The field of popular culture is vast, and its boundaries uncertain or contested. It may include traditional beliefs and rituals, as well as modern habits and practices, promulgated through the market and mediated by technology–and often the divide between traditional and modern is unclear or complex. It may include transnational, even global, phenomena, as well as customs or attitudes that come to seem characteristic of particular localities, nations, or regions.
In this course, we try to examine a sampling of specific examples of popular culture of many different types, from a range of Latin American contexts: from Central American folktales to Brazilian football, Peruvian punk to Venezuelan folk religion, Argentine comics to Mexican narcoculture. Our focus is on the contemporary–the twentieth and twenty-first centuries–even as we try to take account of the varied histories that have given rise to the diverse practices that we see.
There is no way a course such as this one could be truly comprehensive, but we also try to approach these varied examples of popular culture from a range of perspectives (anthropological, literary, sociological, political, and so on), which should provide theoretical tools and concepts for thinking about other instances of popular culture that we do not specifically address during the semester.
