that anthropology has developed
few useful concepts for interpreting how indigenous groups reproduce capi-
talist development internally or construct mixed formations with it. Con-
flicts, which are rarely admitted, are seen as if they were only produced be-
tween two homogeneous blocks: "colonial" society and the ethnic group. In
the study of an ethnic group only those egalitarian or reciprocal social rela-
tions are examined that permit it to be considered a "community;' without
internal inequalities, compactly confronting the "invading" power. ,
Some authors who attempt to take into account modernizing changes ac-
knowledge-in addition to external domination-the appropriation of
their elements by the dominant culture, but they only consider those that
the group accepts as being in "its own interests" or those to which a meaning
of "resistance" can be given. That is why there are so few analyses of the
processes in which an ethnic group--or most of the group--admits the
remodeling that the dominators do with its culture: it voluntarily subordi-
nates itself to Western forms of production, health-care systems, or religious
movements (from Catholicism to Pentecostalism), and incorporates as its
own project the modernizing changes and political integration into the na-
tional society. Even less common are investigations that examine the proce-
dures whereby the traditional cultures of indigenous people and peasants
converge syncretically with diverse modalities of urban and mass culture, es-
tablishing hybrid forms of existence of"the popular:'
The difficulties increase when the classic style of anthropological ethnog-
raphy is applied to the popular cultures of the city. How do you study the
millions of indigenous people and peasants who migrate to the capitals, the
workers subordinated to the industrial organization of work and consump-
tion? It is impossible to respond if marginal sectors are chosen, if small units
of analysis are outlined-a neighborhood, an ethnic group, a cultural mi-
nority-if only intensive observation techniques and in-depth interviews
are used, and if they are examined as dosed systems. These works tend to
give original and rich information about microsocial questions. But their
strategies of knowledge themselves inhibit the construction of an urban an-
thropology, or a comprehensive view of the meaning of life in the city, on the
order of the Chicago School. We can apply what Eunice Durham says of
Brazil to almost all anthropology done in Latin America: it has practiced less
an anthropology of the city than an anthropology in the city .... It is a ques-
tion of investigations that operate with themes, concepts, and methods of an-
thropology but that are turned to the study of populations that live in cities.
The city is, therefore, the place of investigation more than its object. (Durham
1986a, 19)'
It seems that we anthropologists have more difficulties in entering into
modernity than do the social groups we study.
Another characteristic of these works is that they say very little about
modern forms of hegemony. As Guillermo Bonfil notes in a text on research
in Mexico,
the majority of anthropological studies on popular culture depart from the as-
sumption, whether implicit or explicit, that their object of study is a different
culture; and this even when the research refers to nonindigenous peasant com-
munities or urban sectors. (Bonfil Batalla 1988)
The ethnographic tradition, which is distinguished by the hypothesis that
"popular cultures are cultures in themselves, they are different cultures"
(ibid.) resists thinking about them as subcultures or parts of a system of
domination. Even for this author, who includes domination in his analysis
and acknowledges unequal distribution of the global patrimony of society
among the causes that originate popular cultures, the specific character of
anthropological work consists in studying the differences.
Two arguments support this option. One takes up the connection of an-
thropology to history, which permits "the long duration" and "the dia-
chronic dimension" to be included among the social processes. Since the be-
ginning of colonization, one resource for dominating aboriginal groups was
to maintain their difference; although the structure of subordination may
have changed, the need remains-for the dominators and the popular
classes, for different reasons-for the culture of these to be different. The
second argument arises from observing the popular cultures of today. In
mestizo peasant communities, including those where the language changed
and traditional dress was abandoned, there subsist features of"material cul-
ture, productive activities, consumption guidelines, familiar and communal
organization, medical and culinary practices, and a large part of the sym-
bolic universe"; de-lndianization provokes in those groups "the rupture of
the original ethnic identity" but they continue to have an awareness of being
different and consider themselves to be depositories "of a cultural patrimony
created throughout history by that same society" (ibid.). In cities, where the
rupture is even more radical, many migrants of indigenous or peasant origin
maintain links with their communities and renew them periodically; they are
organized here in order to maintain life as it is there, as far as circumstances
permit them to: they occupy small urban spaces that are becoming populated
with people from there; they are organized and support each other according
to their community and region of origin; they celebrate their fiestas and speak
their own language among themselves. (Ibid.)
The concentration of many anthropologists on traditional cultures is related
to their critical view of the effects of modernization. They question the value
for the whole of society, and especially for popular layers, of a modern de-
velopment that-in addition to ruining traditional forms of life-engen-
ders mass migrations, uprooting, unemployment, and excessive u r b a ~
growth. They are energetically opposed to all evolutionism that regards the
ethnic and the peasant as backwardness in order to replace it with an urban
and industrial growth defined a priori as progress. Hence, in the reactivation
of indigenous and peasant traditions, in their knowledge and techniques, in
their way of interacting with nature and resolving social problems in a com-
munitarian way, they search for a style of development that is less degraded
and dependent (cf. Warman; Bonfil Batalla 1990).
