Abstract
Just as all the Thursdays of a great part of 2011 in Chile, students from different parts of the country made a massive call to occupy the streets under very popular slogans at that moment: public and high-quality education. In response, the executive hit back with the prohibition of marching in different places of the country, having interesting consequences in Concepción, a city located in the southern centre of Chile. For 12 to 13 hours, an online transmission was started by Chilean students. During the afternoon of that day, Fernando del Rincón, one of the hosts from ‘CNN en español’, initiated a campaign through Twitter to contact the students fortified in the ‘Arco de Medicina’ and achieved a global connection that was projected in the evening of that day to a great part of the planet where they exposed the problems that a great part of the country had lived with, and how the special forces reacted to them. The day closed with cacerolazos (a political protest) in different parts of the country. Youth (homogenized under the concept of students) had placed themselves at the centre; they were struggling for a new metaphor about politics. At the same time, a previous generation put at the centre the research about youth and the different transformations of these actors, the ‘youth question’ appears. This book turns into one of those symptomatic expressions of that intellectual exercise.
‘Metaphors can kill.’ With this sentence, the linguist George Lakoff (1991) analyzes the Persian Gulf War and the metaphoric system behind it. This sentence attempts to present the political capacity of the metaphoric system, and at the same time, gives us a possible reality to be meant openly to us, and interpretable. In addition, Ricoeur (1980) provides the capacity to return intelligible descriptive complexity of the symbolic language. In consequence, it is possible to find in the language the capacity of the metaphor to describe the real world in its unaltered character.
This book, with the title Youths: Metaphors from the Contemporary Chile, is presenting an exercise of total transparency. The recognition of the conflictive character of the understanding of the real world and assuming the need to put forward the approach as a metaphor democratizes the interpretation of this production, and turns over the possibility of a semantic universe once the connotation opens to the reader. And in addition, it proposes an expression of the conceptual first level within the speech of the groups of investigators that ‘proyecto juventudes’ takes part in; therefore, it will be able to understand it like a kind of hidden manifest that reveals its position, facing the object of study.
The first part ‘Otras políticas juveniles: Saberes, iniciativas e instituciones’ (Other youth policies: Knowledges, initiatives and institutions) turns centrally into a moment from introduction and as a conceptual, methodological and academic discussion about youth. It consists of three chapters. The first focuses principally on characterizing the vicissitude of the researches of the youth in Chile, elaborated by the project coordinator Claudio Duarte; the second proposes the complex objective to grant the most enclosed and operating definition of youth (developed by Canales, Ghiardo and Opazo) and finally with Aguilera and Muñoz’s third chapter that is presented as an objective expounding the manner in which the researches of youth have forged interpretations about the relation between politics and youth (including youth social movements) during the last decades.
The second part, ‘Subjetivaciones juveniles contemporaneas: Escolarizaciones, empleo y sexualidades’ (Contemporaries youths subjectification: Enrollments, employment and sexualities), is perceived like a moment for the deep thought and implementation of the political discussion. The development of the public policy requires synthesis like the one brought-up in chapters 4, 5 and 6 that allow clarifying the frame of historic dude, in which the vicissitude of youth in school, labour and sexual space is taking place. Chapter 4 of Walter Molina called ‘Juventudes y procesos de escolarización secundaria en el chile contemporáneo’ (Youths and processes of secondary enrollment in the contemporary Chile) seeks to characterize this group of young people as ‘high school students’, and the obtaining of school credentials, questioning their incidence in the biographies of youth for their inability to grant social integration.
The third part is titled ‘Apropiaciones culturales: Telecomunicaicones y normatividades’ (Cultural appropriations: Telecommunications and normativities) because the centre of their proposal has a fundamentally practical use. It allows to establish a way to interpellate the didactics of young people with cultural consumptions more and more central in their self-defining construction (put forward for Ganter in Chapter 7), with an interesting transition in the media, and with certain values put in tension. In Chapter 8, Zarzuri proposes a research about the generational rupture and the impact of the ample use of media and the internet by a part of the present-day youth, which is interesting to be compared with the work of Sandoval in Chapter 9, where he describes the values of the Chilean youth during the initial decade of the twenty-first century.
This book appeals and invites us, and it is for its metaphoric character that opens and forces us to understand it as a ‘call to the weapons’, where they tell us ‘Youth is a metaphor’, and they deliver the space to capture it, in order to present it, in order to imagine it in the light of the analysis of the socio-cultural changes. Lakoff indicated 25 years ago that metaphors can kill. Starting from this investigation, authors indicate that ‘it can open’.