Abstract
This concluding chapter addresses the scope of a cultural politics that is aware of the challenges we currently face. Instead of being a handicap, the authors believe the diversity of existing definitions and descriptions of the term “culture” opens the possibility of combining the knowledge attained by many disciplines. All aspects of human life are involved in cultural analysis, including life’s biological and ecological foundations. This is a challenge we need to assimilate, supplementing it with the necessary attention to time frames and geocultural units. Multiple temporalities interact with the manifoldness of sociospatial scales producing a great variety of power configurations that need to be explored empirically, particularly in terms of the degree of dispersion and overlap of subjective, economic, cultural and political power.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance, we are thinking of topics like the peculiar coevolution of biology and culture in humans (evolutionary biology: see Pagel); or the intertwining of biology and culture in human behavior (neurobiology: see Sapolsky); or the phenomenon of joint attention and the cultural origins of human cognition (evolutionary anthropology: see Tomasello); or the difference between emotive responses and feelings and their role in cognition and the cultural mind (neuroscience: see Damasio); or the notion of the extended mind (ecological psychology: see Heft); or the concepts of zone of proximal development and cultural affordances or operators (historical-cultural psychology: see Vygotsky and Río); and so on.
- 2.
For instance, the authors surveyed the time scales in history dissertations from the United States between 1920 and 2014 and found the ‘median date range for history dissertations in the 1920s reached as high as eighty years before falling to closer to thirty in the 1960s. It began to rise again in the 1970s, with a peak around sixty in the late 1990s. Only in the last few years has it breached a median of eighty again’ (549–550). As one can see, what Armitage and Guldi mean is that time frames expand and contract in historical research. That is, ‘longue durée’ in the quotation means “long term” and not what Braudel had in mind, which is an interaction between multiple temporalities that ‘fit together’: longue durée , conjoncture and événement (727–728, 749).
- 3.
See the analysis of structural explanations by Rendueles: they shed light on how certain sedimented constraints reduce the possibility of human action (En bruto 60–64).
- 4.
For a couple of excellent examples from the first half of the twentieth century, see Panofsky and Auerbach.
- 5.
See Morgan for an evaluation of the better-known models of world literature.
- 6.
Bod is interested in the methods and materials of disciplines like linguistics, historiography, philology, musicology, art theory and history, logic, rhetoric and poetics.
- 7.
Biomes share similar climate and terrain conditions and they are found in different ecozones; for example, the Mediterranean biome found in different parts of the world. The main point is that biomes generate ‘similar kinds of adaptations in plant and animal species,’ although those plants and animals are specific to the ecozone in which the biome is located (An Ecology of World Literature 25).
- 8.
See Santamaría (26).
- 9.
See Alonso and Ferrnández Rodríguez (56–61).
- 10.
For a more thorough analysis of (neo)idealism, see Rendueles (En bruto 15–53).
- 11.
According to Anderson, Guha’s analysis of power is ‘perhaps the single most striking work ever inspired by Gramsci’ (102).
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Pereira-Zazo, Ó., Torres, S.L. (2019). Conclusion: Toward a New Cultural Politics for Spain. In: Pereira-Zazo, Ó., Torres, S. (eds) Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19435-2_20
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