Page 91 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONTRASTING PERSPECTIVES 85

While most of the author’s work remains available only in Spanish, several
recent translations have made his scholarship more accessible to readers of
English, including his book Transforming Modernity (1993) and Hybrid
Cultures (1995), an article in Media Culture and Society (1988) and chapters
in On Edge (1992a) and Media, Communication, Culture (Lull, 1995).
García Canclini is Professor in the Anthropology Department at the
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, where he is director
of the Urban Cultural Studies Program.
Our conversation took place on 1 July 1994 at a Sanborn’s diner in the
southern part of Mexico City.

PDM: Alan O’Connor (1991) and George Yúdice (1993) have both written
articles about the emergence of Latin American cultural studies. You are
mentioned by both of these writers as one of the central figures in the formation
of this scholarly enterprise. Can you define what you see as the central
characteristics or investigative tendencies of Latin American cultural studies?
NGC: One way to answer your question would be to look at a series of articles
that I edited a few years ago for a magazine published by the Universidad
Autónoma Metropolitana de México. That particular edition was entitled ‘Los
estudios culturales en America Latina’ (Cultural Studies in Latin America). In
the first article, I discuss the anthropological and sociological conceptions of
culture which pervade Latin American scholarship, and develop a balance of the
last few years of theorizing. What I try to show is how these conceptions have
contributed to theoretical shifts in the 1980s and 1990s, and the emergence of
new ways of analysing culture. As far as I am aware, this is the first magazine in
Latin America that has been published as a title suggesting that there exists
something in Latin America that can be considered to be cultural studies. What is
the justification for this? Well, I believe that necessarily these kinds of
declarations must be made in an effort to clarify the movement. For instance,
understanding that while cultural studies was born in England and further
developed in the United States, in Latin America it has had its own unique
development.
It appears to me that there is a certain relevance, a certain space, for adopting
cultural studies as a critical tool which is beginning to become more common.
Specifically we could speak of different authors; earlier you mentioned José
Joaquín Brunner, Jesús Martín-Barbero and myself; I would add Renato Ortiz in
Brazil, Beatriz Sarlo in Argentina, among others. I believe that this scholarship is
useful in the sense that it is generated from a variety of different disciplines:
Brunner from sociology; Martín-Barbero from communication and semiotics; my
background is in philosophy, but also sociology, art criticism and anthropology;
Sarlo from literary studies; and Ortiz anthropology and sociology. I think that
what we have in common is the desire to find a better way to study cultural
processes in a multidisciplinary fashion. Combining these approaches is central
to the project, as we understand cultural processes as processes that should be