Deductivism In Popular Culture

García-Canclin interrogates how could be possible that popular cultures have been excluded from research on hegemony and state, social change, and development in a continent in which masses have been decisive in revolutions.
Two crisis have lead to study popular cultures: first, the crisis of hegemony and the epistemological crisis. “The exhaustion of economistic paradigms that fail to account for the cultural bases of power, and the non-economic necessities that mobilize peoples” (p. 467).
García-Canclini identifies two main movements that historically have been the main frames to analyzes Latin America: Deductivism and inductivism. The first one refers to major social actors and “attributed the exclusive possesion of power to them […] it
Research in communication and culture in Latin America, says García-Canclini, must grasp the three processes through which pouplar cultures constitute themselves: a) the unequal appropriation of eocnomic and cultural goods; b) the characteristic elaboration of their conditions of life and the specific satisfaction of their needs; c) the conflictual interaction of the popular and hegemonic classes for the appropriation of goods, and the exchanges that coutnerbalance conflicts and renew interaction.
Among the further theoretical challenges pointed out by Garcia-Canclini, I would like to highlight the need “to elaborate, well beyond the Marxist conception of consciousness as reflection and the behaviourist stimulus-response scheme, a theory of how hegemony becomes rooted in everyday life, interiorizing social structures in subjects, converting them into unconscious dispositions, basic schemes of perceptoin, thought, and action, habitus (as Bourdieu put it) that organize the needs of subjects so that they might be congruent with social reprodution (p.