Drawing on ethnographic data collected in three informal communities, one in Argentina, one in México, and one in Ecuador, we address the long-standing question posed by Larissa Lomnitz’s and Carol Stack’s now-classic studies of how impoverished people not only survive but what strategies they adopt in an attempt to build a dignifed life. By focusing on the diversity of strategies by which the urban poor solve the everyday problems of individual and collective reproduction, we move beyond the macro-level analysis of structural constraint and material deprivation. Our fndings show a remarkable continuity in the difculties residents of these informal communities confronted and the problem-solving strategies they resorted to. We found that networks of kin and friends continue to play a crucial role in how poor people not only survive but attempt to get ahead. Additionally, we highlight the role of patronage networks and collective action as central to strategies by which the urban poor cope with scarcity and improve their life chances, while also paying close attention to ways in which they deal with pressing issues of insecurity and violence. The paper shows that poor people’s survival strategies are deeply imbricated in routine political processes.

This essay extends Bourdieu’s work on habitat–habitus and symbolic domination to the study of urban marginality. A full account of urban relegation should pay systematic attention to the environmental hazards to which the dispossessed are routinely exposed. Social science accounts of how domination works at the urban margins should place poor people’s experience of time (and, particularly, of waiting) at their front and center.

This article examines the clandestine connections between participants in the illicit drug trade and members of state security forces to understand how they impact everyday understandings of the law. Drawing on a unique combination of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a poor, high-crime district in Argentina and wiretapped conversations drawn from a court case involving a drug trafficking group active in the same area, we find that traffickers use illicit relationships to maintain economic control of the territory, and that collusion fosters widespread cynicism about law enforcement among residents. This article expands the literature on the covert relationships between drug trade participants and agents of the state by detailing the inner workings of collusion. Furthermore, it analyzes residents’ perceptions of police complicity as an underexplored source of legal cynicism. Finally, it offers a methodological blueprint of how to access and analyze data that capture state actions usually hidden from public view.

Resumen

Este artículo examina las conexiones clandestinas entre participantes en el tráfico de drogas ilegales y miembros de las fuerzas de seguridad del estado a los efectos de entender cómo esas relaciones impactan en la manera en que la ley es entendida en la vida cotidiana. Combinando trabajo etnográfico en un barrio pobre con altos niveles de criminalidad y escuchas telefónicas registradas en un expediente judicial que involucra a un grupo de traficantes de la misma zona, encontramos que: a) los traficantes utilizan esas relaciones clandestinas para mantener control económico del territorio, y b) la colusión entre agentes del estado y traficantes alimenta un cinismo legal generalizado entre los residentes de la zona. Este artículo hace tres contribuciones. En primer lugar, expande la literatura sobre relaciones encubiertas entre participantes en el mercado de drogas ilícitas y los agentes del estado al detallar el funcionamiento de la colusión. En segundo lugar, analiza las percepciones sobre la complicidad policial como una fuente no estudiada de cinismo legal. Por último, ofrece una estrategia metodológica para acceder y analizar datos sobre acciones del estado que suelen estar ocultas.

El texto pasa revista a la extensa y productiva trayectoria del autor en el difícil oficio de la etnografía política. Mediante un relato reflexivo de su propia experiencia etnográfica, se destaca la relevancia y complejidad del oficio, razón por la que nos remite a los hallazgos, los obstáculos, problemas, limitaciones y proyecciones del ejercicio etnográfico en lo político. El escrito se divide en cinco apartados, correspondientes a los temas de investigación abordados por la trayectoria etnográfica del autor, en los que se revisan la relación y utilidad de la etnografía política en el estudio de las redes clientelares, de la acción colectiva, el estudio de la zona gris de la política, el sufrimiento ambiental y el tema de la espera como una expresión de las relaciones de dominación social. El escrito cierra con una invitación y advertencia en torno al oficio etnográfico.

