ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the meanings of cultural policies in Latin America in the past twenty-five years. It explains the specificity of cultural policies in Latin America, that is, how the circulation of ideas, regional processes, and governmental positions on the state and its role in the cultural realm affected the shape and nature of cultural policies. While the economic and institutional model for Latin American cultural policies in the 1960s came from France and Spain, with a strong association of culture, politics, and democratic transition; the 1990s model came from Britain and the United States, countries in which cultural activity is based on private initiative and sponsoring, instead of state funding. The chapter summarizes some of the most important contributions to the study of cultural policies and the creation of knowledge, concrete policies, and spaces of professional training made by authors working within Latin American cultural studies.
