Latin American intellectual practices in culture and power: experiences and debates

Abstract

One of the two main lines of argumentation of this text turns around the idea of ‘intellectual practices’. This idea is used here to criticize the hegemony that both academic institutions and publishing industries have been exerting on representations of the idea of ‘the intellectual’. In ­addition, the idea of ‘intellectual practices’ is useful to make more visible the diversity of forms in which intellectual work informs current social practices, as well as to show that this work assumes forms not limited to writing practices. The other line of argumentation turns around the conceptual pair ‘culture and power’. This pair, explicitly or implicitly used by many intellectuals, allows the formerly mentioned reflection to be grounded in a relatively more limited universe of practices. Moreover, the reference to this pair highlights the importance of the particular set of practices that explicitly or implicitly relate to it. These practices may be characterized as simultaneously involving a cultural approach (focusing on socio-symbolic dimensions) of issues of power, and a political approach (focusing on relations of power) of the cultural (socio-symbolic) dimensions of social processes. Finally, this article also presents a critic of the idea of ‘Latin American cultural studies’, which fundamentally criticizes a de-contextualized and de-contextualizing application of certain representations of the idea of cultural studies in Latin America, as well as studies about Latin America from abroad. Such de-contextualization impoverishes the critical impulse of such an intellectual perspective, and at the same time diminishes the visibility of other significant practices in culture and power developed in Latin America.