En el vientre de la ballena

In the belly of the whale is a cultural and literary essay, with an interdisciplinary approach and a humanistic scope. Its author asks an apparently simple question, what is culture? His response, on the other hand, is enormously complex. Starting from a summer dream with a whale, in a moment of the presence of death during the worst of the global pandemic, Diego Moldes, influenced at that moment by reading a text by George Steiner, unravels the mythological symbolism of this animal. His allegories make up a cultural metaphor about the moment in which our culture finds itself, its multiple meanings, its historical genesis and its immediate future. To do this, in the central part of this highly original book, he asks 38 authors from different disciplines, ages, languages ??and nationalities the following: 'What is culture? How is the culture of the 21st century similar and different from the of the 20th?' His brilliant responses make up a polyphonic cultural map where Literature, History, Anthropology, Ethnography, Ecology, Philosophy, Sociology, Art, Cinema, Television, entertainment or Poetry, among other disciplines, go hand in hand. Weaving this dense network of interconnections, a fertile intergenerational dialogue is established - from a centenarian philosopher to a journalist in his thirties - and cosmopolitan with the collaborators. With all this, he outlines a civilizing theory about the phases of the History of Culture. Thus, it traverses the relationships between cultural forms and the media, from the invention of the printing press to the hegemony of the internet. A rich and audacious mosaic from which a whole ontology of culture is born.