Pablo Semán

Secularism and liberalism in contemporary Argentina: Neoliberal responses, initiatives, and criticisms of Pope Francis:

The role of Jorge Bergoglio as the head of the Catholic Church has provoked political positioning in Argentina, which reveals new forms of articulation between secularism and politics. While progressive sectors connected to the Kirchnerist government initially viewed Pope Francis and his theology of the people with mistrust, they currently see him as an ally in the defence of social initiatives. From the conservative perspective, the trajectory has been exactly the opposite. Although they initally saw the Pope as an ally to help undermine populism, they soon discovered serious obstacles in the way. As a response, they raised the banner of laïcité and called into question the close relationship between politics and the Catholic Church. In this context, we will analyse the reactions, initiatives, and critical arguments, which surfaced around this limited secularism in political life, the mass media, and public space. In other words, we will observe a displacement in which social conservatism is not necessarily of a Catholic fundamentalist variety, and neoliberalism launches its own secularising tradition.

Rescate y sus consecuencias. Cultura y religión: sólo en singular

The case of evangelical rock provides an example allowing to discern how religious groups affect the cultural sphere. However this discernment is not possible if the particularity, fragmentation and openness characterizing cultures (in this case evangelical and youth cultures) are not taken into account. Within this frame this article shows how an Evangelical Rock Band (Rescate) performs a synthesis between two specific moments: the situation of the evangelical field in Argentina (and especially the contemporary younger generation) and a youth cul¬ture entangled with local versions of rock music and culture. The article concludes that, although unintentionally, and even when a nominalistic reasoning assumes that evangelism can be equated to classical Protestantism, the effectiveness of Rescates’s intervention involves an exercise of inculturation.

Cumbia Villera or the Complex Construction of Masculinity and Femininity in Contemporary Argentina

Since its introduction in the early sixties by groups like Los Wawanco (a group of mostly Colombian and Central American students living in Argentina), Colombian cumbia rapidly became a dance of choice for Argentine popular sectors (an Argentine sociopolitical term that encompasses working-class and lower-middle-class people). Its popularity was particularly marked in Buenos Aires’s suburbs and the suburbs of other major cities of the country, where many of its followers were internal migrants from the countryside.

PIERRE SANCHIS EN LA COYUNTURA DE LAS CIENCIAS SOCIALES DE LA RELIGIÓN

La intervencion de Pierre Sanchis resulta iluminadora por su capacidad de combinar una concepcion abarcativa de un campo de enorme variabilidad del conjunto del panorama emergente, del peso, la consistencia y las relaciones de las heterogeneidades que lo componen. Alli donde elegimos o donde muchas veces se nos impone la disyuncion entre una vision detallada pero descontextualizada del fragmento o una captacion aerea del conjunto, los textos de Sanchis constituyen herramientas heuristicas para aliar la comprension de cada punto a la vision panoramica, pero sutilmente ponderada del plano general.