Page 133 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JORGE A. GONZÁLEZ

for the lower classes all over Mexico. Or if we are interested in an even broader
arena, we could study the reconstruction of different strategies for creation of a
transnational icon extracted from the dominated cultural field of industrial
entertainment that was made originally for the lower positions in the social
space. Along both trajectories we could find a number of different struggles (at
levels intra, inter, and trans) for the construction of a common symbolic platform
in which all the social agents involved could recognize, at least in part, some-
thing of their own. When this higher level of organizing cultural meanings
fails, however, we confront a critical shift of momentum in which the pre-
carious equilibrium that defines some phase of hegemony is threatened and the
possibility of change opens up structurally.
With these two first approaches – which resemble genetic structuralism, as
Bourdieu has said – we must identify the space of objective relations that is
largely independent of the consciousness and will of the agents (Bourdieu
1993). In the next two sections of this chapter – on situational and symbolic
considerations – we will focus on the space of such position-takings. We will
go first to everyday life in order to understand and describe the systems of
classification and actions operating in specific social settings and public rituals,
and then we will move to the symbolic specificity of cultural fronts.

Situation
Once we have studied the structural representations and historical trajectories
that configure the processes we want to analyze as a cultural front, we have to
deal with the quotidian circumstances and negotiations of a given situation,
context, and interaction in which real social actors communicate and otherwise
interact. This is the place where social actors and activities merge in specific,
‘natural’, everyday settings. As we have seen before, all these settings must be
understood as components of a structure of relationships that take their actual
forms through trajectories of historical change. However, by no means can the
contexts in which different social actors produce different social activities be
simply deduced from the structural organization of the social space. In order to
study a cultural front in detail, we must locate specific social activities in a web
of social coordinates (space, time, people, actions, goals). Such work can best be
accomplished ethnographically (see, for example, Goffman 1967: 47–95; Mauss
1974; Spradley 1980; Babbie 1997: 202–30; Galindo 1998: 347–83; González
1998: 233–53; Werscht 1998; Jensen and Jankowski 1991; Lindlof 1995).
Descriptions of cultural contexts usually produce a number of observations
that can be integrated into taxonomies through which we can make observable
locally situated systems of classification from the ‘insider’s’ or ‘native’s’ point of
view. Becoming crucial at this stage is the second-order reflexivity of the ‘observer’
who monitors the very production of his or her own observation (Maturana
and Varela 1992). The cultural fronts approach thus intends to understand the
creation of precarious consensus in complex societies in which the researcher

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