A wide range of sociological work documents higher rates of violence within households in neighborhoods where violence related to illicit drug markets is prevalent. Existing explanations for this association point to cultural scripts, to an absence of community social control, or to the effects of individual exposure to violence on the propensity to reproduce it. Drawing on in-depth interviews and field observations, we argue that much violence within the home may instead be understood as an extension of the systemic violence of the drug trade. That violence travels into homes by way of three often coexisting sequential pathways: 1) invasion, in which dealers enter homes in search of other drug market participants and families are caught in the middle; 2) protection, in which family members seek to protect themselves and each other from repeated theft of household items; and 3) preemption, in which parents use violence against their children in an effort to prevent more serious violence against them by other drug industry participants. This analysis sheds new light on the impacts of the current governance of drug markets and on the difficult choices faced by families in highly vulnerable contexts, contributing to a theorization of violence as situated not in individuals or groups but in patterned sequences of events.

Across South America, poverty and environmental destruction go hand-in-hand. How do communities respond?

This article offers a relational account of the emergence, development, and impact of a social movement against urban fracking in Denton, Texas. It highlights the role played by the interactions between grassroots activism, local officials, and other stakeholders in the political construction of shared understandings of environmental risk. Drawing upon scholarship on risk perceptions and on social movement outcomes, the article argues that as a result of relationships of conflict and cooperation between activists, officials, residents, and oil and gas industry representatives, a field of opinion about the potential (negative) impacts of fracking emerged. It shows that grassroots, face-to-face, joint action played a key role in the campaign to ban fracking. Localized collective action should be at the front and center of social scientific examinations of shared understandings of environmental danger.

Basado en un trabajo de campo etnográfico y en una investigación periodística en dos barrios altamente violentos y pobres de la provincia argentina de Buenos Aires, este artículo retrata el modo en que los vecinos elaboran estrategias para lidiar con los riesgos que acechan sus vidas y las de sus seres queridos. Sitiados por la violencia interpersonal, vecinos de barrios relegados establecen rutinas y tejen relaciones sociales para superar y responder al peligro físico. Al hacerlo, ejercitan un «ética popular» aún inexplorada en la literatura sobre violencia urbana en América Latina.

Basado en un trabajo de campo etnográfico y en una investigación periodística en dos barrios altamente violentos y pobres de la provincia argentina de Buenos Aires, este artículo retrata el modo en que los vecinos elaboran estrategias para lidiar con los riesgos que acechan sus vidas y las de sus seres queridos. Sitiados por la violencia interpersonal, vecinos de barrios relegados establecen rutinas y tejen relaciones sociales para superar y responder al peligro físico. Al hacerlo, ejercitan un «ética popular» aún inexplorada en la literatura sobre violencia urbana en América Latina.

Based on 30 months of collaborative fieldwork in a poor neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this paper scrutinises the multiple uses of violence among residents and the concatenations between private and public forms of physical aggression. Much of the violence reported here resembles that which has been dissected by students of street violence in the United States – that is, it is the product of interpersonal retaliation and remains encapsulated in dyadic exchanges. However, by casting a wider net to include other forms of aggression (not only criminal but also sexual, domestic and intimate) that take place inside and outside the home, and that intensely shape the course of poor people’s daily lives, the paper argues that diverse forms of violence among the urban poor (a) serve more than just retaliatory purposes, and (b) link with one another beyond dyadic relationships.

This paper examines the experience of time among residents of a highly polluted shantytown in contemporary Buenos Aires. Drawing on Bourdieu’s understanding of time as constitutive of social action and waiting as a key modality of experiencing the effects of power, I inspect the routine encounters between the poor and the state to disclose the temporal texture of political subordination in the city’s periphery. In recurrently being forced to accommodate and yield to the state’s chronological exigencies and practical dictates, the urban poor receive a subtle, and usually not explicit, daily lesson in the workings of domination. Taking Bourdieu to the contaminated urban margins of Latin America allows us to see that poisoned outcasts, in constantly being forced to wait for everything to come from more powerful actors, become the opposite of citizens: patients of the state.

