Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America

Series

• The Comparative Studies in Society and History Book Series

The argument and evidence collected in this book advance a distinct point of view on change in Latin America, and its meaning for scholarship in general. Transformations in culture, power, and the relations between them provide the core of an approach that takes account of how individuals and groups define themselves and in the process refashion their encounter with enduring structures of meaning and power. Seeing culture and power as active and creative processes is an essential step in the effort to repeople the social sciences with recognizable human beings, not abstractions deduced from theoretical principles.

Abandoning the determinism and elite-bound concepts of earlier approaches, Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America directs attention to a rich range of encounters and connections among levels of action: rituals and markets, rallies and routine meetings, parades and political parties, community groups, churches, states, and armies. The result is a working concept of culture and power that makes systematic room for cultural change and for understanding how popular groups negotiate their relations with institutions of power and meaning over the long term.

Praise / Awards

• "The critical value of this work is that Levine has now cogently and compellingly renewed his case that all of Latin American society can be studied fruitfully the same way he taught us to study Latin America's religious populations: as an open, undetermined process, which is nonetheless shaped by confluences of important structures. The result varies from the interesting to the stunning."
  —Studies in Comparative International Development