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Reviewed by:
  • Cultura de masas, reforma y nacionalismo en Chile 1910-1931
  • J. Pablo Silva
Cultura de masas, reforma y nacionalismo en Chile 1910-1931. By Stefan Rinke. Santiago: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, 2002. Pp. 174. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography.

This collection of essays is the fruit of tremendous research. Stefan Rinke has reviewed a wide range of primary and secondary sources in order to compile what he calls "a first approximation and basic information" on the topic of "sociocultural change in Chile" (p. 30). Most scholars of Chile would agree with him that nationalism, reform, and mass culture were all central elements of the sociocultural change that took place from 1910 to 1931. And Rinke does an effective job of summarizing the key events and intellectual currents in these three fields. Indeed, the book is filled with interesting observations and anecdotes and draws effectively on the existing literature. But the book coyly refuses to draw the separate threads together and reach a new synthesis.

As his title implies, the work is divided into three parts with two essays each on mass culture, reform, and nationalism. The first essay is a somewhat scattered review of different facets of urban life including media, consumption, popular entertainment, and construction and urban planning. The second essay provides a fascinating overview of movies and the movie business in Chile. This chapter offers the book's most original contributions and to my knowledge represents the most accessible and thorough statement on the topic. In Part II, the book presents a chapter on employer paternalism and employee resistance in the mining sector, followed by a chapter on urban reform movements including the women's movement, temperance movement, and movements for health and sanitation. In the last part of the book, Rinke has a chapter on the competing intellectual discourses on Chilean identity and another chapter on economic nationalism. Although these essays on nationalism draw heavily on earlier works, they do offer a systematic comparison of the different intellectual currents that made up the debate over Chilean nationalism at the time.

Overall, Rinke's message seems to be that in this period Chilean modernist ambitions did not play out in the way that intellectuals and politicians had hoped. Beyond that, Rinke seems content to provide a set of parallel narratives. Within these narratives he amasses a lot of interesting detail, and future students of Chilean nationalism and movie culture would do well to start with those chapters of this book. But [End Page 174] given Rinke's obvious mastery of the material, one could have hoped for a bit more. Although I was willing to believe that all these narratives were interrelated and mutually reinforcing, I would have appreciated some specifics on the relations between the different spheres of nationalism, social reform, and mass culture. Rinke could have clarified his own position by more clearly situating himself within debates in the secondary literature.

J. Pablo Silva
Grinnell College
Grinnell, Iowa
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