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The Misteri or Festa d'Elx is the main festival of a town (Elche). Although it has survived from the Middle Ages, it was patrimonialised twice in seventy years to be preserved in a historical context of profound changes. Nowadays, the Misteri still is represented, nevertheless, the attitude of the local population towards this Festival shows a polarization that ranges from the indifference of the majority to the enthusiasm of a minority, committed to its maintenance and continuity. In other words, new ways of relating to the Festa have been generated, different from the traditional ones, which implies new cultural meanings. In this paper, we intend to point out these new meanings about this patrimonialised festival. To do this, we analyse discourses and practices of local social agents, especially those involved in their maintenance and safeguarding. We relate them to the historical context that gives them meaning and that is characterized by permanent sociocultural change, and by the influence of globalizing factors at the local level, such as tourism and UNESCO distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, our goal is to analyze trap music and its development in Spain in recent years. We try to understand its impact among young people, identifying their ethics and aesthetics and finding out how they are perceived among their consumers. Understanding youth cultures as metaphors for social and political changes, we study Spanish trap to find out what it tells us about our society and its recent transformations. Methodologically, we use the analysis of songs and videoclips, we develop interviews and focus groups with young consumers, trappers and producers, and we study representative trapper biographies. Appeared during the crisis that began in 2008 in impoverished areas as a song of the excluded and depoliticized youth, trap will become popular reflecting the concerns of a precarious youth. Trap, we conclude, is a contradictory genre that reproduces the logic of capitalism while opening up spaces for its response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the observable consequences of the social and cultural change among the Huaorani (an Amerindian people from the Ecuadorian Amazon contacted in the late 1950s), has been the suicide, which since the beginning of the 21st century has been increasing alarmingly. This article focuses the attention on the case of Epaa, a 28-year-old woman, who unexpectedly and for no apparent reason took her own life away, leaving behind many unknowns. The ethnographic fieldwork on which this research is based lasted two months. Based on the data produced, this paper offers a brief approach to Huaorani suicide in the Toñampari area, to, after that, describe its two central objectives: 1) portray in detail the suicide of Epaa with the versions of the triggering motives; and 2) reflect, from a cultural point of view, on the deep factors that help to understand the protagonist's behavior. The conclusions highlight the practical sense of shamanism as an explanation and the possible influence of words, as an element of contagion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the social and urban changes occurring in a neighborhood in the South Sector of Buenos Aires (Parque de los Patricios). The changes are connected to the construction of a housing complex by a cooperative established though a social political movement of unemployed workers. We explore the struggles for the control of the local urban space, between this political movement and the neighbors who were already living in the neighborhood. We describe the transformation of this urban space from empty space to a resource. We relate such changes to others that have been developing in the city of Buenos Aires during the last decade of the 20th century, such as increased segregation and fragmentation of the social space and the weakening of existing social ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frustrating efforts to analyze music from essentialist points of view have always denied the indispensable influence of multiple mediating factors in musical reception. Music, as an aesthetic artefact, is an exclusively human creation whose relative signification depends on attributions which are external to the piece of art. Many have been the changes observed in the wake of the last decades that have outlined the importance of mediators in analyzing music. From the transposition of the public space of musical reception into a ‘private space’, to the modern incursion of the ‘lone listener’ and the problematization of the technological media implied in the spreading and reproduction of music, many are the relevant aspects to take into account and calibrate the psychosociological and historical phenomenon of the subjective appropriation of music for the current human being. The psychological and social changes experienced by the listener thanks to the everyday use of music in the western world emphasize the necessity to redefine a sociological theory able to bear in mind the mediating factors in analyzing the musical object, without isolating it from the listener, the performer, the instrument of production, the medium, or the particular use made of it. Hence, in this paper we consider suitable for this aim to introduce the constructivist stance made by Antoine Hennion on the relationship between music and the human being as a social and variable, and not aesthetic and static act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]