Page 134 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

participates as an active and skillful social agent, and not just as a non-intrusive
subjective presence making ‘clean’ observations. So, for example, we can make
several ethnographic descriptions in different settings that could lead us to
catch slight nuances, or even explicit clashes, about what really ‘good music’ is
and is not. We can observe live presentations, visit retail music stores, listen to
schoolyard chats, attend to radio and television shows, study musicians’ organ-
izations, and watch bands and singers participating in various public rituals, for
instance. Erving Goffman (1967) is among those who stressed the importance
of societal rituals for the construction and social recognition of the self. It is the
situational context that makes possible the construction and display of specific
systems for classifying cultural phenomena in real and vivid confrontations (for
instance, discriminating between the ‘real’ good performer Ricky Martin, and
the ‘evident’ bad taste and poor musical abilities of Los Tigres del Norte).
We can observe also that in the case of the Catholic religion in Mexico,
lower-class believers communicate in their own indigenized, ritualized ways
with mighty entities like Sanjuanita or El Santo Señor de Chalma, while others
affiliate with the higher powers of the Church – God, the saints, the virgin – by
means of ex voto narrative paintings, discursive displays of ‘god’s grace’
embraced sentimentally by the faithful (González 1990: 97–157). We can then
compare religious practices of the popular classes such as these with the far
more conventional actions performed and valorizations given by the upper
classes and by the Church hierarchy responding to the ‘commoners’ traditional,
naive, and irrational’ practices. This way the upper classes differentiate them-
selves from ‘low taste’ and ‘idolatrous misbehavior’. In situational analysis, we
give analytical emphasis to multiple clashes of such rituals and narratives,
showing and linking alternative identities with the pre-eminence of those that
actually (that is, structurally and historically) control and manage the rules,
spaces, objects, and collective icons (for instance, the sanctuaries).
The aim of the situational entry, therefore, is to identify the symbolic tax-
6
onomies actually operating in natural settings and in public rituals where dif-
ferent social positions are expressed and confront mobilizing sociocultural
resources and forces such as religious icons, musical genres, or communications
technology. Here we can actually see how deep transclass factors like gender,
race, and age shape the ways we experience fundamental human activities such
as loving, caring, believing, healing, expressing, feeding, thinking, consuming,
amusing, and being visible in society (Cirese 1984). Through a detailed elabor-
ation in which several semiotic and discursive operations are made possible,
these symbolic constructions can be designed, shaped, and modulated to cross
over the limits imposed by social space positions and the class-originated
habitus. The relationships which take form within these cultural performances
make possible the ‘social space of stances’ (Bourdieu 1993), in which di fferent
cultural fronts are created, deployed, and eventually clash. In musical terms, for
instance, these operations could imply modification of a style to appeal to a
larger, more differentiated audience. This brings about the constant reshaping

123