Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain

Download or read book Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain written by Laura Desfor Edles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the role of culture in social change and the Spanish transition to democracy after Franco. Laura Desfor Edles takes a distinctively culturalist approach to the 'strategy of consensus' deployed by the Spanish elite and uses systematic textual interpretation (with a particular focus on Spanish newspapers) to show how a new symbolic framework emerged in post-Franco Spain which enabled the resolution of specific events critical to the success of the transition. In addition to uncovering underlying processes of symbolization, she shows that politico-historical transitions can themselves be understood as ritual processes, involving as they do phases and symbols of separation, liminality and re-aggregation.