Ciertamente, uno de los aspectos fundamentales en la formación de todas las personas es tener un vínculo estrecho con su cultura y reconocer que ésta es la verdadera matriz de su identidad y de su destino. Esa es la premisa de este interesante libro, basado en un conjunto de conferencias que su autor dictó en diversas universidades de los Estados Unidos, América Central y Sudamérica. Con un estilo claro, el libro indaga en los orígenes más remotos de la cultura iberoamericana y describe cómo estos valores originales han dado forma a las ciudades de Hispanoamérica; a expresiones culturales fundamentales tales como las creencias religiosas, la tradición literaria y artística así como también a distintas formas de gobierno y de organizar el Estado. Sin duda, un libro de enorme interés para los lectores de habla hispana.

"Stimulating, somewhat dated series of essays by a preeminent sociologist 'thinking' about postmodernism in Latin America"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

Examen del encuentro entre Europa y América, y las transformaciones ocurridas mediante un proceso que comenzó con del descubrimiento y continúa hasta el presente siglo XXI. El autor muestra el tejido de las relaciones entre diversos modos de vida, creencias, organizaciones sociales, leyes y costumbres, políticas y economías, que originan así un nuevo modo de civilización Occidental.

The theme of violence is natural to the history of Latin America and, therefore, it is endless in any of its multiple material and symbolic manifestations, from its colonial origins to the present. At a continental level, the praxis and discourse of violence can be traced back to the spread of the colonising voracity that conditioned Latin America within the cultural development of the West, followed by the most recent and subtle forms assumed by state violence, including the instances of imposition of cultural and economic models that, at the different times, radically impacted the Creole and vernacular cultures. Thus, Latin America has historically suffered the consequences of a founding violence which condemned it to a peripheral position in relation to global systems which centres have spread in their corresponding areas of influence, the 'rationality' of their own cultural, political and economic replication. In this way, the social fabric resulting from the colonialist matrix has recorded from the beginning the indelible traces of violence that are displayed both at racial and economic levels, both in terms of gender policies and in terms of the geocultural distribution of power, at all levels. The 'painful Spanish-American republics' of which Martí spoke, have since fought against the normalisation of the violence of exclusion and authoritarianism, the internal misery and imperialistic greed, the cultural colonisation and political actions always condoned by a legitimising rhetoric that the ruling classes wielded in every instance to perpetuate their power. This volume, which compiles papers that were presented and discussed at the Second International Conference on Latin American Cultural Studies to be held at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2000, has as its main focus a specific articulation around the topic of contemporary violence: it analyses the intersections and specific ways in which violence presents itself in the urban centres of Latin America as its main scenario, and the modalities from which the phenomenon of violence is recorded and represented by the mass media, as well as popular culture, art, literature and other forms of literary discourse and 'high culture'.