What is popular culture in Latin America?
The text of Rowe William, who is a professor of religious philosophy, proposes to understand the concept of popular culture in Latin America. In class, we have already discussed about the concepts of culture and people. But, to what extent, popular culture in Latin America is unique?
First, popular culture in Latin America seems to be a mix of three cultures: pre-Columbian cultures, Spanish popular culture and modernism. I think that the plaza of the three cultures in Mexico illustrates well the construction of a popular culture around these three elements. As Rowe explains it, pre-Columbian cultures and their traditions were not totally swept out by Spaniards. In fact, Catholicism who developed in Latin America was influenced by Indian system of beliefs. Thus, popular culture in Latin America is related to religion. It is the result of a cultural syncretism. Thus, the Catholicism of Latin America seems to be unique because it mixes the Catholic official church, the Spanish popular idea of Catholicism and some Indian beliefs.
Moreover, popular culture is not a fixed concept. Indeed, the concept of popular culture evolved. It was sometimes used as a counter culture against the dominance of the Spaniards or as an opposition to modernity. But in the same time, it results to be influenced by these new elements and incorporates them. Thus, popular culture proposes a continuous renewal. Even if, many authors point out that mass production of culture reduce the role of popular culture as a ferment of collective memory, according to Rowe William, it goes on being a fundamental element of collective consciousness.
Rowe also explains that there is a continuation between the rural popular culture and the urban one in Latin America. Indeed, the wave of peasants, going to cities in order to work, brought popular culture from rural sites into cities. However, popular culture in city changed and adapted to new logics based on capitalist system. Nowadays, as three fourth of the Latin American people are urban, we could say that now, popular culture is merely urban. As popular rural culture infers with capitalist system, some changes occurs. The capitalist logic influence popular culture in many fields. These changes have advantages and drawbacks. Generally thinking, popular culture is no longer used only as a vector of a collective consciousness, but also, as an economic product. Thus, the topical issue is: do the changes of popular culture into an economic product reduce its importance as a factor of collective consciousness?
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Just a quick note… it’s William Rowe (and Vivian Schelling), not Rowe William. And in fact he’s Professor of Poetics, not Religion, in the departments of Languages, Linguistics, and Culture and English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London.
I really like your last thoughts. I think overall the article was trying to get at your very point, whether popular culture’s importance or significance is considered to be blemished by its economic influences. How do we consider popular culture when it is so influenced by capitalism, an economic system that has created adverse effects for many people living within Latin America? We could say that popular culture within the group of people struggling under the influences of capitalism as vehicle to express resistance and empowerment for collective entities.
There is one point in your blog that I don’t agree entirely with. I don’t see popular culture in Latin America as a mix of simply three cultures and that is mainly because I feel that there are more than just three cultures at hand. In class I sat beside another one of our peers and he is from Mexico. We talked about the topic of this class (popular culture in Latin America) and how ambitious it is in trying to combine such a enormous topic in one class, when in even a single country there are many different types of culture. Latin America is huge, I think it is very difficult to consider there to be only three types of cultures. The only thing that we can probably be certain of is that they are all being impacted by capitalism and other economic systems as they have acted in a pervasive manner in many communities and political systems in Latin America.
I think your entry makes some very intelligent points! What you say about the capitalist system changing the way popular culture is now derived form the cities, and not the rural areas makes a lot of sense. Also, what you say about popular culture being used as an economic product and not only a “vector of collective consciousness” is extremely true. Your final question is very interesting, and I hope we touch on that in class.