Download Free Culture And Customs Of Venezuela Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Culture And Customs Of Venezuela and write the review.

Venezuela, one of the least-known countries in Latin America, is brilliantly spotlighted in Culture and Customs of Venezuela. This oil-rich nation sustained a stable democracy until the economic downturn in the 1980s, and changes in the social and political spheres will bring the country under increasing scrutiny from the outside world. Dinneen captures the sharp contrasts and immense variety of modern Venezuela. Students and interested readers will find engaging and authoritative overviews of the land, people, and history; religions; social customs; media; cinema; literature; performing arts; and art and architecture. This work successfully portrays the country's cultural richness and diversity. Influences from the United States are inescapable, especially in Caracas, but many distinctive traditions are continued throughout the country, varying from region to region. Religious rituals and numerous festivals that take place in towns and villages and the vibrant music scene, all major expressions of the nation's social and cultural life, are just some of the highlights found herein. Numerous photos give witness to Venezuela's diverse culture and a chronology, and glossary supplement the text.
Oil has played a major role in Venezuela’s economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring Legacy, Tinker Salas traces the history of the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. He reveals how class ambitions and corporate interests combined to reshape many Venezuelans’ ideas of citizenship. Middle-class Venezuelans embraced the oil industry from the start, anticipating that it would transform the country by introducing modern technology, sparking economic development, and breaking the landed elites’ stranglehold. Eventually Venezuelan employees of the industry found that their benefits, including relatively high salaries, fueled loyalty to the oil companies. That loyalty sometimes trumped allegiance to the nation-state. North American and British petroleum companies, seeking to maintain their stakes in Venezuela, promoted the idea that their interests were synonymous with national development. They set up oil camps—residential communities to house their workers—that brought Venezuelan employees together with workers from the United States and Britain, and eventually with Chinese, West Indian, and Mexican migrants as well. Through the camps, the companies offered not just housing but also schooling, leisure activities, and acculturation into a structured, corporate way of life. Tinker Salas contends that these practices shaped the heart and soul of generations of Venezuelans whom the industry provided with access to a middle-class lifestyle. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.
"Culture and Customs of Venezuela successfully portrays the sharp contrasts and immense variety of modern Venezuela and the country's cultural richness. Influences from the United States are inescapable but many distinctive traditions are continued throughout the country, varying from region to region. Religious rituals and numerous festivals that take place in towns and villages and the vibrant music scene, all major expressions of the nation's social and cultural life, are just some of the highlights found herein. Students and interested readers will find engaging and authoritative overviews of the land, people, and history; religions; social customs; media; cinema; literature; performing arts; and art and architecture."--Jacket.
In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumerculture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.
This book unpacks the links between oil energy, state power, urban space and culture, by looking at the Petro-Socialist Venezuelan oil state. It challenges the disciplinary compartmentalisation of the analysis of the material and cultural effects of oil to demonstrate that within the Petrostate, Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture become indivisible. To this end, it examines how oil is a cultural resource, in addition to a natural resource, implying therefore that struggles over culture implicate oil, and struggles over oil implicate culture. This book develops a story about Venezuela as an oil state and the way it deploys its policies to instrumentalise culture and urban space by examining the way Petro-Socialism manifests in space, how it is imagined in speeches and how it is discursively constructed in adverts. The discussion reveals how a particular culture is privileged by the Venezuela state-owned oil company and its social and cultural branch. The book explores to what effect the state-owned oil company constructs a parallel notion of culture that becomes inextricable from land, akin to a mineral deposit, and tightly controlled by the Petrostate. The book will appeal to researchers who are interested in Resource Management, Environmental Studies, Cultural Studies and Political Geography.
