Versión español

Portada Puerto Rico en el mundo

The purpose of this publication is to examine Puerto Rico''s society and culture in the context of today''s world trends. By taking into consid­eration global affairs and long term tendencies, we also wish to abandon our isolation, nurtured in the past by the false idea that "things are different here", an attitude that historically stems from the experience of depen­dency and an overall sentiment of collective insufficiency.

Some articles, therefore, fo­cus on world affairs and how they impact our institutions, while others describe local situ­ations and trends with a critical perspective. The collection is divided into five major themes. The first section deals with so­ciety, recognizing common areas of social and anthropological research, such as demograph­ics, migration, the economy, crime, urbanism, labor, family and gender relations, identities and world views. This section ends with a glance at the issue of the environment, recognizing its centrality in today''s world.

In the following section, glo­balization receives special at­tention because of its dominant historical weight. A difference is established between globaliza­tion as a cultural and informa­tion phenomenon brought about by new technologies and globalization as a particular way of organizing the world economy, based on a prevailing conserva­tive neo-liberal ideology.

Politics follows as the next section. The editors considered it necessary to include in this section a glossary of political terms which are commonly used with faulty precision. For the survival of democracy''s logic, we need to increase the func­tion and relevance of debate in the public sphere. Real com­munication based on commonly accepted terms and concepts is necessary in order to navigate in the whirlpool of everyday media and political parties'' discourses. The section also establishes the difference between the political, understood here as the fundamental and conjunctural affairs of the polis, and the term poli­tics, meaning matters pertaining to electoral campaigns and the overall struggle for the control and administration of State in­stitutions.

A dossier on the contempo­rary antimony of left and right, as it applies to global affairs closes the political section. We suppose that identities based on alternate social visions, shared by the rest of the world, provide a deeper sense of political identity than local issues, such as, the "status issue," in our case.

A thematically diverse sec­tion on education and culture closes the book. The university as an institution is examined in its postmodern context and an interesting proposal of reform is offered as a means of re­stating its primary social value. Another article examines the contradictions of educational ideals today. The underlying theme is that the social vision of education is more institutionally relevant than its technical and operational functions.