Based on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork in a violence-ridden, low-income district located in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, this article examines the state’s presence at the urban margins and its relationships to widespread depacification of poor people’s daily life. Contrary to descriptions of destitute urban areas in the Americas as either governance voids deserted by the state or militarized spaces firmly controlled by the state’s iron fist, this article argues that law enforcement in Buenos Aires’s high-poverty zones is intermittent, selective, and contradictory. By putting the state’s fractured presence at the urban margins under the ethnographic microscope, the article reveals its key role in the perpetuation of the violence it is presumed to prevent.

En la reunión, frente a todos los vecinos, Isabel pregunta quién no tiene un hermano, un primo, un cuñado, alguno que conozca a algún transa. Nerina dice que los policías no aparecen. Alicia, que son corruptos y cómplices: saben lo que pasa pero no hacen nada. La palabra más repetida es “miedo”.

The world’s poor often live with terrible pollution – but that doesn’t mean they like it.

El texto pasa revista a la extensa y productiva trayectoria del autor en el difícil oficio de la etnografía política. Mediante un relato reflexivo de su propia experiencia etnográfica, se destaca la relevancia y complejidad del oficio, razón por la que nos remite a los hallazgos, los obstáculos, problemas, limitaciones y proyecciones del ejercicio etnográfico en lo político. El escrito se divide en cinco apartados, correspondientes a los temas de investigación abordados por la trayectoria etnográfica del autor, en los que se revisan la relación y utilidad de la etnografía política en el estudio de las redes clientelares, de la acción colectiva, el estudio de la zona gris de la política, el sufrimiento ambiental y el tema de la espera como una expresión de las relaciones de dominación social. El escrito cierra con una invitación y advertencia en torno al oficio etnográfico.

O artigo analisa a imbricação entre a estrutura do Partido Justicionalista (peronista) e as políticas assistenciais estatais em comunidades pobres da província de Buenos Aires, na época governada por Eduardo Duhalde. Os agentes partidários se colocam na posição de mediadores, que, evitando uma barganha expressa e adotando um discurso de solidariedade, garantem apoio político graças à capacidade de fazer com que carências imediatas sejam supridas. No processo, propõem e buscam disseminar uma determinada forma de resolução de problemas.

The article examines the entangled relations between the structure of Argentina’s Justicionalist (Peronist) Party and state welfare policies in poor communities in the province of Buenos Aires, then governed by Eduardo Duhalde. Party agents put themselves in the position of mediators who, avoiding an open bargain and adopting a solidarity-based discourse, guarantee political support thanks to their ability to meet basic needs. In the process, they propose and seek certain ways to solve problems.

Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can… The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead.” More than a century and a half later, the subproletariat still inhabits treacherous, dreadful grounds in today’s megacities. With close to a third of the world’s population living in informal settlements, many of them mired in misery and violence, the need to understand and explain their lives is as imperative as it was when Engels first wrote these words. Three recent books here under consideration take up this task in two very distinct cities, Buenos Aires and Mumbai, dissecting the material and symbolic dimensions of life on “the other side.” These vivid portraits convey the external and internal forces that shape and sustain the slum’s challenges, its struggles, its relentlessness, and its cruelty.

Residents of poor barrios in Buenos Aires are deeply worried about widespread violence (domestic, sexual, criminal, and police) and about environmental hazards – two dimensions of marginalization that policy-makers tend to disregard and social scientists of the ethnographic persuasion seldom treat together for what they are: producers of harm. Based on 18 months of collaborative fieldwork, this article dissects poor people’s experiences of living in harm’s way.

