Abstract

The main goal of this article is to demonstrate the canonical character acquired by the "chingana" as an object of academic study in the historiography of Chilean music and musicology in recent decades. I aim to highlight the work carried out by a group of historians of culture and mentalities on the popular culture of Santiago of the 19th century, but also to the call the attention about other spaces -similar to chingana- not included in history due to the lack of integration of a relational space theory. The text is organized in four parts. First, I explain the consolidation of the chingana as an object of academic study. In the second, I analyze the way in which this place has become a musical and historical canon and the reasons that could explain this phenomenon (information in archives, legal control and taxation, and the absence of theories of space). In the third part, I offer preliminary ideas about which places would be postponed by historiography and musicology, installing some concepts that may be useful to examine the spatial dimension of culture, such as "place" and "sense of place". In the conclusions I synthesize some of the main ideas and establish the need to avoid a "monospatialized hermeneutics" of place in the study of public entertainment. For this I propose the analysis of entertainment spaces understood as "circuits of culture" and not as isolated territories of communicative expression and art.