Is popular culture merely a process of creating, marketing, and consuming a final product, or is it an expression of the artist's surroundings and an attempt to alter them? Noted Argentine/Mexican anthropologist Nestor Garcia Canclini addresses these questions and more in Transforming Modernity, a translation of Las culturas populares en el capitalismo. Based on fieldwork among the Purepecha of Michoacan, Mexico, some of the most talented artisans of the New World, the book is not so much a work of ethnography as of philosophy--a cultural critique of modernism....