This paper reflects on a decade and a half of ethnographic research on five different topics: patronage politics, the intricate relationship between clientelism and collective action, the role of clandestine connections in politics, urban marginality and environmental suffering, and poor people’s waiting as a way of experiencing political domination. The paper examines the contributions that political ethnography can make to a better understanding of these themes and highlights areas for further empirical and theoretical work.

Over the decade and a half that I have been conducting research on poverty and marginality in Latin America (with a specific focus on Argentina), I have become increasingly aware of the lack of dialogue between scholars working on similar issues north and south of the border. The striking similarities in the ways neoliberal economic policies and political transformations are now affecting the lives of the urban poor throughout the Americas might present a good (and well overdue) opportunity to break down artificial, but well-entrenched, “area-studies” boundaries and to scrutinize the manifold (sometimes similar, sometimes not) processes that are shaping the dynamics of urban relegation throughout the continent.

Cet article examine les liens souvent invisibles, au sein de ce que nous appelons la zone grise politique, à la jonction entre les acteurs politiques officiels et non officiels, qui sont chargés du plus « sale boulot » politique dans l’Argentine contemporaine. Ce « sale boulot » prend des formes différentes, qui vont de l’incitation à des actions de violence collective aux « récompenses » en drogue et en alcool versés à des jeunes en rétribution de leur présence à des rassemblements politiques, en passant par la menace physique envers les candidats et membres des partis d’opposition. Après un bref passage en revue de la littérature existante sur les relations entre les liens politiques clandestins et la violence collective, cet article s’appuie sur une relecture ethnographique de données déjà existantes pour élaborer trois comptes rendus détaillés permettant d’éclairer le rôle joué par la zone grise dans la politique de l’Argentine contemporaine. Nous démontrerons que le « blanchiment » d’actes politiques à travers ces canaux clandestins constitue une dimension cruciale de la politique qui doit être empiriquement disséquée et théorisée afin de mieux comprendre l’activité politique conventionnelle au sens large, avant de conclure par une brève réflexion sur les implications analytiques et méthodologiques de ce type de problématique.

This volume includes contributions of scholars from various fields – the social sciences, journalism, the humanities and the arts – whose work offers insightful and innovative ways to understand the devastating and unprecedented forms of violence currently experienced in Latin America. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, it offers an array of perspectives that contribute to ongoing debates in the study of violence in the region.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the main welfare office of the city of Buenos Aires, this article dissects poor people’s lived experiences of waiting. The article examines the welfare offi ce as a site of intense sociability amidst pervasive uncertainty. Poor people’s waiting experiences persuade the destitute of the need to be patient, thus conveying the implicit state request to be compliant clients. An analysis of the sociocultural dynamics of waiting helps us understand how (and why) welfare clients become not citizens but patients of the state.

In a preliminary attempt to understand the daily production of poor people’s subordination in contemporary Argentina, this paper explores the workings of overt and covert forms of state violence against the urban destitute and of more subtle modes of domination. Attention to the simultaneous operation of what this paper calls visible fists, clandestine kicks, and invisible elbows in the daily life of the dispossessed serves to a) better integrate violence into the study of popular politics, and b) cast light on the productive (and not merely repressive) nature of state power.

Spanish translation: “Puños, Patadas y Codazos en la Regulación de la Pobreza Neoliberal.” In M.J. Funes (editora), A Propósito de Tilly. Conflicto, Poder y Acción Colectiva.

After an ethnographic vignette that encapsulates the typical trajectory of an applicant to welfare benefits observed during a year of collaborative fieldwork, this brief essay will put to work Tilly’s notion of ‘‘invisible elbow’’ and Bourdieu’s understanding of waiting as a strategy of power in order to clarify the cultural dynamics of a welfare waiting room in the age of neoliberalism.

