Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

166 reframing latin america
Understandable though it is after centuries of colonialism and in light
of the prestige that French thought had in the early days of Independence,
this anxiety of imitation is tied to a cultural debate framed in terms of
the dichotomies America and Europe, tradition and modernization, and regional
and cosmopolitan or “universal” culture. In contrast, thinkers such
as Bolívar and Martí abandon the search for a pure (underived) originality,
locating “Latin Americanness” instead in the concept of cultural hybridity.
“The blood of our citizens is different; let us mix it to unify it,” says Bolívar.
Martí proudly emphasizes the heterogeneous origins of what he called, in
a now-famous phrase, “our half-breed [mestizo] America,” and affirms that
the diverse continent possesses a “continental soul” and raises its voice in
a “hymn of oneness.” Yet the concept of hybridization does not resolve the
question of cultural identity; it merely points out the arena in which the
issue may most fruitfully be discussed. Both Bolívar and Martí assume, for
instance, that the hybrid space must be a unifi ed one, and they imply that
the process of hybridization must be directed from above.
The concept of transculturation introduced by the Cuban anthropologist
Fernando Ortiz provides a much clearer analysis of cultural hybridization.
Ortiz argues that, although Latin American intellectuals and elite classes
may have attempted to derive their thought from Europe’s models and to
imitate its cultural forms, Latin America as a whole is something other
than a replica of Europe. Most important, he views crosscultural contact
and the formation of hybrid cultures as an interactive process in which pressure
is exerted from below as well as from above.
Ortiz proposed the term as a more accurate description than “acculturation”
of the passage from one culture to another. “Transculturation” refers
not only to the acquisition of a new culture but also to the partial loss of a
preceding one and, importantly, the activity of the subjects of this process,
whom Ortiz’s model views not simply as receivers of culture but as creators
of new cultural phenomena. It is an ongoing process that engages continuing
foreign infl uence, received either directly or mediated through the
capital cities (which have the closest connections to such infl uence, and in
which national policy is made), and the selective appropriation, modifi cation,
and assimilation of such infl uence to a preexisting culture, which does
not simply fade away but exerts its own infl uence on the culture received.
Because of its dynamism—its ability to account for and make use of confl
ict—the concept of transculturation permits us to see hybrid cultures as
something more than a repetition of previous ones, reorganized in the form
of harmonious syntheses, homogenizing “melting pots” or aggregate “mosaics.”
This is especially important since some of the best-known presen-