"It's not just about money": An Ethnography of Rebusque Performances and Life-Stories on Public Transportation Buses in Downtown Bogotá, Colombia

Ana Fonseca

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Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: With Distinction, , course: Informal ...

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Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Ethnology / Cultural Anthropology, grade: With Distinction, , course: Informal economy, Colombia, ethnography, Latin America, anthropology, labor economics, history, ethnology, language: English, abstract: This research focuses on the performances of peddlers, buskers and panhandlers who are said to practice "rebusque" on the main transportation system of downtown Bogotá, Colombia. Rebusque refers to informal workers who forge self-employment to make a living. Through rebusque performances on the buses, such workers challenge misleading perceptions of their work, offer social critiques, and forge relations of solidarity with bus drivers and riders. This solidarity emerges from Colombians' shared nationalist and religious beliefs paired with their broad dissatisfaction with their country's socio-economic order and neoliberal government. Following Ortner's idea of "serious games," De Certeau's notion of "tactics" and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, I examine rebusque performers' "self-reliance" as a form of "social agency" accrued by negotiating earnings through expressions of religious and nationalist critiques and aspirations which inspire collective participation. Thus, "informal workers," often refugees from Colombia's rural violence, gain peaceable earnings within Bogotá's buses.