Winner of the 2021 New Voices Book Award by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Exploring the ways in which the development of linguistic practices helped expand national politics in remote, rural areas of Venezuela, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta situates language as a mediating force in the creation of the 'magical state'. Focusing on the Waraos speakers of the Orinoco Delta, this book explores center–periphery dynamics in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic anthropological lens. Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduction' and 'translation', this book combines ethnographic and historical evidence to analyze the ideological mediation and linguistic practices involved in managing a multi-ethnic citizenry in Venezuela. Juan Luis Rodriguez shows how indigenous populations participate in the formation and contestation of state power through daily practices and the use of different speech genres, emphasising the performative and semiotic work required to produce revolutionary subjects. Establishing the centrality of language and semiosis in the constitution of authority and political power, this book moves away from seeing revolution in solely economic or ideological terms. Through the collision between Warao and Spanish, it highlights how language ideologies can exclude or integrate indigenous populations in the public sphere and how they were transformed by Hugo Chavez' revolutionary government to promote loyalty to the regime.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy brings together a variety of perspectives on participation and democracy in Venezuela. An interdisciplinary group of contributors focuses on the everyday lives of Venezuelans, examining the forms of participation that have emerged in communal councils, cultural activities, blogs, community media, and several other forums. The essays validate many of the critiques of democracy under Chávez, as well as much of the praise. They show that while government corporatism and clientelism are constant threats, the forms of political and cultural participation discussed are creating new discourses, networks, and organizational spaces—for better and for worse. With open yet critical minds, the contributors seek to analyze Venezuela’s Bolivarian democratic experience through empirical research. In doing so, they reveal a nuanced process, a richer and more complex one than is conveyed in international journalism and scholarship exclusively focused on the words and actions of Hugo Chávez. Contributors Carolina Acosta-Alzuru Julia Buxton Luis Duno Gottberg Sujatha Fernandes María Pilar García-Guadilla Kirk A. Hawkins Daniel Hellinger Michael E. Johnson Luis E. Lander Margarita López-Maya Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols Coraly Pagan Guillermo Rosas Naomi Schiller David Smilde Alejandro Velasco
In 1935, after the death of dictator General Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela consolidated its position as the world's major oil exporter and began to establish what today is South America's longest-lasting democratic regime. Endowed with the power of state oil wealth, successive presidents appeared as transcendent figures who could magically transform Venezuela into a modern nation. During the 1974-78 oil boom, dazzling development projects promised finally to effect this transformation. Yet now the state must struggle to appease its foreign creditors, counter a declining economy, and contain a discontented citizenry. In critical dialogue with contemporary social theory, Fernando Coronil examines key transformations in Venezuela's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. The result is a timely and compelling historical ethnography of political power at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary reflections on modernity and the state.
Among the top ten oil exporters in the world and a founding member of OPEC, Venezuela currently supplies 11 percent of U.S. crude oil imports. But when the country elected the fiery populist politician Hugo Chavez in 1998, tensions rose with this key trading partner and relations have been strained ever since. In this concise, accessible addition to Oxford's What Everyone Needs to Know® series, Miguel Tinker Salas -- a native of Venezuela who has written extensively about the country -- takes a broadly chronological approach that focuses especially on oil and its effects on Venezuela's politics, economy, culture, and international relations. After an introductory section that discusses the legacy of Spanish colonialism, Tinker Salas explores the "The Era of the Gusher," a period which began with the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century, encompassed the mid-century development and nationalization of the industry, and ended with a change of government in 1989 in response to widespread protests. The third section provides a detailed discussion of Hugo Chavez-his rise to power, his domestic political and economic policies, and his high-profile forays into international relations-as well as surveying the current landscape of Venezuela in the wake of Chavez's death in March 2013. Arranged in a question-and-answer format that allows readers to search topics of particular interest, the book covers questions such as, who is Simón Bolívar and why is he called the George Washington of Latin America? How did the discovery of oil change Venezuela's relationship to the U.S.? What forces where behind the coups of 1992? And how does Venezuela interact with China, Russia, and Iran? Informative, engaging, and written by a leading expert on the country, Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers an authoritative guide to an increasingly important player on the world stage. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
We know where he went, what he wrote, and even what he wore, but what in the world did Christopher Columbus eat? The Renaissance and the age of discovery introduced Europeans to exotic cultures, mores, manners, and ideas. Along with the cross-cultural exchange of Old and New World, East and West, came new foodstuffs, preparations, and flavors. That kitchen revolution led to the development of new utensils and table manners. Some of the impact is still felt—and tasted—today. Giovanni Rebora has crafted an elegant and accessible history filled with fascinating information and illustrations. He discusses the availability of resources, how people kept from starving in the winter, how they farmed, how tastes developed and changed, what the lower classes ate, and what the aristocracy enjoyed. The book is divided into brief chapters covering the history of bread, soups, stuffed pastas, the use of salt, cheese, meat, fish, fruits and vegetables, the arrival of butter, the quest for sugar, new world foods, setting the table, and beverages, including wine and tea. A special appendix, "A Meal with Columbus," includes a mini-anthology of recipes from the countries where he lived: Italy, Portugal, Spain, and England. Entertaining and enlightening, Culture of the Fork will interest scholars of history and gastronomy—and everyone who eats.