The common concern of these essays is with the aspects of Latin American society and culture that transcend political boundaries. Charles Wagley, who is Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies and Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, conceives of Latin America “as a broad cultural sphere set off in many ways from the Anglo-American culture sphere with which it shares the new world” (p. vi). The seven essays which comprise the book deal with both the defining and the divergent aspects of this cultural sphere.
The pièce de resistance of the collection, at least for general readers, is “An Introduction to Latin American Culture,” which appears as Chapter II. Originally prepared in 1953 as a training document for the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State, it became a classic of sorts even before it was published in printed form. Wagley covers so much territory (both geographic and topical) in so few pages with so little distortion or superficiality that his lucid essay can elicit only admiration from those familiar with the enormous difficulties of his task.
His introductory chapter, “A Framework for Latin American Culture,” is a more formal attempt to organize the topics which he had treated discursively in the earlier paper. As the common denominator of Latin American culture he poses a set of “ideal patterns” which are essentially broadly shared conceptions of how social institutions should be organized and function as well as how people should behave in given situations. Although these ideal patterns are to be found throughout Latin American culture, there are obvious variations. These variations are partly regional, but they are also reflections of subcultures to be found within even relatively small communities.
In his third chapter Wagley offers a tentative taxonomy of Latin American subcultures, identifying nine major categories and briefly describing each one. The fourth chapter elaborates one of the nine types, “The Peasant.”
In the fifth chapter, which reproduces his familiar essay, “The Concept of Social Race,” the limitations of his typology become apparent. For while Wagley correctly points out that races in Latin America are essentially sociocultural units, his racial categories do not fit neatly into the subcultural categories which he has previously defined. This, however, does not detract from the basic excellence of his discussion of social race and its implications for understanding the complex interpersonal relations of Latin American society.
A sixth chapter, on kinship relations in Brazil, is less useful to the general reader and probably not very informative for the specialist either. In the final essay, entitled “The Dilemma of the Middle Class,” Wagley returns to a more general theme. Actually he presents not one but a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas. In essence these involve the implementation of middle-class democratic ideals to improve the lot of the lower classes at the risk of losing newly-won social recognition. Wagley believes that, forced to a choice, most of the middle class will opt for status preservation. If accurate—as cited evidence suggests that it is—his view supports his basic thesis about the tenacity of traditional ways in the face of fundamental social and economic change.