In the last two decades, the sociology of culture and political sociology
have forged an opposing model, which sees popular cultures from the point
of view of modernization. They begin from the relative success achieved by
the projects of national integration, which elinlinated, reduced, or subordi-
nated the indigenous groups. One evidence of this is linguistic uniformity.
Another is modern education, which includes generalized literacy in the two
main languages-Spanish and Portuguese-and also a type of knowledge
that enables the members of each society to participate in the labor market
and capitalist consumption, as well as in national political systems. A third is
a way of organizing familial and labor relations based on modern liberal
principles.
It is known that this historical tendency was reinforced in the dualistic so-
ciological theories that saw industrialization as the dynamic factor in Latin
American development and attributed to this discipline the mission of
struggling against traditional, agrarian, or "feudal" residues. Precisely be-
cause popular "backvvardness" was criticized and because in that era sociol-
ogy concentrated on the debate over socioeconomic models, very few inves-
tigations were interested in knowing about subaltern cultures. It was in
recent years, when all the programs of modernization and social change
went into crisis (developmentalisms, populisms, Marxisms) that Latin
American sociologists began to study culture, especially popular culture, as
one of the elements of articulation between hegemony and consensus.
The works that stood out in the sociology of culture in the eighties were
guided by the theory of reproduction and those in political sociology were
based on the Grarnscian conception of hegemony. There was often a conflu-
ence of purpose in explaining how hegemonic classes founded their position
on the continuity of a modern cultural capital that guarantees reproduction
of the social structure, and on the unequal appropriation of that capital as a
mechanism for reproducing those differences. But despite the greater atten-
tion given to the empirical knowledge of popular cultures, they often saw
their daily life from the perspective of these macrotheories and gathered only
what fit into them. This perspective has the merit of questioning the ideal-
izations generated by the excessive autonomization of subaltern cultures,
fulfilled by those who see them as manifestations of the creative capacity of
the communities or as the autonomous accumulation of traditions that pre-
date industrialization. In situating popular actions in the aggregate of the so-
cial formation, the reproductivists understand subaltern culture as the prod-
uct of the unequal distribution of economic and cultural goods. The Gram-
scians, who are less fatalistic, relativize this dependency because they grant
the popular classes a certain initiative and power of resistance, but always
within the contradictory interaction with hegemonic groups.
Along this line, it has been maintained that there is no popular culture in
Latin America with the components that Gramsci attributes to the concept
of culture: (a) a conception of the world; (b) specialized producers; (c) pre-
eminent social bearers; (d) the capacity to integrate into a social whole and
bring it "to think coherently and in a unitary way"; (e) make possible the
struggle for hegemony; (f) manifest itself through a material and institu-
tional organization.
8
What is usually called "popular culture" in these multi-
ethnic countries would be closer to the concept of folklore in the Gramscian
vocabulary. The problem is that those universes of ancient practices and
symbols are perishing and being weakened by the advance of modernity. In
the midst of migrations from the countryside to the city that uproot pro-
ducers and users of folklore, against the action of schools and the culture in-
dustry, the traditional set of symbols can only offer "scattered, fragmented
states of consciousness in which heterogeneous elements and diverse cul-
tural strata taken from very different universes coexist" (Brunner 1988, 151-
85). Folklore maintains a certain cohesion and resistance in indigenous
communities, or rural areas, and in "urban spaces of extreme marginality;'
but even there the demand for formal education is growing. Traditional cul-
ture is exposed to a growing interaction with industrially and mass-pro-
duced information, communication, and forms of entertainment:
The populations or favelas of our big cities have been filled with transistor ra-
dios; in rural areas the installation of television relay towers increases; rock is
the universal language at young people's parties that cuts across diverse social
groups. (Ibid., 172)
A way of understanding the conflict between these two paradigms would be
to suppose that the bifurcation between anthropology and sociology corre-
sponds to the existence of two separate modalities of cultural development. If
on one side traditional forms of production and communication persist, ruy:l
on the other urban and mass circuits, it seems logical that there are different
disciplines for studying each one. Are the positions in favor of the constant
resistance of the popular cultures and regionally inexorable modernization
not true-the first in the Andean and Mesoamerican regions and the second
in the southern cone and the big cities? The question seems to resolve itself
provided that one of the research tendencies does not become generalized, or
claim that only one cultural policy exists. Although this precision has a cer-
tain relevance, it leaves unresolved the basic problems of a comprehensive
analysis of the relations between tradition, modernity, and postmodernity.
Another way of addressing the question is to start with the analogy that
appears in dealing with the crisis of the popular and that of elite culture. We
also concluded in the chapters on art that there is not only one form of
modernity but rather several unequal and sometimes contradictory ones.
Both the transformations of popular cultures and those of high art coincide
in demonstrating the heterogeneous implementation of the modernizing
project in our continent, the diverse articulation of the liberal rationalist
model with ancient aboriginal traditions, with Catholic colonial hispanism,
and with each country's own sociocultural developments. Nevertheless, in
exploring the features of this heterogeneity the division between disciplines
again arises. Whereas anthropologists prefer to understand it in terms of dif-
ference, diversity, and cultural pluralism, sociologists reject the perception
of heterogeneity as the "mere superimposition of cultures" and speak of a
"segmented and differential participation in an international market of
messages that 'penetrates' the local structure of culture everywhere and in
unexpected ways" (Brunner 1988, 215-18).
