Abstracts Anthropology

Imágenes e Ideas de Juventud. Genealogía del cuerpo joven en Chile (1906-1990)

by Marcela Eliana Saa Espinoza

The research presented below is framed in the doctoral program in Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and its purpose is to know and genealogically analyze the visuality of the youthful body, through the images of the body represented in magazines, and thereby understand and deepen how the idea of youth was built in Chile during the 20th century (1906-1990). From a genealogical perspective, this thesis set out to investigate and analyze the different conditions of possibility so that the idea of youth could unfold in Chilean culture and society, taking visuality and youth media as the main place of questioning. . Through the study of illustrated magazines about and for youth, I investigated how visual representations were linked to a diversity of knowledge, discourses, images, institutions and different architectures of the cultural world, to propose, dispute and establish certain images of the young body. This research reconstructs fragments of a cultural history about youth, images and the body. I made visible the ways in which the body was presented and represented visually. These youthful bodies were marked by symbolizations, discourses, and images that shaped the edges, horizons, and possibilities of what was expected of young Chileans, and that, in tune with other young people from the continent and the Western world, became visual, mental, cultural and that the hegemonic and alternative media circulated and popularized for almost the entire 20th century. This had the effect of stabilizing the understanding of who young people are and should be. The investigation, therefore, delves into the double possibility of said representation: that of being young, and that of becoming an image.