Romana Falcón

Rituals, rules and the attempt to dominate Porfirian Mexico

Abstract Like many general concepts in social science, popular culture is particularly difficult to define. Just dealing with the term of culture alone, Kroeber and Kluckhohn cite over a hundred definitions ranging from ‘ideas in mind’ to ‘a psychic defense mechanism’.1 From an anthropological point of view it has been conceived as ‘a system of shared meanings, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artifacts) in which they are embodied’.