It is fitting to add for the moment that both tactics for approaching the
problem have demonstrated their fruitfulness. The anthropological train-
ing for unmasking what may be ethnocentric in the generalization of a
modernity born in the metropolises is indispensable, as is, on the other
hand, that of recognizing the local forms of symbolizing conflicts and of
using cultural alliances to construct social pacts and mobilize each nation
in a project of its own. At the same time, the sociological view serves to
avoid the illusory isolation of local .identities and informal loyalties, to in-
clude in the analysis the reorganization of the culture of each group by the
movements that subordinate it to the transnational market or at least re-
quire it to interact with it.
Notes
1. Nicole Belmont (259-68) makes a critique of the notion of survival along this line.
2. The OAS convened a meeting on traditional popular culture with the goal of bringing the
Charter of American Folklore up-to-date. This took place in Caracas july 20-24,1987, under the
auspices of the Center for Traditional and Popular Cultures of Venezuela and the Inter-Amer-
ican Center of Ethnomusicology and Folklore. Some of the arguments that follow I put forth
on that occasion; my specific critique of the charter was published later that year ("Las artes
populares en Ia epoca de Ia industria cultural," 3-8).
3 SELA's estimate does not include countries that do not belong to this system, but the only
country absent from it that does have significant artisanal production is Brazil.
4 Since the beginning of the 1980s, authors from various countries have been interested in
the revitalization that commercialization and consumption of nontraditional sectors have
made possible for folklore (e.g., Ribeiro et al., Becerril Straffton).
5. At the time that the poll mentioned earlier was conducted, at the beginning of the eight-
ies, thirty-five of every one hundred Mexican homes had incomes below the monthly mini-
mum wage, that is, a little less than one hundred dollars (Aguilar Cam In 1988, 214).
6. For an analysis of artisanal modernization in Teotitlan del Valle, see Cohen and
Schneider.
7 Another study by the same author (1986b) shows what the change of direction we suggest
here can mean for research.
8. This is the way in which it is formulated by Brunnel' ("Notas sobre cultura popular, in-
dustria cultural y modernidad," in Un espejo trizado, 151-85).
,
Cultunll Studies of the Americas
Edited by George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores
Volume 6

Consumers and Citizms: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts
Nestor Garda Canclini
Volume 5
Music in Cuba
Alejo Carpentier
'{olume 4
Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of
Robin Truth Goodman i
Volume 3
Latin Americanism
Roman de la Campa
Volume 2
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
Jose Esteban Munoz
Volume 1
The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Claire F. Fox
Cultural Studies of the Americas Volume 6
-
Nestor Garcfa Cancl ini
consumers and citizens
GLOBAL IZATION AND MU LTICULTURAL CONFLICTS
and with an Introduction by George Yudice
2oo {
m . UoNe<sity of Mioo""'ta P""
Minneapolis London
,
Contents
Translator's Introduction
From Hybridity to Policy
For a Purposeful Cultural Studies ix
Author's Preface to the English-Language Eaition
The North- South Dialogue on Cultural Studies 3
Introduction
Twenty-first-Century Consumers, Eighteenth-Century Ci tizens 15
Part I Cities in Globalization
1. Consumption Is Good for Thinking 37
2. Mex1co
Cultural Globalization in a Disintegrating City 49
3. Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America 67
4. Narrating the Multicult ural 77
Part II Postnational Suburbias
5. Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle 89
6. Lat in America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood 97
7. From the Public to the Private
The "Americanization" of Spectators 109
8. Multicultural Pol icies and I nt egration via t he Market 123
Part Ill Negotiation, Integration, and Getting Unplugged
9. Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 137
10. How Civil Society Speaks Today 151
Notes 163
Index 183
,
...
Chapter 1
Consumption Is Good for Thinking
P
roof that common sense does not coincide wi th "good sense" can
be obtained by focusing one's research on consumption. In everyday
language, consumption is usually associated with useless expenditures
and irrational compulsions. This moral and intellectual disqualification
is based on other commonplaces regarding the omnipotence of the mass
media, which presumably incite the masses ro gorge themselves unthink-
ingly with commodities.
There are still some who fault the poor for buying televisions, video
players, and cars when they don't even own a home. How can one-make
sense of famil ies who squander their Christmas bonuses on parties and
presents when they don't have enough to eat and dress themselves
throughout the year? Don't these media addicts know that newscasters
lie and that telenovelas distort real life?
Rather than responding to these questions, one can inquire into
the way in which they are formulated. Nowadays we see consumption as
more complex than the simple relation between manipulative media and
docile audiences. It is well known that numerous mass communications
studies have shown that cultural hegemony is achieved by dominators
who corner their audiences. Between them there are intermediaries like
37

38 Consumption Is Good for Thinking
the family, the neighborhood, and their fellow workers.
1
These studies
no longer posit the relation between senders and receivers as one of dom-
ination. Communication is not effective if it does not include collabo-
ration and transaction between both parties.
To make headway in this area of work, it is necessary to situate
communication processes in a larger conceptual framework that emerges
from theories and research on consumption. What does it mean to con-
sume? What is the rationality-for producers and consumers-of an
incessant expansion and renewal of consumption?
