Page 126 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

what constitutes a family in the first place. The cultural conflict con-
cerns the structure and content of public education – how and what
American children will learn. Also affected is the content of the popu-
lar media – from the films that are shown to the television shows that are
aired to the books that are read and to the art that is exhibited. It has a
critical effect on the conduct of law particularly in the ways in which
Americans define rights – who should have them and who should not
and with whose interests the state should be aligned. Not least, this
cultural clash has tremendous consequences for electoral politics, the
way in which Americans choose their leaders.
(Hunter 1991: 50–1; emphasis mine)

Those created symbolic configurations in the everyday social world engender
different appropriations that help produce the construction of sets of di fferent
cultural ‘selves’.

Entering the cultural fronts
Cultural fronts are multi-dimensional configurations produced within the
dynamics of multiple historical changes and symbolic structures. These pro-
cesses take place precisely at the vortex of a tense and uncertain equilibrium.
We can use the case of the different readings and social uses of the liturgy in the
class-divided religious behavior of Mexican Catholics to show how this works.
Here, we see how contrasting, even directly opposite versions of the liturgy
have undergone tremendous symbolic negotiations and changes over time. In
sum, varying social agents have very different perceptions of what a religious
practice should be. The upper classes and the Church hierarchy embrace a
‘status justification’ religion. At the same time, the lower classes and peasants are
more likely to have strong feelings and expressions of their relationship with
mighty powers that take the form of ‘salvation religion’, as the classical work of
Max Weber has shown (1978). Both sides of the society share the same images
and temples, but create very different meanings from the symbolism that
characterizes the Catholic Church in Mexico. Such struggles over meaning
represent the dynamics of one cultural front.
On the one hand cultural fronts are structural, making up a set of relation-
ships. On the other hand cultural fronts constantly move, refract, and help
produce a pot of boiling cultural con flicts and tensions. The tentative structure
and order made up of multidirectional, non-linear flows and trajectories of
meaning creates chaotic conditions. The stability of such constructed symbolic
universes is constantly subject to the variable actions, interactions, and negoti-
ations of many symbolic forces. We can think of a cultural front as a whirling
space of motion that, once arrived at a critical bifurcation, suddenly crystallizes
into recognizable, yet still unfixed, structures and semblances of symbolic order.
In this scenario we can locate the particular sites of concrete cultural struggles.

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