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Popular Publics: Street Protest and Plaza Preachers in Caracas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2004

David Smilde
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Abstract

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Classic liberal conceptions of the public sphere generally miscast the public participation of popular sectors in the developing world as premodern, proto-political, or nonrational. The term “popular intellectual” is a useful corrective since it focuses attention on discourses and symbols that are consciously created and endure beyond the individuals and events which put them into play. The term “popular publics” – intentionally organized relational contexts in which specific networks of people from the popular classes seek to bridge to other networks, form coalitions, and expand the influence of their discourse – preserves this emphasis but also changes the unit of analysis from individual or collective actors to relational contexts. Here I use this concept to analyze two cases of popular public participation in late twentieth-century Caracas, Venezuela. In the first case we will look at a street protest, in which dislocated members of the informal economy work to make their private concerns into public issues. In the second case, we will look at plaza services, in which Pentecostal Christians address Venezuela's contemporary social and political reality through an alternative rationality. Each of these cases challenge classic liberal concepts of the public sphere.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 49 , Issue S12 , December 2004 , pp. 179 - 195
Copyright
2004 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Footnotes

This article benefited from presentations at the Culture and Institutions Workshop at the University of Georgia, the 2004 Annual Meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society, as well as comments by, or discussion with, Janise Hurtig, George Philip, Patricia Richards, and Alejandro Velasco. The research on Pentecostals was supported by a US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays fellowship. The research on protest was supported by grants from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires, and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología of Venezuela. Previous analyses of the informal workers' street protest appeared in David Smilde, “Protagonismo Cultural desde la Pobreza: Respuesta a Mikel de Viana”, Revista Venezolana de Economía y Ciencias Sociales, 7 (2001), pp. 45–64; and, Margarita López Maya et al., Protesta y Cultura en Venezuela: Los Marcos de Acción Colectiva en 1999 (Caracas, 2002).