Toward a Multidisciplinary Theory
It is not easy to answer these questions. Research on consumption may
have proliferated in recent years, but it continues to reproduce the com-
partmentalization and disconnection characteristic of the social sciences.
There are economic, sociological, psychoanalytic, psychosocial, and an-
thropological theories on what rakes place when we consume. There are
literary theories on reception and aesthetic theories on the critical fate
of artworks. But there is not a sociocultural theory of consumption. I
artempr to bnnf; together l1ert th<. mui 1 < f interprt.tation and to
indicate their of convergence \\lth the goal of conrributing to a
global conceptualization of consumption that includes the communi-
cation and reception of symbolic commodities.
Let me begin with a definition: consumption is the ensemble of soci-
ocultural processes in which the appropriation and use of products takes
place. This characterization leads us ro understand our acts of consump-
tion as something more than the exercise of tastes, whims, and unre-
flexive purchases, as is presumed by moralistic judgment, and as some-
thing that goes beyond individual attitudes explored in market surveys.
In this view, consumption is understood according to its economic
rationality. Various trends within this framework posit consumption as
a moment in the cycle of social production and reproduction. It is the
site of completion of the process initiated when commodities are pro-
duced. It is where the expansion of capital and the reproduction of the
labor force are realized. From this point of view, needs and individual
tastes are not what determine who consumes what, and in what man-
ner. The planning of the distribution of commodities depends, rather,
on the administration of capital. In its organization for the provision of
food, housing, transport, and entertainment to the members of a society,
the economic system "thinks" about how to reproduce the labor force
Consumption Is Good for Thinking 39
and increase profit on commodities. We may not agree with this strat-
egy, that is, with the selection of who will consume more or less, but it
is undeniable that the supply of goods and the inducement through ad-
vertising to buy them are not arbitrary acts.
Nevertheless, the macrosocial considerations of large-scale eco-
nomic agents are not rationalities that shape consumption. Marxist stud-
ies of consumption, as well as earlier mass communications research
(from 1950 to 1970), exaggerated the determining force Qf corporations
on consumers and audiences.
2
A more complex theory of the interac-
tion of producers and consumers, senders and receivers, as developed
in certain currents of urban anthropology and sociology, shows that con-
sumption is also motivated by an interactive sociopolitical rationality.
When we examine, from the perspective of consumer movements and
their demands, the proliferation of commodities and brands, of com-
munications and consumer networks, we see the contribution to these
processes of the rules and motivations of group distinction, educational ex-
pansion, technological innovations, and fashion. "Consumption," Manuel
Castells has written, "is the site where class conflict, rooted in unequal
participation in production, continues in the distribution and appro-
priation of To consume ro parricipare in an arena of
COIDpC[IIlg claims ft r what SO(iety pmJULCS anJ the Ways of using ir.
The importance of demands for increased consumption and for a so-
cial wage in organized labor initiatives, and the critical perspectives de-
veloped by consumer groups, are evidence of how popular sectors think
about consumption. If consumption was once a site of more or less uni-
lateral decisions, it is today a space of interaction where producers and
senders no longer simply seduce their audiences; they also have to jus-
tify themselves rationally.
The political importance of consumption can also be appreciated,
for example, in the arguments of the politicians who curbed hyperinfla-
tion in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. They based their electoral strate-
gies on the increased indebtedness that a change in economit policy
might have on those who bought cars or appliances on credit. "If you
don't want a return to inflation and higher taxes, which will make it
impossible to pay off what you bought, you should vote for me again,"
said Carlos Menem in seeking reelection as president of Argentina. A
formula used in his elecroral campaign-the "layaway vote" -demon-
strates the complicity of consumption and citizenship nowadays. '
A third line of research, the study of consumption as a marker of
difference and distinction between classes and groups, has led to a fo-
cus on the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of the rationality of consumption.
There is a logic to the construction of status markers and in the ways of
communicating them. Books by Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, and
Stuart Ewen, among others, show that in contemporary societies a sig-
nificant aspect of the rationality of social relations is constructed less in
the struggle for the means of production and satisfaction of material
needs than in the appropriation of the means of symbolic distinction.
4
There is a coherence to the places where the members of a class, and
even class fractions, eat, study, live, and take vacations. This also goes
for what they read and enjoy, how they inform themselves, and what
they transmit to other groups. This coherence comes into view when
socioanthropological research seeks to understand these arenas synergis-
tically. The logic that drives the appropriation of commodities as ob-
jects of distinction is not the same as the logic involved in the satisfac-
tion of needs. It is defined, rather, by the scarcity of those commodities
and the impossibility that others should have them.
This said, this research is that it tends to under-
stand consumption <U. primarily a meam of creating divtstons. If the mem-
bers of a society did not share the meanings of commodities, if these
were meaningful only for the elites or the minorities that use them,
they would not serve the purposes of differentiation. An imported car
or a computer with new features distinguishes its few owners because
those who do not possess them know their sociocultural meaning. Con-
versely, a handicraft or an indigenous feast-whose mythic sense is
possessed by the ethnic group that generated it-become elements of
distinction or discrimination when other sectors of the same society take
interest in them and understand their significance in some measure. Con-
sequently, we should acknowledge that consumption contributes to the
integrative and communicative rationality of a society.
