Significaciones imaginarias sobre identidad cultural colombiana de niños y niñas de tercero y cuarto de primaria

Abstract

The cultural identity of a community is those traditions and customs that allow individuals to feel like members of a social group; it is marked by several aspects such as language, beliefs, traditions, and customs, in addition to empowering each individual to build behaviors, attitudes, and practices within the social world that they inhabit with the other members of their community. Cultural identity is transforming to be a construction of a historical nature to the extent that social conditions change and subjects build new significations and imaginaries that, as incessant creations of meaning in society, configure the emergence of new customs and beliefs that overlap, especially by contact with other cultures. Currently, this cultural transformation is carried out in an accelerated way due to the incidence of new technologies and the mass media that have established channels of transmission and vertiginous transformation. In this sense, to understand individuals in their saying and doing within the community, it is necessary to describe, reveal, identify and interpret the imaginary significations that they build on cultural identity and which are currently strongly influenced by contact through networks and the internet with other cultures, which leads to transforming those customs and language initially learned from the family, considered instituted and the foundation of Colombian society; for this reason,this research focuses its interest on interpreting the imaginary significations about the cultural identity of a group of primary school children, from a conceptual commitment of studies on social imaginaries from the sociological perspective, especially from the sociologist and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. For this, a methodological design was built based on interpretive qualitative research assuming phenomenology as a methodological strategy or method, while identity and cultural construction are considered social phenomena. The information collected was systematized considering a group of 15 boys and girls in the third and fourth grades of primary school in an official district school in the neighborhood of Kennedy in Bogotá. The results showed three instituted imaginary significations and two instituting imaginary significations on Colombian cultural identity. The instituted imaginary significations are the name, God, and the musical traditions, and the instituting ones are the emerging musical tastes and peace as an emerging national symbol. It was identified that the children felt nostalgia or joy when remembering cultural traditions transmitted by their parents or grandparents, bringing to their memory family moments where they share experiences that they can only have with loved ones, longing to remember some of these situations. Therefore, analyzing these social imaginary significations allows us to understand society more, giving voice and prominence to childhood.