This article discusses the dialectic between practice and structure and its implications in ethnographic representation from the standpoint of two major contemporary thinkers: Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau. The author calls attention of music ethnographers for some of the limits of the so-called “practice theory “ and advances some suggestions to overcome them in music ethnography. As an example, the author gives a detailed account of a music performance held during the Fiesta de la Cruz, in the rural Aymara district of Conima, southern Peru. Here, he sets an interpretative frame sensitive to several layers of contextual meanings for this single episode in which he, too, participated as a musician. As a step further in ethnomusicological representation, he calls for a reflexive action in which music ethnographers should consider their ambivalent role as both participants and critics of social domination systems.
ethnomusicological representation; musical ethnography; practice theory