Abstract
For those of us who weathered the historical experience of populism, expressions such as “popular culture” and “culture of the people” provoke a certain distrust and a vague sense of uneasiness. We must bear in mind, however, that these reactions are born from the memory of the political context in which those expressions were abundantly employed. In all of its manifestations, paternalistic or forceful, populism is a politics of manipulating the masses who are attributed with a passivity, immaturity, disorganization and consequently, with a mixture of innocence and violence, justifying the need to educate and control them so that they may appear “correctly” on the stage of history. The populist is obliged to recognize the reality of a crude culture deemed “popular” while also valuing it both positively (as the basis of political and social practices) and negatively (as the bearer of those attributes that were imposed upon the masses). This ambiguity produces the image of an ideal popular culture (either in the sense of an idea to be realized or in the sense of a model to be followed) whose implementation will depend upon the existence of an enlightened vanguard committed to the project of enlightening the people. This vanguardist and unconsciously authoritarian form of enlightenment carries with it an instrumental idea of culture and the people,1 whose most refined expression appears in the 1962 manifesto of the Center of Popular Culture.2
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Notes
Regarding this point, these works were particularly valuable: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1976);
Verena M. Alier, “Enxada e voto,” Ospartidos politicos e as eleições no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra/Cebrap, 1975);
Lucio Kowarik, “Usos e abusos: reflexões sobre as metamorfoses do trabalho,” Cidade—Usos e abusos (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1978).
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970).
Luiz Augusto Milanesi, O paraíso via Embratel (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1978);
Ecléa Bosi, Leituras de operárias (Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes, 1972).
Aracky Martins Rodrigues, Operário, operária (São Paulo: Sãmbolo, 1978);
Eduardo Hoornaert, “Folclore é invenção de policiais,” Arte popular e dominação (São Paulo: Alternativa, 1978);
Maria Conceição de Incão e Mello, Os bôias-frias, acumulação e miséria, (Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes, 1976).
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Work (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Roberto Romano da Silva, Brasil. Igreja contra estado (São Paulo: Ed. Kairos, 1979).
Oscar Lewis, Five Families. Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians. A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959), 82.
Ecléa Bosi, Memória e sociedade. Lembranças de velhos (Sço Paulo: Taq. Ed., 1979).
Juan Martinez Alier, Notas sobre el franquismo, Barcelona University Working Papers (1978), 30–32.
See also Michael Hall, Immigration and the Early Working Class (Jahrbuch für Geschichte, 1975).
Gérard Lebrun, La patience du concept (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 43.
Maria Sylvia Carvalho Franco, Homens livres na ordern escravocrata (São Paulo: IEB/USP, 1969), 60.
Cândido Procópio de Camargo, Católicos, protestantes, espiritas (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1973), 65.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), preface.
Juana Elbein, O nagâ e a morte (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1976), 44.
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© 2011 Marilena Chauí
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Chauí, M. (2011). Notes on Popular Culture. In: Between Conformity and Resistance. Theory in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118492_10
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