Cultural Agency In The Americas

“Cultural agency” refers to a range of creative activities that contribute to society, including pedagogy, research, activism, and the arts. Focusing on the connections between creativity and social change in the Americas, this collection encourages scholars to become cultural agents by reflecting on exemplary cases and thereby making them available as inspirations for more constructive theory and more innovative practice. Creativity supports democracy because artistic, administrative, and interpretive experiments need margins of freedom that defy monolithic or authoritarian regimes. The ingenious ways in which people pry open dead-ends of even apparently intractable structures suggest that cultural studies as we know it has too often gotten stuck in critique. Intellectual responsibility can get beyond denunciation by acknowledging and nurturing the resourcefulness of common and uncommon agents. Based in North and South America, scholars from fields including anthropology, performance studies, history, literature, and communications studies explore specific variations of cultural agency across Latin America. Contributors reflect, for example, on the paradoxical programming and reception of a state-controlled Cuban radio station that connects listeners at home and abroad; on the intricacies of indigenous protests in Brazil; and the formulation of cultural policies in cosmopolitan Mexico City. One contributor notes that trauma theory targets individual victims when it should address collective memory as it is worked through in performance and ritual; another examines how Mapuche leaders in Argentina perceived the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism and developed new ways to intervene in local government. Whether suggesting modes of cultural agency, tracking exemplary instances of it, or cautioning against potential missteps, the essays in this book encourage attentiveness to, and the multiplication of, the many extraordinary instantiations of cultural resourcefulness and creativity throughout Latin America and beyond. Contributors. Arturo Arias, Claudia Briones, Néstor García Canclini, Denise Corte, Juan Carlos Godenzzi, Charles R. Hale, Ariana Hernández-Reguant, Claudio Lomnitz, Jesús Martín Barbero, J. Lorand Matory, Rosamel Millamán, Diane M. Nelson, Mary Louise Pratt, Alcida Rita Ramos, Doris Sommer, Diana Taylor, Santiago Villaveces

"The Arts America Program, an office of the United States Information Agency's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administers programs designed to demonstrate the creativity, vitality, diversity and democratic quality of the visual and performing arts in the United States. In most instances, Arts America resources are programmed in countries with limited access to expressions of American culture." -- Front cover verso.

This volume explores how visual arts functioned in the indigenous pre- and post-conquest New World as vehicles of social, religious, and political identity.

Based on fieldwork among Pentecostal men in Caracas, Venezuela, this ethnography seeks an explanation for the explosion of Evangelical Protestantism, unraveling the cultural and personal dynamics of Evangelical conversion to show how and why these men make the choice to convert, and how they come to have faith in a new system of beliefs.

This text addresses the central problem in anthropological theory of the late 1990s - the paradox that humans are both products of social discipline and creators of remarkable improvisation.

Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano are now legendary, as much because of NEA support of their work as for the work itself. This is one example of what can happen when politics meets culture, and it provides an appropriate snapshot of the issues explored in this book. As in other policy areas, cultural policies develop within a particular political context, evolve as a consequence of government action or inattention, and affect a variety of publics and interests. In this volume, the contributors explore the inescapable politics accompanying public culture. Surveying the philosophical, economic, legal, and political underpinnings of cultural assistance, they articulate not only governments role in the support of the arts, but also basic questions for future cultural policy. Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano are now legendary, as much because of NEA support of their work as for the work itself. This is one example of what can happen when politics meets culture, and it provides an appropriate snapshot of the issues explored in this book. As in other policy areas, cultural policies develop within a particular political context, evolve as a consequence of government action or inattention, and affect a variety of publics and interests.Americas Commitment to Culture discusses government support of culture as a public policy area. The book focuses on the rationales underlying public support for the arts and examines the development and practice of government as an arts patron. The contributors explore the inescapable politics accompanying public culture. Surveying the philosophical, economic, legal, and political underpinnings of cultural assistance, they articulate not only governments role in the support of the arts, but also basic questions for future cultural policy.

Margaret Archer's Culture and Agency was first published in 1988, and proved a seminal contribution to social theory and the case for the role of culture in sociological thought. Described in Sociological Review as 'a timely and sophisticated treatment', the book showed that the 'problems' of culture and agency, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other, could be solved using the same analytical framework. In this revised edition of Culture and Agency, Margaret Archer contextualises her argument in 1990s cultural sociology and links it explicitly to her latest book, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.