Page 129 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ

Puerto Rican singing sensation Ricky Martin. Martin may or may not like
ranchero music, but, because of his objective place in the field of entertainment,
he will never sing or dance a ranchero song. Even the shape of band members’
and singers’ bodies and their techniques of self-presentation are not individual
choices. If the biological Hernández brothers and their group (Los Tigres del
Norte), or Enrique Martín Morales (Ricky Martin) never existed, another
social agent would cover and occupy the structural position in which they are
located. That agent would generate, cultivate, and show the properties created
and required from the given structural position. Personal style or ‘ flavor’,
therefore, exists only if it is recognized within the strict limits of a given sym-
bolic market. The market is the structure that gives or withdraws relative value
to specific performances. Any given structure operates as a set of objective
constraints, with or without the awareness of the social agent. We need to
generate appropriate information about the structure and about the com-
position of the social space in which we wish to study particular cultural fronts.
We can construct this information by using several techniques that help us
identify and describe the social distribution of ‘valid’ resources operating in
that specific field. We are already used to describing the structure and com-
position of the economic, social, and cultural ‘capitals’ at play (Bourdieu 1993).
But we must keep in mind that capital is not a thing, but a social energy – an
objective, active relationship. The dynamic quality of culture creates serious
analytical problems with some theoretical approaches, for instance the ‘culture
wars’ perspective of James Hunter (1991) mentioned earlier. Hunter locates
very well the conflicts, attitudes, and performances of cultural contestants, but
he doesn’t offer the structural analysis we need to explore the processes and
meta-processes of conflicts in modern societies.

History
Images produced by structural descriptions of social space should be under-
stood as a point (or a momentary state) of a larger trajectory. That trajectory
should be traced through a detailed historiography that is elaborated from a
variety of documents and other sources. When possible, it should include oral
testimonies (Bertaux and Thompson 1993).
From these sources we can trace and elaborate the long-term positional
changes of the cultural elements, agents, places, and relationships we observe.
That constructed history must not be understood as linear. The historical
creation and re-creation of social settings can be delineated well only by analyz-
ing multiple threads of social and cultural experiences. Following and
reconstructing the long-term formation of cultural fronts gives us the perspec-
tive needed to understand the intertwined footprints, traces, and paths of the
symbolic struggles and strategies that have converged and merged into ‘normal’
or commonly shared understandings of socially differentiated groups. The
claim behind the cultural fronts approach is that what we experience today as

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