Is There a Postmodern Rationality?
Some currents of postmodern thought have drawn attention-in the
opposite direction tO the one we endorse-to the dissemination of mean-
ing, the dispersion of signs, and the difficulty of establishing stable and
shared codes. The scenarios of consumption are invoked by postmodern
writers as the most compelling evidence for the crisis in modern ration-
ality and its effects on some of the principles that had governed cultural
development.
Jean-Frans;ois Lyotard is no doubt correct in pointing out that the
metanarratives that organized modern historical rationality have been
exhausted. But one cannot deduce from the demise of certain totaliz-
ing narratives that the global has disappeared as a horiwn. Postmodern
critique has served the purpose of rethinking the condensed forms of
organization of the social that modernity introduced (nations, classes,
etc.). But is it legitimate to extend this questioning tO the extreme of a
supposed postmodern disorder, to 'a dispersion of subjects that has its
paradigmatic manifestation in free markets? It is odd that in this era of
planetary concentration wrought by ma,rkets so much influence should
be attributed to uncritical celebrations of individual dissemination and
visions of societies as erratic coincidences of drives and desires.
It is also surprising that postmodern thought should be constituted
almost exclusively by philosophical reflections, even when it deals with
such concrete objects as architectural design, the organization of the
culture industry, and social interrelations. When we try to verify hypothe-
ses in our empirical research, we observe that no society or group can
supporr too much erratic eruption of destres, nor the <.:oncomiranr un-
cerrai nty of meaniugs. In other words, we need structures by means of
which to think and give order ro what we desire.
It is useful to remember here several anthropological studies on rit-
ual that touch on the questions relating to the supposed irrationality of
consumers that we raised at the beginning of this chapter. How can we
distinguish forms of expenditure that contribute to social reproduction
from those that dissipate and fragment it? Is the "squandering" of money
in the consumption of popular groups a self-sabotage of the poor, a sim-
ple demonstration of the incapacity ro organize themselves for progress?
A clue in answering these questions is the frequency with which
these sumptuary, "excessive" expenditures are associated with rituals and
celebrations. A birthday or the anniversary of a patron saint may jus-
tify the expense on the basis of morality or religion. However, the expense
also makes possible an event through which the given society conse-
crates a rationality that gives it order and security.
Through rituals, according to Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood,
groups select and pin down-in keeping with collective agreemei)Cs-
the meanings that regulate their lives. Rituals "serve ro contain the drift
of meanings" and to make visible public definitions of what is judged
valuable by general consensus. Rituals are effective when they make use
?f material things to establish meanings and practices that preserve them.
The costlier these things, the stronger the affective investment and the
ritualization that fixes the meanings associated with it. Douglas and
Isherwood define many of the things consumed as "ritual trappings"
and see consumption as a ritual process whose primary function is "to
make sense of the inchoate flux of events."
5
Anxious or obsessive behavior around consumption may have a
profound dissatisfaction at its origin, according to many psychologists.
But consumption is otherwise associated, in a more radical sense, with
a dissatisfaction that generates an erratic flow of meanings. Buying ob-
jects, wearing them on the body, or distributing them throughout the
home, assigning them a place within an order, endowing them with
functions in one's communication with others, are resources for thinking
one's own body, the unstable social order, and uncertain interaction
with others. To consume is to make more sense of a world where all
that is solid melts into air. That is why, aside from their usefulness in
expanding the market and reproducing the labor force, insofar as they
distinguish us from others and help us communicate with them, "com-
modities are good for thinking," in Douglas and Isherwood's words.
6
Through this play of desires and structures, commodities and con-
sumption also serve to give political order to each society. Consump-
tion is a process in which desires are converted into demands and so-
cially regulated acts. Why do indigenous artisans or popular merchants
who become rich because of the felicitous reception of their work, or
many politicians and union leaders who accumulate wealth through cor-
ruption, continue to live in working-class neighborhoods, control their
expenses, and try not to "stand out"? Why do they prefer to continue
belonging to their original groups (sometimes holding on to power) than
to show off their prosperity?
Alfred Gell's study of the Muria Gond people of India proposes a
subtle approach to explain this regulatory aspect of consumption? Thanks
to changes in the tribal economy in the last century, the Muria got richer
than their neighbors, yet maintained a modest lifestyle that Appadurai,
turning Veblen on his head, calls "conspicuous stinginess. "
8
They spend
quite prodigally on certain commodities so long as they correspond to
shared values and do not alter the sumptuous homogeneity.
In indigenous villages in Mexico, I observed the acceptance of ex-
ternal-modern-objects, so long as they can be assimilated to com-
munitarian logic. The growth of income, the expansion and variety of
consumer items, as well as the technical capacity to appropriate new com-
modities and messages owing to higher levels of education, do not have
T
enough power to drive members of the gropp to abandon themselves
to the novelties. The desire to possess "the new" does not operate as
something irrational or independent of the collective culture to which
these people belong.
