A Typology of Latin American Subcultures

Abstract

O NE of the most perplexing problems in the study of complex national or regional cultures such as those of Latin America is the diversity of pattern and institution which they contain. There are a series of institutions, values, and modes of behavior which constitute throughout Latin America a denominator and which distinguish Latin American culture from other major culture spheres of the Western world (cf. Gillin 1947b and Wagley 1948). But the common denominator of modern Latin America does not consist simply of those institutions, values, and behavior patterns held in by most of the Latin American population. Regular cultural differences within the complex and heterogeneous national societies must also be considered. A conceptual framework based on these differences is much needed to provide a context for the extant data and to guide future research. This is especially true with respect to the numerous anthropological community studies, whose contribution to our knowledge of a national culture is often lessened by an inadequate definition of just what variety of the national culture is being considered-or, in other words, what segment of the diverse population they treat. The purpose of the present article is to suggest a taxonomic system of subcultures which we hope will have operational utility throughout Latin America. This attempt to provide a classificatory system for ordering cultural data on Latin America is obviously not unique. As we shall discuss in more detail below, Redfield (1941), by implication at least, distinguished four types of communities for Yucatan, although only the folk and urban types were emphasized. Steward (1953) and his associates in the Puerto Rican project isolated a series of significant Puerto Rican subcultures for study.' And recently, there has been published a series of articles, dealing mainly with Latin America, aimed at refining and extending Redfield's folk-urban concepts. Most of these discussions of Redfield's classification and most attempts to develop a sociocultural taxonomic system have dealt with varieties of whole local communities treated as whole societies. This is to be expected from a discipline whose traditional research methods involved prolonged, sedentary, and intimate contact with a restricted locale and the analysis of local sociocultural wholes. But it is apparent that many of the communities studied in Latin America by anthropologists have an internal heterogeneity of culture pattern depending upon class differences, differences between rural and urban residents of the same community, and other factors, too numerous to list. It is therefore often