Néstor García Canclini

Néstor García Canclini (born 1939) is an Argentine-born academic and anthropologist known for his theorization of the concept of "hybridity." García Canclini was born December 1, 1939 in La Plata, Argentina. Three years after receiving his PhD in philosophy at the University of La Plata in 1975, thanks to a scholarship awarded from CONICET (The National Scientific and Technical Research Council), García Canclini also received another PhD in philosophy from the Paris Nanterre University. He taught at the University of La Plata between 1966 and 1975 and at the University of Buenos Aires in 1974 and 1975. Throughout his academic career he has also served as a visiting professor at University of Naples, UT Austin, Stanford University, University of Barcelona and São Paulo. Since 1990 García Canclini has been working as a professor and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City and until 2007 he directed the university’s program studies on urban culture. He is also a researcher emeritus of the National System of Investigators under the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt) of Mexico. In the text Comunicación y consumo en tiempos neoconservadores (Communication and Consumerism in Neoconservative Times), the theorist affirms that communications research, centered in the social sciences, has made areas of Latin American cultural development visible, in which the relationship between consumerism and citizenship is established. Consumerism, a product of globalization, has generated a new conception of the citizen, while the quantity of goods that a person can acquire determines the social status that they have and therefore the role of the common citizen, in terms of political participation (mainly) depends on how the consumer is. The principal cause of the aforementioned phenomenon is globalization. For Canclini, this concept does not have its own definition, rather, it depends on the circumstances and the contexts which are presented.