El culturalismo: atrofia o devastación de lo social

Abstract

Culturalism, already present in the dominant ideology of Cultural Studies, is a complex phenomenon, that views culture at the crossroad of ideological, social, economic and political interests, linking it to present identitary and ethnicist obsessions, as a relativism that pretends to interpret and justify all social facts as a reflection of cultural differences. This article attempts to explain this modern culturalist phenomenology, by showing the manner in which it holds —in a very neo–liberal vein— a vision of culture without society, and even a reduction of the social to the cultural. Such an approach contributes to hide and neutralize the social logic that runs across the modern world. Even though “culturology”, a paranoic discourse about culture has claimed inter-culturality as its main aspiration, it is incapable to understand that such an ideal becomes possible only when the “other” culture has meaning and value for one´s own culture.