Resumen de Popular culture and the formation of the working class
Social class is sometimes considered as a mere economic or a political phenomenon. In our research we tried to relate social class with cultural variables. Most notably, our purpose is to show how a particular kind of cultural production "popular culture" affects social and political mobilization of the working class. In this way, we focused our attention in the rural workers of the Left Margin of Guadiana River, in Alentejo. Basically, the research is a qualitative approach to the feelings and subjective apprehensions of those workers and how they interact with their political behaviour. Our hypothesis is that the cultural heritage of these social agents contributed to the development of social and political practices. At the same time, the proper and autonomous production of their own cultural sociabilities induced mental and symbolic frameworks creating a sense of community gathered by common values and beliefs. So, in order to understand some of the past political interventions of Alentejo's working class, we cannot escape to integrate theoretically these most visible phenomena with the correlative cultural background that supports them.
