Essay on South American Culture Text

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South american culture is the combination of almost the half of the culture of this world. This continent has its own culture that was fostered by the native people who were the original part and inhabitant of this great continent. Among these other cultures there were the european culture, the african culture and recently the modern culture that has contribution mostly from the north america and also from other parts of the world. South america culture is the rich total of several of the leading cultures of this world.

Along with the indigenous culture that was developed during the mayan civilization, there are the influences of the european culture that was brought by the colonizers in this continent. As a result of the slave trade that consisted of the african people as the slaves, in south america, african culture also developed through these african people. The field of religion was also influenced and this lead to the diversity in religion in south america. Christmas is an important celebration and it has religious sentiments attached to it and displays the traditional south america culture. Christmas traditions in south america is totally celebrated in roman catholic way and it can be called as the summation of european and native american culture along with the modern influence of american culture.

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All the traditional customs and gift giving themes are prevalent from the history of santa clause dressed in white and red comes and distributes the gifts and chocolates to the children and this tradition of gift distribution has started off from the chile and brazil. Gift giving is seen in argentina in christmas and even in king's day on first week of january. You can go through the following, shifts in global power dynamics, structures of resistance, and critical approaches to thinking through the present indicate that it is time to vigorously confront the ethical questions at the heart of latin american cultural studies as a first step in our theories and practice. This essay argues that a turn to ethics, especially one that derives from a critique of neoliberal biopolitics, reveals a need to move from an emphasis on the location of culture to the ethics of culture. The essay begins by tracing features of this newest phase in latin american cultural studies.

Whether we mark its shift along with john beverley after 9/11 or whether we trace the current moment to the new millennium, it is clear that some of the critical categories that previously shaped the field no longer obtain in an era of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and shifting notions of sovereignty. I then consider the role that ethics can play in reformulating the debates over identity politics, cultural rights, and struggles for recognition and redistribution. The third section turns to the overdetermined nature of cultural location and asks why location persists in framing so much of the critical discourse about globalization and culture. Despite the fact that much of the local versus global debate has been problematized and discredited, it remains the case that geographical framing of cultural origins continues to be one of the key dynamics at play, even if those frames are understood to be hybrid, glocal, or transterritorial. writing in 1993, fred jameson declared that cultural studies was constituted more by desire than by actual practice. That desire, he explained, had two realms: the first was to be politically relevant and the second was to have an impact on disciplinary knowledge. 1 those twin gestures―to influence political life and to change the ways we think about it―have also been central to latin american cultural studies. Considering it from the perspective of latinamericanism, john beverley puts it simply: ldquo beyond our differences, we share a desire for cultural democratization and social justice rdquo 21.

The trouble starts, though, when we consider the right ways to approach these questions. At times the debates among cultural studies scholars over how best to do the work of the field has overshadowed, if not overtaken, the work itself. Abril trigo maps these developments in his piece on the ldquo practices and polemics rdquo of latin american cultural studies in the 1990s, explaining that ideological disagreements and critical oppositions very nearly imploded the entire field 362.

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These ideological battles have been especially intense since the 1990s brought postcolonial, poststructural, and deconstructive criticism into conversation with the more traditional left work of cultural studies. But as paul smith points out in his introduction to the edited volume renewing cultural studies, the field has also―always had―an ideology and ethos 1. What rsquo s of interest here is the fact that while much has been written about the ideologies of cultural studies, both latin american and otherwise, less attention has focused on its ethics.

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There are reasons this has been so some of which i will elaborate on below , but shifts in global power dynamics, structures of resistance, and critical approaches to thinking through the present indicate that it is time to vigorously confront the ethical questions at the heart of latin american cultural studies as a first step in our theories and practice. 2 what i hope to show is that a turn to ethics, especially one that derives from a critique of neoliberal biopolitics, reveals a need to move from an emphasis on the location of culture to the ethics of culture. After a period of much needed questioning of epistemic frameworks and of ideas often negatively associated with enlightenment ideologies, we can note today a return to the discourses of justice, rights, remedies, and ethics, since these put the question of how best to achieve social transformation at the heart of critical work. Every critical position connected with cultural studies has its own ethics, but the presence of ethical agendas was often subtended to other more visible markers of cultural advocacy such as those associated with identity categories. The problem is that when one advocates for identity politics without making the ethics of such a move apparent, the position eventually loses its ethical ground.

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To put it in stark terms, multiculturalism without the ethical push for recognition of the unjustly disenfranchised can lead to arguments about the need to protect neo nazi culture. Similarly, a defense of the ldquo local rdquo without an ethical argument about why such a defense is important for a just society and without an explanation of how one determines which local cultures to preserve can unwittingly lead to policies that justify the protection of us culture in free trade agreements. Epistemic and ontological claims or more precisely anti epistemic and anti ontological claims have been made over ethical ones despite the fact that those gestures carry their own implicit ethical imperatives. But, as i rsquo ll explain in more detail, the latency of these corollary ethical positions did more than hide them: in some cases it erased them, allowing them to be too easily coopted into reactionary practices that were all too eager to take advantage of an ethical void. As george y dice explains, ldquo cultural analysis necessarily entails taking a position even in those cases where the writer seeks objectivity or transcendence rdquo 38. In contrast to claims that position taking leads to normativity, he suggests a foucauldian version of ethics where what is sought is an ethical basis for practice. Following y dice i would add that the new era in biopolitics calls for a move beyond previous approaches to ethics that were centered on such notions as human autonomy and reason.