Performing Vulnerability at Times of Crisis: The Peruvian State and the Configuration of the Digital Cultural Entrepreneur

Abstract

This article examines mitigation mechanisms implemented by Peru's Ministry of Culture during the COVID-19 pandemic to buffer the economic effects on the cultural sector. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2022 and 2023—including interviews with officials and beneficiaries and visits to craft workshops across eight regions—we examine how these policies shaped a new citizen subject: the “digital cultural entrepreneur.” We propose the concept of vulnerability as performance to theorize how access to state support is mediated through the enactment of both precarity and entrepreneurial agency. Our findings show that the very mechanisms of state support —such as online application portals, digital training mandates, and self-management requirements—reconfigure artisanal practices by embedding digitalization and self-management within regimes of cultural policy, reinforcing neoliberal rationalities. The study contributes to the anthropology of entrepreneurship by showing how these specific relief initiatives generate differentiated effects according to uneven digital and social capacities, exposing tensions between productivity imperatives and the structural precariousness of cultural labor in contexts of crisis.