Culture, Art, and Literature in Chile

Chile has been under military authoritarian rule since 1973. During this time, new cultural expressions, both rich and complex, have appeared. Now, after 15 years, these developments can be evaluated from a broad perspective' and a synthesis can be offered. The present work is an interdisciplinary approach that examines some aspects of high, formal, or learned culture. In Chile, as in any other national case, cultural production implies a specific, professional, and autonomous field. The results of this research are presented and organized in different artistic areas that are to be understood as relatively autonomous fields within a larger social and cultural context. Each artistic area exhibits characteristic modes of production, exchange, and consumption of specific meanings.2 Culture is understood here as a continuous production of meaning by means of human activity. The symbolic levels of any society are constituted by a set of semiautonomous cultural fields that are nevertheless in interaction with each other. The actual agents of these cultural areas are the intellectuals who set in motion diverse institutions by means of communicational processes in which cultural and aesthetic signs are produced, exchanged, and consumed.3 Consequently, culture is defined here as a multidimensional phenomenon, as a way of life of a people, and as complex communication processes. There is no social experience outside the universe or domain of culture. Each national culture is a system of signifying systems.made up of several social codes containing already accumulated data. This polyphony of sign systems organizes the world for people. Culture, the collective self of a community, its social identity, is in a constant process of articulation and disarticulation. It functions as a multiple structure, a dynamic polyglotism in which each field (theater, painting, music, fiction, poetry) contains different modes of cultural and artistic production. Such is the case in today's Chilean social formation.4

Economic history · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · History

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