Latin American Intellectual Practices in Culture and Power: experiences and debates.

DANIEL MATO

Cultural Studies

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2003 vol. 17 p. 783 - 804

0950-2386

<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0pt; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:none; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:70.85pt 85.05pt 70.85pt 85.05pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> One of the two main lines of argumentation of this text turns around theidea of ‘intellectual practices’. This idea is used here to criticize thehegemony that both academic institutions and publishing industries havebeen exerting on representations of the idea of ‘the intellectual’. Inaddition, the idea of ‘intellectual practices’ is useful to make more visiblethe diversity of forms in which intellectual work informs current socialpractices, as well as to show that this work assumes forms not limited towriting practices. The other line of argumentation turns around theconceptual pair ‘culture and power’. This pair, explicitly or implicitly usedby many intellectuals, allows the formerly mentioned reflection to begrounded in a relatively more limited universe of practices. Moreover, thereference to this pair highlights the importance of the particular set ofpractices that explicitly or implicitly relate to it. These practices may becharacterized as simultaneously involving a cultural approach (focusing onsocio-symbolic dimensions) of issues of power, and a political approach(focusing on relations of power) of the cultural (socio-symbolic) dimensionsof social processes. Finally, this article also presents a critic of theidea of ‘Latin American cultural studies’, which fundamentally criticizes ade-contextualized and de-contextualizing application of certain representationsof the idea of cultural studies in Latin America, as well as studiesabout Latin America from abroad. Such de-contextualization impoverishesthe critical impulse of such an intellectual perspective, and at the same timediminishes the visibility of other significant practices in culture and powerdeveloped in Latin America.