Even in totally modern situations, consumption is not something
"private, atomized and passive," argues Appadurai, but "eminently so-
cial, correlative and active," subordinated to a certain political control
by elites. The tastes of the hegemonic sectors have something like a "fun-
neling" function, for they condition the selection of external offerings
and provide politico-cultural models for the administration of the ten-
sion berween what is one's own and what comes from afar.
In the studies on cultural consumption in Mexico, to which I will
refer later, we found that popular sectors' lack of interest in experimen-
tal art exhibitions, theater, or film is due not only to the weak symbolic
capital they draw on for the appreciation of those forms of communi-
cation, but also to group loyalty to their communities. Within the urban
setting, it is their family context, their neighborhood, and their jobs
that maintain the homogeneity of their consumption and control the
deviations in their tastes and patterns of spending. On a larger scale, what
is understood na(ional culture conrmues to serve as the context of
selection for what comes from outside.
Transnational Consumer Communities
These communities of belonging and control, however, are undergoing
restructuring. What group do we belong to when we participate in a
sociality constructed primarily in relation to globalized processes of con-
sumption? We live in a time of fractures and heterogeneity, of segmen-
tations within each nation, and of fluid communication with transna-
tional orders of information, fashion, and knowledge. In the midst of
this heterogeneity, we find codes that unite us, or at least permit us to
understand each other. But those shared codes refer ever less to the eth-
nicity, class, and nation into which we were born. Those old units, in-
sofar as they endure, seem to be reformulated as mobile pacts for in-
terputation of commodities and messages. The definition of a nation,
for example, is given less at this stage by its territorial limits or its politi-
cal history. It survives, rather, as an community of consu'l'n-s,
whose traditional- alimentary, linguistic-habits induce them to re-
late in a peculiar way with the objects and information that circulate in
international nerworks. At the same time, we find international com-

munities of consumers-we already gave the examples of youth and
television viewers-that provide a sense of belonging where national
loyalties have eroded.
Since the agreements among producers, institutions, markets, and
publics-which constitute the interpretive pacts and renew them peri-
odically-are struck in these international networks, it turns out that
the hegemonic sector of one nation has more in common with the elites
of another than with the subaltern sectors of its own nation. Twenty
years ago, the adherents of dependency theory reacted to the first signs
of this process by accusing the bourgeoisie of a lack of loyalty to na-
tional interests. And, of course, the national character of these interests
was defined by the "authentic" traditions of the people. Today we know
that this authenticity is illusory, for the sense of one's own repertoire of
objects is arbitrarily delimited and reinterpreted in historical hybrid
processes. We can also see an analogous hybrid process in the mixture
of "autochthonous" and "foreign" ingredients in consumption by pop-
ular sectors, in the peasant artisans who adapt their archaic knowledges
in order to interact with tourists, in workers who manage to adapt their
work cultun.: ro nev.. :echrtcl, lt;ies \' hile m nraining their ancient and
local bel ieh. decadc' Jt uamn.monal construction have
created what Renata Ortiz. labeled an "international popular culture,"
with a collecnve memory made from fragments of different nations.
9
Although their psyches might continue to harbor a national memory,
consumers from the popular classes are nevertheless capable of reading
the quotations of a multilocalized imaginary assembled by television
and advertising: Hollywood and pop stars, jeans and credit-card logos,
sports heroes from various countries, and national sports figures that
play in other countries, all constitute a constantly available repertoire
of signs. Marilyn Monroe and Jurassic animals, Che Guevara and the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the most-consumed soft drink, and Tiny Toon cart
be cited or alluded to by any international advertising designer, con-
fident that his or her message will have meaning even for those who
have never traveled outside of their country.
It is necessary, therefore, to find out how identities and alliances
are restructured when a national community wanes or when segmented
participation in consumption-which becomes the principal criterion
of identification-creates solidarity among elites from each country
within one transnational circuit and solidarity among popular sectors
within another. In our study of cultural consumption in Mexico, we
found that the separation among hegemonic and subaltern groups is
no longer presented as the opposition between one's own and imports,
or between the traditional and the modern, but by a differential affilia-
tion with cultural subsystems with a different complexity and capacity
for innovation.
10
While some follow Brahms, Sting, and Carlos Fuentes,
others prefer Julio Iglesias, Alejandra Guzman, and Venezuelan telmovelas.
This split is operative not only in the consumption of entertain-
ment. It also segments social sectors via strategic commodities that po-
sition them in the contemporary world and enable them to have decision-
making capacity. While technological modernization in industry and
services requires greater work skills, there is a concomitant increase in
school absenteeism and ever lesser access to innovative information by
middle sectors (and still less by popular iectors). The knowledge to use
data and instruments that enable people to act autonomously and cre-
atively is limited to those who can afford to subscribe to information
services and exclusive television networks (on satellite dishes and rerrans-
mitters of metropolitan channels). The rest are offered mass communi-
cations, concentrated in large monopolies, that carry standard North
American programming, plus repetitive lite entertainment shows pro-
duced in each countrv.
l ht: charaueril.dion of COI1\U111puon ds .t :l unrdlu..ive Sl' of usc
less expenditure can be crittcized as follows. 1 he matomy of people are
turned away from the most creative trends in contemporary culture as a
result of the reorganization of transnational symbolic systems, which takes
place according to neoliberal rules of maximum profitability of mass
commodities and the concentration of culture among select, decision-
making elites. Cultural leveling and depoliticiz.ation do nor follow from
the structure of the medium (television, radio, or video). The possibilities
for interaction and critical reflection, on the contrary, have been demon-
strated many times, albeit in small-scale experiments that do not trans-
late into higher effectivity among mass publics. Similarly, the deepening
of political apathy should not be attributed only to the contraction of
public life and the retreat of families to home delivery of electronic en-
tertainment. Nevertheless, this transformation in the relations between
public and private in everyday cultural consumption marks a funda-
mental change in the conditions for the practice of a new type of civic
responsibility.
