Heterotopic spaces of sociability: some cases for understanding the political culture of the elites in Colombia, 1930-1945

This article analyses the spaces of sociability of the Colombian liberal elites during the Liberal Republic, such as clubs, cafes and the so-called casas liberales, frequented by actors linked to and recognised as circles of power, which developed and produced alliances and conflicts. These were spaces where decisions could be made or issues put on the public agenda in the context of mass society, the friction between tradition and modernity, or the discourses of the conservative, socialist or liberal-capitalist order. The observation of these spaces allows us to locate centralities, connections, patterns or mechanisms of selection and linkage, as well as of control of opinion and political culture of the time, decentring our gaze from the traditional ways of seeing the political, and at the same time, proposing it as part of a trialectic between society, time and space.