Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space - Hardcover

Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520077881 ISBN 13: 9780520077881

Verlag: University of California Press, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? Claudio Lomnitz-Adler takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. His sweeping and innovative interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces—in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico—Exits from the Labyrinth links rich ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology.

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Claudio Lomnitz-Adler is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Tepoztlán: Politics, Culture, and Anthropology, a revised English language version of his earlier Evolución de un socieded rural (1982), is soon to be published.

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"One of the most original and comprehensive treatments of the topic of Mexican nationalism that exists. . . . No book combines the theoretical breadth and the empirical depth of this one."—Henry A. Selby, University of Texas, Austin

"Rich, detailed, and sophisticated, the analyses of the Huasteca and especially the Morelos are at once excellent introductions to the regions, commentaries on existing ethnography in them, and advances in ethnographic analysis."—William Roseberry, New School for Social Research

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"One of the most original and comprehensive treatments of the topic of Mexican nationalism that exists. . . . No book combines the theoretical breadth and the empirical depth of this one." Henry A. Selby, University of Texas, Austin

"Rich, detailed, and sophisticated, the analyses of the Huasteca and especially the Morelos are at once excellent introductions to the regions, commentaries on existing ethnography in them, and advances in ethnographic analysis." William Roseberry, New School for Social Research

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Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space

By Claudio Lomnitz-Adler

University of California Press

Copyright © 1993 Claudio Lomnitz-Adler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520077881
1
Concepts for the Study of Regional Culture

In this chapter I propose a terminology and conceptual framework for studying culture in internally differentiated regional spaces. I develop a notion of regional culture as culture in power-regions, and I propose, explicate, and illustrate five concepts: "intimate culture," "culture of social relations," "localist ideology," "coherence," and "mestizaje." Since the discussion in this chapter is theoretical and rather abstract, I make use of a set of ethnographic examples that I will develop in subsequent chapters. The approach that I outline here is designed to specify key areas for the ethnographic description of regional culture and hegemony.

The spatial dimension of cultural production and identity is a theme that has usually been sidestepped by both regional analysts and cultural theorists. Regional analysis has always emphasized the explicit construction of schemes of regional organization, and, in so doing, it has made a substantial contribution to all anthropologies that ignore the systemic dimensions of social space.1 However, the main thrust of regional-systems theory has been ill suited to the analysis of culture or ideology for at least three reasons: because regional analysts often presume that culture is simply a rational adaptation to economic and political forces in the regional system;2 because the kinds of perspectives that are used in order to represent spatial structures often prejudice writers in favor of charting "observable behavior" (the eye takes precedence over the ear, counting takes precedence over interpreting, and so on);3 and because the analysis of commercial relations has so conditioned most of regional analysis that culture is often reduced to a kind of symbolic interaction that appears to be especially "transparent" and comparable to commer-

cial exchange: the exchange of information.4 In its most developed versions, regional analysis has not yet reached beyond the demonstration of its relevance for explaining—in piecemeal fashion—certain cultural characteristics of groups in regions.5

Cultural theory has had a more varied set of problems vis-à-vis regional culture. A large proportion of cultural studies focus on discourse and rhetoric while downplaying the question of cultural production in social space. Structuralists, as we have seen, tend to view cultures as codes or as texts, thereby minimizing the "sociological" issues pertaining to the dynamics of spatial-cultural variation. Neither have poststructuralist criticism and postmodernism advanced much in this regard; given the postmodernists' emphasis on the culture of "late capitalism," they have tended to concentrate on the fragmentation of personal and group identities and on the mythification of cultures at the hands of the powerful (today's local cultures are transformed into neutered caricatures for capitalist consumption). And they have been particularly fascinated by the ways in which space and distance have been transformed by satellite communications. However, space and the relationship between culture and political and economic regions have not yet been understood, and the postmodernist assault on particular understandings of cultural boundaries has left the general issue of cultural regions (including "postmodern" cultural regions) underdeveloped.6

On the other hand, social analysts who have studied agency, power, culture, and ideology have examined some important dimensions of the relationship between culture and space. Bourdieu's (1979) notion of "habitus," for example, is designed to address the relations between cultural structure, the ways in which spaces are laid out, and the self (see also Bourdieu 1971). So, although the production and reproduction of social spaces are the result of the practices of people, these people are social personae whose very identities and practical orientations are influenced by the spaces in which they have been socialized (the house, the street, the temple, and so forth).7 There is, in other words, a dialectic between person and place; because places are frames of social relations, they become imbued with the values of those relations and therefore help to create the relational values that make up the self.8

Throughout his many works, Foucault explores an aspect of the history of this dialectic by centering his attention on the relationships among the desire to know, the construction, expansion, and deployment of discourses, and the ways in which spaces are organized. In his historical interpretations, Foucault (see, for example, 1988) shows some of the ways in which knowledge and power have shaped and reshaped space in conformity to the (figured) ideas produced in discourse. However, it is important to bear in mind that Foucault, like Bourdieu, does not system-

atically explore the spatial implications of his perspective.9 His interest lies in the connections between power, discourse, institutional transformations, and the ultimate reduction of people to conformity via the minute encoding of people's drives and desires. He pays little attention to the ways in which practices and institutions map out in actual social space, and in this the strategies of regional analysis—with its insistence on systematic observation of the interaction between different spatial logics within "nodal regions"—could be useful indeed.10

In this chapter I will develop the fundamentals of a perspective that analyzes cultural differentiation and homogenization in political-economic regions by paying strict attention to the relationship between the spatial arrangement of power relations and cultural and ideological production.11 The end result is a framework that specifies and contextualizes the notion of hegemony. This specificity is needed for an adequate understanding of what cultural descriptions actually describe.

Culture and Communication in Regional Spaces

Contemporary societies are made up of many kinds of groups with all sorts of different relations between them; the systematicity and internal coherence of culture are problematic indeed. A recognition of the problem of systematicity and mutual use and understanding of symbols has led some anthropologists to compare culture to a repertoire of often dissimilar meanings and symbols. In this context, what can we possibly mean by "regional culture"? Are we looking for a "collective consciousness" or are we trying to analyze the full—heterogeneous—cultural repertoire of a region?

When we speak of regional culture, we are interested not exclusively in a common regional culture, although finding whether such a common culture exists, or if images of such a common culture exist, is part of the task involved. Rather, we seek to show how different kinds of cultural interaction map out in regional space, and from there to explore the spatial dimensions of cultural understanding.

The task is therefore twofold. On the one hand we need to explore the "political economy" of regional culture (that is, the spatial organization of the production and distribution of signs), and on the other we must explore the relationship between space and ideology. In other words, we must analyze the regional frame of cultural interaction...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520077881
• ISBN 13: 9780520077881
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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