If consumption has become a site from which it is difficult to think,
this is the result of its capitulation to a supposedly free, or better yet fe-
rocious, game of market laws. If consumption is to articulate with a
reflexive exercise of citizenship, it would have to meet the following re-
quirements: {a) a vast and diversified supply of commodities and mes-
sages representative of the international variety of markets, with easy
and equal access for the majority; (b) multidirectional and reliable in-
formation on the quality of products, with effective consumer control
and the capacity to refute the pretensions and seductions of advertis-
ing; {c) democratic participation by the principal sectors of civil society
in material, symbolic, juridical, and political decisions that organize con-
sumption, such as health standards relating to foodstuffs, concessions
of radio and television frequencies, prosecution of speculators who hoard
the most necessary products, and management of crucial information
for decision making.
These political actions, which elevate consumers to citizens, entail
a conception of the market as not only a place for the exchange of com-
modities, but as part of more complex sociocultural interactions. Simi-
larly, consumption is seen not so much as the individual possession of
isolated objects, but rather as the collective appropriation, within rela-
tions of solidarity with and distinction from others, of commodities that
provide biol ogtcal and needs. and rhat serve to transmit and
receive rhe theorie\ of UlllSUmp ion re\iewed In this chaprer
suggest that, when considered complemenrarily, commercial value is
not something contained "naturally" in objects but is rather the result
of sociocultural interaction among the people who use them. The ab-
stract character of commercial exchanges, accentuated nowadays by the
spatial and technological distance between producers and consumers,
led to the belief in the autonomy of commodities and in the inexorable
character, extraneous to the things themselves, of the objective laws
that presumably regulate the relations between supply and demand.
The encounter of modern and "archaic" societies permits us to see that
commodities have functions in all societies, and that the commercial
aspect is only one of them. Humans exchange objects to satisfy cultur-
ally defined needs, to integrate with and distinguish ourselves from oth-
ers, to fulfill our desires and to map out our situation in the world, to
control the erratic flux of desires and to give them stability or security
through institutions and rituals.
Within this multiplicity of actions and interactions, objects have a
complex life. In one phase, they are only "candidates for commodity
status."
11
Then they go through another, properly commercial phase.
Finally, they lose this aspect and take on another. For example, masks
made by indigenous peoples for ceremonies are sold to a modern con-
sumer and ultimately are put on display in urban apartments or in
museums, where their economic value is forgotten. Another example is
that of the song produced for exclusively aesthetic reasons, which, once
it is recorded, attains mass appeal and profits. Then it is appropriated
and modified by a political movement and becomes a resource of iden-
tification and collective mobilization. These changing biographies of ob-
jects and messages suggest that the commercial aspect of commodities
is their opportunity and their risk. We can act as consumers by situating
ourselves in only one of these processes of interaction-say, that which
regulates the market. As citizens, we can also take more time for reflec-
tion and experimentation, taking into consideration the multiple po-
tentialities of objects and taking advantage of their "semiotic virtuos-
ity"12 in the varied contexts where people might encounter one another.
To pose these questions implies relocating the pubic. The discred-
iting of states as administrators of the basic sectors of production and
information, and the lack of credibility of political parties (including
those of the opposition), have contracted the spaces where it was possi-
ble to look afrer the public interest, and where it should be possible to
limit and manage the otherwise savage struggle of private commercial
power\. In some counme\ we can derecr tht: emergence of nonpartisan
and nongovernmental institutions-such as the ombudsman, human-
rights commissions, and independent news groups-that make it pos-
sible to uncouple the need to value the public sphere from the province
of corrupt state bureaucracies. Some consumers want to be citizens.
After the 1980s, the "lost decade" of economic growth in Latin Amer-
ica, during which states surrendered part of their control of society to
private corporations, it has become clear where privatization at any cost
leads: to national decapitalization, underconsumption by majorities, un-
employment, and impoverishment of cultural offerings. The articula-
tion of consumption and citizenship requires a relocation of the mar-
ket within society, the imaginative reconquest of public spaces, and
interest in the public. Consumption can be a site of cognitive value; it
can be good for thinking and acting in a meaningful way that renews
social life.
,
172 Notes
rather, the development of modern tendencies that are reworked in the multicul-
tural confl icts of globalization. I have elaborated on this position in my book Cul-
turas hibridas: Estraugias para mtrar y salir tk Ia motkrnidad (Mexico City: Grijablo,
1990) [English translation: Hybrid Cultum: Straugits for Enuring and uaving
Motkrnity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. L6pez (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1995].
