Page 128 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

handling the information in order to make our theoretical objectives plausible.
The construction and analysis of any cultural front requires at least four kinds
of information sources and a format that can facilitate analysis at the three levels
specified above.
The first information source is structural information, regarding the multi-
dimensionality of any social space. The second is historical information, mapping
the different social trajectories of the various agents and strategies at play. The
third kind of data needed for constructing a cultural fronts approach is situ-
ational information, which can be used to describe the ethnographic contexts in
which the conflicts, struggles, and merging results are located in terms of time,
space, and activities. The fourth type we need is directly symbolic information,
requiring a social semiotic strategy that can make detailed descriptions of the
located social construction of meaning in detail. Let me now elaborate on these
entry points.

Structure

Any attempt to study the cultural dynamics of a given society as cultural fronts
should be situated in a broad spectrum of objective social relations. ‘Objective’,
in this sense, refers to the existence of di fferent social relationships in a wide
range that is independent of individual human will and knowledge: the struc-
ture beyond the social agent. These are by no means only economic relations.
They are at the same time political and symbolic relationships resembling what
the French ethnologist Marcel Mauss (1974) called a ‘total social fact’. These
relations are the philosophical principles and the practical bases for the con-
figuration of any social space where we find different loci – positions, sites, or
places. These loci are defined both by the relative distances between them and
by the struggles between them. Any attitude, action, practice, or interaction
depends, in principle, on the social position of the actors or the institution. The
observation and description of any feature or characteristic of a social agent
therefore must be related in a non-mechanistic way to these social relations.
Let’s put forward a couple of examples here. It is because of their position in
the subfield of popular music entertainment that the Mexican ranchero band,
Los Tigres del Norte, sing certain kinds of songs, use particular traditional
customs, and express a sort of easy, simple thinking in their television inter-
views. Once a cultural entity occupies a key position in the cultural field, the
social forces that have been created ‘talk’, ‘perform’, and ‘make sounds’ through
their individual actions. So, the recognized characteristics of (in this case)
Los Tigres del Norte (lyrics, melodies, rhythms, and virtuoso playing of the
accordion) lie beyond any individual thought or action of its individual
members. Fame – the symbolic recognition of situated cultural properties for
specific audiences – derives more from a structural position than from any
‘freewill individuals’.
The same principle operates in the public behavior and performances of

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