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Cultural Agency in the Americas

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The Americas is mostly Central and South America where as in Bogota, Columbia, "no one asks what 'cultural agency' is." "The concept resonates with a variety of public practices that link creativity with social contributions." As the editor and authors of the 16 articles, most of whom are university anthropologists, approach the topic, the "link" is between scholarship and society. Scholarship takes on a social dimension, bringing benefits to the members of society. The methodology, subject matter, and intellectual character of scholarship bound with a notion of the public good is able to help overcome the traumas of the past, build bridges between antagonistic social groups, and implement performances and other activities having a part in developing a community. Chapter titles indicate the novel, imaginative, and beneficial forms "cultural agency" can take--e. g., "A City [Mexico City] That Improvises Its Globalization; Tradition, Transnationalism, and Gender in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble [a local religion]; The Cultural Agency of Wounded Bodies Politic: Ethnicity and Gender as Prosthetic Support in Postwar Guatemala. The collected pieces provide a sampling of the especially vibrant, generous, and hopeful cultural agency--which the older term social activism refers to to some extent--occurring in heterogeneous Latin American cultures seeking new social forms in the ambiance of postmodernism.