“Citizen culture” in Bogotá: biopolitics, hegemonization and cultural panic in the epoch of the culturalism

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Eduardo Restrepo

Abstract

This article examines how the notion of “citizen culture” has been naturalized as an idealized and romanticized idea. With this it’s intended to show that, contrary to those idyllic perceptions, what is truly at stake with this notion-strategy is a modality of biopolitics that produces a “cultural panic” in order to produce a particular subject —an appropriate citizen— using salvationism rhetorics, which put in practice a moral Eurocentred and classist authoritarianism. The most significant achievement of the “citizen culture” is not what experts and bureaucrats celebrate from “security” and “well-being”, but its hegemonizing process that forgets the understanding of the city problematics from perspectives different than its cultural reductionism.

Author Biography

Eduardo Restrepo, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Doctor en Antropología (con énfasis en Estudios Culturales), Universidad de Carolina del Norte-Chapel Hill. Profesor asociado, Departamento de Estudios Culturales. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.