Culture in Action: Nicaragua's Revolutionary Identities Reconsidered

Rather than assume revolutionary subjectivity during insurrectionary conditions as an ideological historical given, I begin my inquiry into revolutionary action by considering the "contextual point" from the actual participants. "Culture in Action" challenges the notion that revolutionary actors are ipso facto ideologically defined during pre-overthrow conditions. Building on the social movement, revolution, and other pertinent literature as well as using interview data, secondary sources, and historical analysis, I demonstrate that the majority of Sandinista sympathizers were able to transform their social-political reality, not through Marxist-like ideology, but through the radical use of pre-existing idiomatic currencies, with Christian idioms and folkloric Sandinismo as the central vocabularies that helped embodied revolutionary subjecthoods. The piece seeks to shed light on the historico-cultural conditions within which revolutionary actors are constituted, and as such sets out to demonstrate the disruptive potential of culture. An attempt is also made to explore the relationship between idiom and ideology.