ABSTRACT
Through a Colombian novel, I lay out the five principles for cultural analysis that are most important to distinguish the approach from “cultural studies” and from any of the participating disciplines. The two most crucial ones are interdisciplinarity and a temporality explained through the metaphor of the octopus, with tentacles going in all directions, rather than the orthodox linear chronology. Another key difference is the close analysis of the cultural artifacts we study. An anchoring in the sociocultural environment from which the cultural objects emerged, but in which they function in the present, is also important—as is a theoretical framing where theory is not a bossy master discourse but an interlocutor in the conversation between object, analyst, and theory.
