American Ethnologist

In social theory, there is a tension between approaches which privilege practice and those focusing on discourse. Recently, such dualisms have been challenged, for example in the analysis of social movements, by perspectives which seek to overcome divisions between culture and politics. I argue that these challenges can be promoted by focusing on how culture as a human activity of working in the world, in which the material and the symbolic are unified, exists in tension with culture as a commodified object in the context of hegemonic constructions of culture which construct it as primarily a set of symbolic representations. I examine this theme in relation to the efforts of young blacks in the city of Cali, Colombia, who use rap music to make a cultural identity as a way of life, which also involves class issues in the urban environment, while at the same time they construct their culture as a object designed to move in circuits of consumer commities and, especially, state and NGO funding. The local state and the voluntary sector also work on culture as a more limited set of expressions, seeking to depoliticize it.