Social Movements in Latin America: The Cultural Dimension

This chapter sets out to warn against an overstating of the exploratory potential of “culture” to account for social movement developments, both through attributing causal effects to culture or through a reification and homogenization of culture. Subsequently, three modes in which culture should be studied in social movement research are addressed: (1) culture as an overarching, partially shared and partially subconscious set of practices and routines that orient both contenders and authorities; even if it is often hard to point down the ways such orienting effects transpire; (2) culture—often accused of being an inequality-reproducing institutionalized routine– as the issue the social movement is addressing and criticizing, like in the case of gender inequalities, theocracies, or elitism; and (3) finally the culture the movements attempts to embody and broadcast: a critical, liberating or gratifying alternative culture they actually practice in the movement form and operations. The conclusion highlights the need for cautious analyzes as culture is hardly ever the demonstrable cause for things and, moreover, usually is ambiguous, contested, and only researchable in concrete, partial instances and never as the abstraction shorthanded coined as a specific social configurations’ “culture.”