A Brief Introduction

This paper traces the historical roots of the concept of "transculturation" since the pre-Columbian period, noting its emergence as a product of the multi-ethnic mestizo social reality in Latin America, with manifestations in economic, political, literary, and artistic dimensions of national identity construction. Although the concept was not formally named until the twentieth century, its theoretical development underwent three stages: the conceptual inception in Caribbean anthropology of the 1940s, the conceptual migration in Latin American narrative literary studies during the 1970s and 1980s, and the conceptual reconstruction in global cultural studies of the 1990s. Despite the continuous expansion of geographical references and disciplinary genealogies, the search for autonomous expression of Latin American multi-ethnic subjectivity has remained its core motivation. The inherent complexity, contradictoriness, and high coupling with specific contexts of this concept have led to generalized misuses in Chinese academia, such as conflating it with "interculturality" and applying it without proper definition; therefore, this paper systematically reviews the concept according to the three-stage chronological sequence and prospects recent research trends.

Literature Review

This section traces the academic genealogy of the concept of "transculturation" and its theoretical extensions. In the 1940s, Cuban anthropologist Ortiz coined the term "transculturation" in *Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar*, replacing the dominant "acculturation" concept in North American academia. Ortiz criticized the latter for its implicit ethnocentric tendency and emphasis on unidirectional cultural submission; his proposed "transculturation" precisely captured the complexity and bidirectionality of cultural transformation in multi-ethnic mestizo societies in Cuba and the Caribbean. This process comprises three stages: the loss of original culture or "deculturation," the acquisition of foreign cultures, and the resulting "neoculturation." Ortiz employed personification rhetoric to construct the economic counterpoint of tobacco and sugar, revealing how the production modes represented by these two crops profoundly shaped Cuban national history, and through the concept of "counterpoint"—a musical and poetic notion—established a trans-temporal resonance between the theory of transculturation and Bakhtin's dialogism.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Uruguayan critic Rama systematically introduced the theory of transculturation into Latin American narrative literary studies, proposing the concept of "narrative transculturation." Building upon Ortiz, he supplemented "selectivity" as a core mechanism, emphasizing the agency of cultural subjects in discerning and transforming beneficial elements from internal and external cultural resources, with particular attention to redeeming original cultural elements obscured by dominant cultures. Rama took representative writers of the "Boom" period such as Rulfo, Rosa, Arguedas, and García Márquez as examples, demonstrating how they employed Western modern novelistic techniques to return to regional cultural roots, organically transforming "hinterland" cultural elements such as indigenous languages, oral traditions, and folk beliefs into an aesthetics of peripheral modernity that critically engaged with central modernization discourses. This theoretical construction both continued Ortiz's critique of the colonial ideology of Western anthropology and, within the Cold War context and the tide of dependency theory, provided a methodological path for the construction of Latin American literary subjectivity.

Conclusion

This paper traces the three-stage evolution of the concept of "transculturation" from Ortiz's anthropological origination in the 1940s, through Rama's literary theoretical transformation in the Cold War context of the 1970s and 1980s, to the disciplinary debates and transnational dialogues in the context of globalization at the end of the twentieth century, and elaborates its new developments under the "Global South" research framework in the twenty-first century: its incorporation into critical studies of neoliberal governmentality, its fusion with the "material turn" to form "transculturation materialism," and its expansion to cross-media studies in visual arts and architecture. Finally, it emphasizes that the application of this concept must be combined with specific historical stages and theoretical contexts, grasping its complexity, contradictoriness, and openness.