Abstract

VILLAGRAN, Andrea Jimena  and  LOPEZ, Irene. Serenade to Cafayate: “A Gift to the People” ” in the Transformation Process of the Traditional Physiognomy. Trab. soc. [online]. 2017, n.29, pp.223-247. ISSN 1514-6871.

La Serenata a Cafayate (Serenade to Cafayate), held since 1974 up to this date, is tackled in this work as an event with enormous analytical potential, inasmuch as investigating about it raises different questions and enables the exploration of multiple dimensions. These dimensions refer to the spheres of work, of social relationships, of celebrations, and the senses they concentrate. Taking into consideration the perspective offered by the social exchange theory, as well as the concepts of total social fact and seasonal variation of M. Mauss, the Serenade can be understood -beyond its celebratory and folkloric show nature- as part of a complex structure of transformations occurring in a context of productive restructuring and labor organization which impact on the diverse spheres of life and, mainly, in the way the relationships between employer-landowners and employees-farm worker are established. Within the framework of that process, the exhaustion of a “traditional system” of interrelation becomes evident and a progressive redefinition of social status takes places along with a role reconfiguration. The article shows a series of significant displacements on the social, economic, and cultural orders since the Serenade concentrates and reframes a set of practices which precedes it, developed in private spheres, within the farms and in forums common to the elite, towards a space that is becoming public at the same time that a collective subject, the “people”, is formed. It is for this collective subject that the show is held, in the sense of a “gift”.

Keywords : Event; Social processes; Landowners and farm workers; "Gift".

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