Cultural Sociology in Mexico: Meaning-Making as Hybridization, Power, and Cultural Structure

Abstract

This article analyzes how, at a very early stage, Mexican cultural sociologists explained meaning-making processes using a set of factors external to the cultural sphere and how, more recently, they have emphasized that such meaning-making processes have analytical autonomy. Mexican cultural sociology is marked by a dominant model based on the works of Gramsci, Bourdieu, and the Birmingham School that was built in the late 1970s; this model was derived from the analysis of cultural consumption and reached the peak of its development in the 1990s with the concept of cultural hybridization and efforts to introduce semiotics into cultural interpretation. At the beginning of the 21st century, decolonial theory and the ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology opened new avenues of reflection in Mexican cultural sociology.