It has been a while since the concept of cultural action was last revisited. Most contemporaneous reflexions are centered on the democratization of culture and cultural democracy, if not on cultural mediation which curently attracts a great deal of attention. We posit, however, that the democratization of culture’s shortcomings has not exhausted all of animation’s investment possibilities into cultural action. In order to validate this, we lead a theoretical examination that consists in contrasting animation’s objectives and methods to the definitions and range attributed to cultural action. To the extent that animation promotes a participatory methodology that acknowledges participants’ action capacities, and that cultural action gives rise to social transformation, it follows that autonomous cultural actions are a possibility we need to entertain.