Based on both archival research and twoand a halfyears of ethnographic fieldwork in an Argentine shantytownwith high levels of air,water, and ground contamination, this article examines the social production of environmental uncertainty. First, we dissect residents ‘perceptions of contamination, finding widespread doubts and mistakes about the polluted habitat. Second, we provide a sociologically informedaccount of uncertainty and the erroneous perceptions that underlie it. Along with inherent ambiguity surrounding toxic contamination, thegeneralized confusion about sources and effects of pollution is theresultof twofactors: (1) the “relational anchoring” of risk perceptions and (2) the “labor of confusion “generated bypowerful outside actors. We derive two implications from this ethnographic case study: (1) Cognitive psychology and organizational sociology can travel beyond the boundaries of self-bounded communities and laboratory settings to understand and explain the collective production and reproduction of ignorance, uncertainty, and error. (2) Research on inequality and marginality in general, and in Latin America inparticular, should pay close attention to the contaminated spaces where the urban poor live.

This article combines a statistical analysis with qualitative research to investigate the dynamics of collective violence in one of its most recurrent forms- the food riot. Using an original dataset collective by the authors on food riot episodes occurring in Argentina in December 2001, the article argues for the need to dissect the local, contextualized inner-dynamics of the episodes. We find significant interrelationships between three important factors: the presence of police, the presence or absence of political party brokers, and the type of market looted (big/chain or small/local). We then conduct a qualitative and ethnographic analysis to illustrate how these interactions might play out in two ideal type looting scenes – one illustrating the role of public authorities at big, chair super markets, the other showing the importance of party brokers at small, local food markets. We conclude by calling for more such research to better understand the mechanisms and processes, especially the relationships between state power and party politics, involved with all forms of collective violence.

Based on long-term collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown called Flammable (real name) located in Argentina, this article examines residents’ perceptions of their highly polluted surroundings. Using a case study to explore the relationship between objective space and subjective representations (habitat and habitus), the article a) describes the widespread confusion that dominates shantytown dwellers’ views of contamination, and b) argues that this confusion translates into self-doubts, division, stigma, and a continual waiting time. The article ends with an empirically grounded speculation regarding the sources of toxic uncertainty.

Based on long-term collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown called Flammable (real name) located in Argentina, this article examines residents’ perceptions of their highly polluted surroundings. Using a case study to explore the relationship between objective space and subjective representations (habitat and habitus), the article a) describes the widespread confusion that dominates shantytown dwellers’ views of contamination, and b) argues that this confusion translates into self-doubts, division, stigma, and a continual waiting time. The article ends with an empirically grounded speculation regarding the sources of toxic uncertainty.

Tehran Pars, Iran, dans les années 1970. « Cette nuit-là, lorsque nous sommes sortis de la maison, j’ai assisté à une scène que je ne souhaite à personne de voir. Tout le quartier avait été encerclé par des militaires qui s’y étaient glissés furtivement et avaient interdit à quiconque d’allumer une lumière […]. Ils s’étaient équipés de quatre bulldozers. Ils ont contraint tout le monde à sortir des maisons et se sont ensuite mis à les démolir. Tous les membres de la famille, y compris les enfants, qui logeaient dans l’une de ces habitations, sont montés sur le toit en criant : “Nous ne sortirons pas !” Mais les militaires ont détruit la maison. Le père de famille est tombé et la maison s’est écroulée sur lui. Dès qu’elle a vu cela, la mère s’est évanouie et elle a laissé tomber l’enfant qu’elle tenait dans ses bras. »

Based on archival research and on multi-sited fieldwork, this article offers the first available description of the food lootings that took place in Argentina in December 2001. The paper joins the current relational turn in the study of collective violence. It examines the existing continuities between everyday life, routine politics and extraordinary massive actions, and scrutinises the grey zone where the deeds and networks of looters, political entrepreneurs and law enforcement officials meet and mesh. The article reconstructs the looting dynamics at one specific site and highlights the existence of three mechanisms during the episodes: 1. the creation of opportunities by party brokers and police agents, 2. the validation of looting by state elites, and 3. the signalling spiral carried out by party brokers.