Culture
Besides languages and colonial heritage, the states of the Southern Cone share some common cultural traits such as high football popularity and relatively good performance in that sport. Argentina and Uruguay have both won the FIFA World Cup twice, and Brazil five times; they are the only national teams outside Europe to have won the cup. Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay have all hosted the World Cup.
Other cultural expressions associated with the Southern Cone is the social and culinary practice of the asado barbecue. The asado developed from the horsemen and cattle culture of the region, more specifically from the gauchos of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (and southern Chile) and the huasos of Chile. In the Southern Cone horsemen are considered figures of national identity and are as such embodied in the epic poem MartÃn Fierro. Mate is popular throughout the Southern Cone, especially in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. In Chile mate is popular in the southern regions and in rural areas of south-central Chile.
In the countries of the Southern Cone, 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants have had strong influence on the countries' culture, social life and politics.
Read more about this topic: Southern Cone
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)
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“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)