17. Roberto Alejandro, Htrmmrotics, Citiunship, and tht Public Sphm (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 6-7.
18. I take the expression "institutional configurations" from Peter Dahlgren,
"Introduction," in Communication and Citizenship, ed. Peter Dahlgren and Colin
Sparks (London: Routledge, 1993).
19. Pierre-Yves Perillon, "0! Chicago: images de Ia ville en chancier," in Jean
Baudrillard et al., Cituymntte tt urbanite (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1991), 144.
20. The results of these research projects are provided in the following works:
Nestor Garda Canclini, ed., El consumo cultural m Mexico (Mexico City: Consejo
Nacional para Ia Cultura y las Artes, 1993); and Nestor Garda Canclini, Julio Gulko,
Marfa Eugenia Modena, Eduardo Niv6n, Mabel Piccini, Ana Marfa Rosas, and
Graciela Schmilchuk, Publicos tk amy politica cultural: un tstudio tkl II hstival
dt Ia ciudad tk Mexico (Mexico City: DDF, INAH, UAM, 1991).
21. See Nestor Garda Canclini, ed., Los nuroos tsptctadom. Cint, ukvisitJn y
vitko m Mexico (Mexico City: Imcine-CNCA, 1994).
1. Consumption Is Good for Thinking
This chapter is an expanded version of an article of the same ride that I pub-
lished in Didlcgos tk Ia Comunicacion 30 (Lima, June 1991).
1. See, for example, James Lull, ed., World Familits ~ t c h Tekvision (New-
bury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988); Jesus Marrin Barbero, Communication, Culturt and
Htgtmony: From tht Mtdia to Mtdiatiom (New York: Sage, 1993); and Guillermo
Oro1.co, ed., Hablan lcs ukvitknus. studios tk rtupcion m varios paius (Mexico
City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992).
2. See, for example, Jean-Pierre Terrail, Desmond Preteceille, and Patrice
Grever, Capitalism, Consumption, and Nuds (New York: Blackwell, 1985).
3. Manuel Castells, Tht Urban Qutstion: A Marxist Approach (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1977), Appendix.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critiqut of tht judgtmmt ofTasu
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Arjun Appadurai, ed., Tht Social
Lift ofThings: Commodities in Cultural P=J>utivt (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Stuart Ewen, All Comuming Images: Tht Politics oJSryle in Conumpo-
rary Culturt (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
5. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Ba-
sic Books, 1979), 65.
6. Ibid., 62.
Notes 173
7. Alfred Gell, "Newcomers to the World of Goods: Consumption among
the Muria Gonds," in Appadurai, Tht Social Lift ofThings, uo-37.
8. Ibid., 47
9. Renaro Orri1., Mundializafiio e cultura (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1994), chapter 4
10. Nestor Garda Canclini and Mabel Piccini, "Culruras de Ia ciudad de
Mex.ico: simbolos colectivos y usos del espacio urbana," in Nestor Garda Canclini,
ed., El consumo cultural m Mexico (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para Ia Cultura
y las Arres, 1993) .
11. Appadurai, The Social Lift of Things, 29.
12. Ibid., 57
2. Mexico
This chapter appeared in Ciudatks 20 (Mexico City, December 1993).
I. This is a well-established distinction, still held ro by some anthropolo-
gists. See, for example, Clifford Geern, Tht lnurpretation ofCultum (New York:
Basic Books, 1973).
2. The most consistent attempts to convert the city from a place in which
one studies into an object of study can be found in Brnilian anthropology. See
Eunice Ribeiro Durham, "A pesquisa antropol6gica com popula\oes urbanas: prob-
lemas e perspectivas," in Ruth Cardoso, ed., A avmtura antropoMgica (Rio de
Janeiro: Pn e Terra, 1986), and "A sociedade vista da periferia," Rroista Brasileira
tk Ciincias Sociais I Qune 1986): 85-99.
3. Oscar Lewis, Tepoztldn (New York: Holt, 1960); Robert Redfield, Tepoztldn:
A Maican Villagt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 [1930]); Clifford
Geern, Works and Lives: Tht Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1987).
4. For a summary of these developments, see George E. Marcus and Michael
M. J. Fischer, Anthropolcgy as Cultural Critiqut (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986). See especially the chapter titled "Taking Account of the World His-
torical Political Economy: Knowable Communities in Larger Systems."
5. See Marjorie Thacker and Sylvia Ba7.Ua, Indlgmas urbanos tk Ia ciudad
tk Mexico, pruyectos tk vida y estraugias (Mex.ico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista,
1992). As in the entire country, statistics on the size of the indigenous population
are the source of many debates, as are statistics on any matter in Mexico. Thacker
and Ba7.Ua's estimate is based on the Eleventh Population and Housing Census of
1990 and includes children less than five years of age and those who do not p ~
indigenous languages yet belong to an indigenous family despite having been born
and raised in the capital.
6. Jerome Monet, "EI centro hist6rico de Ia ciudad de Mexico," in Sdbado,
Literary Supplement for Unomdsuno (Mexico City, 26 August 1989): 1-2.

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