Hybridity and Inequality

――Culture and Society in the Theory of Néstor García Canclini――

Abstract

This paper examines Néstor García Canclini’s synthesis of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction. My aim is to clarify the relationship between hybridity and socio-cultural inequality central to his theory of hybridity.In the first section, I briefly touch upon the criticisms against his theory of hybridity in general and García Canclini’s conception of it in particular. By doing this, I set my goal in this paper as above. In the second section, I examine his definition of popular cultures and find ambiguity in that. In this examination, it becomes clear that there is logical interdependence between this ambiguity and hybridity. By being transmuted into hybridity, the ambiguity of popular cultures becomes the potential for cultural transformation. In the third section, I discuss how ambiguity and multiplicity of popular subjects are drawn from Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In the fourth section, I demonstrate how Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus are synthesized in García Canclini’s theory. By this synthesis, contingency and indeterminacy inherit in practices of consumption and situations where a given practice is conducted are transmuted into the structural capacity for transformation. In the fifth section, I examine how the theories of hegemony and reproduction are restructured by being put onto the context of the popular cultures in Latin America. This theoretical restructuring clarifies transforming capacity of the popular cultures. In the sixth section, I show how the relationship between culture and society is redefined by this synthesis between hegemony and reproduction. The theory of hegemony as well as that of reproduction reformulates the link between culture and society. The synthesis of these two in García Canclini’s theory contributes to locating potentiality of social transformation in everyday practices.