Paper short abstract:

The paper employs the concept of the broker to show how 'culture wars' might be mediated; focusing on the processes through which distinct groupings and their cultural expressions are transcended by the actions of individual agents.

Paper long abstract:

It is often assumed that distinct social groupings adhere to fixed and bounded systems of knowledge, belief and practice. Anthropologists critical of this approach point to the historically contextual and fluid nature of culture and show how mistaken it is to reify the concept. But although culture is "dutifully de-constructed and de-essentialized" in anthropology courses, people continue to "slaughter each other" in its name (Scheper Hughes 1995:415).

Writings on popular cultural brokers offer valuable insights. Popular culture has been described as a 'decisive area where social conflicts are experienced and evaluated' and as 'the ground on which … transformations are worked' between the often contradictory interests of diverse social categories and classes. And it is the creative efforts of cultural brokers, usually people occupying a liminal status - or in transition - between more easily-recognized social categories, which traverse the interpretive gap: which interweave the diverse and disparate social threads from which popular culture is made.

Based on some case studies from South Africa, the paper will employ the concept of the broker to show how "culture wars" might be mediated. It focuses on the processes through which distinct groupings and their cultural/ ideological expressions are transcended, and on how individual agents or groups of agents operate to transform knowledge and belief at the point where divergent "cultural" worlds intersect with one another.