J Auyero
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1346 |
|---|---|
| NOME | J Auyero |
| PRENOMES | J |
| SOBRENOME | Auyero |
| ASSINATURA | AUYERO J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5387-2812 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 86 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 858 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 86 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Why Ethnography
What kind of knowledge does ethnography afford? Why do we need such knowledge? This paper draws upon the authors’ individual work to reflect on the ongoing necessity of good enough ethnographic fieldwork in sociology. Alongside presenting moving stories, unearthing rules of behavior, interpreting meanings through thick description, obtaining fine-grained insight into the working of organizations, revealing the complex interplay of informal and fo…
Opportunities and Alliances
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and judicial wiretap analysis in Argentina, this paper shows that collusion between state actors and violent non‐state actors operates through fluid and competitive relational networks rather than stable hierarchies or fixed institutional arrangements. In Mexico, private security entrepreneurs broker ties between public officials, clients, and violent specialists, particularly during periods of electoral …
A Thing that Works
Mass street protests and other highly contentious actions often capture headlines and public attention, but what remains after the news cycle moves on? Many times, grassroots initiatives crystallise during or after these intense moments of participation, leaving in their wake effective organisations that continue to make daily life more liveable in contexts of extreme vulnerability. Despite the persistence and impact of these 'things that work' -…
Collusion and Violence in Underground Drug Markets
Poor urban neighborhoods throughout the Americas are marked by high rates of interpersonal violence, much of which is associated with the underground drug trade. Scholars have examined the social dynamics that produce and shape violence among neighborhood residents and the state agents who police them. But less is known about the clandestine collaborations between residents and agents of the state and how those collaborations might contribute to …
The Politics of Violent Concatenations
Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines face‐to‐face violent interactions in a high‐poverty squatter settlement in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Delving into the situational interactions and biographies of those who simultaneously exercise and suffer violence—victims and perpetrators—we illustrate in fine‐grained detail the concatenations of violence and their political dimensions. Violent concatenations are political in …
You Will Never Walk Alone
Despite being intensely sociable, ethnographic research is also deeply isolating. Although fieldworkers may feel lonely, we contend that they are not (or should not be) alone. At the 10th anniversary of Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, we reflect on the ethnographic training cultivated there. We detail objectives, experiences, and lessons learned while also considering challenges for pedagogical projects of ethnographic…
The Clandestine Hands of the State
Police collusion with drug market organizations is widespread around the world, but the nature of this collaboration remains poorly understood. This article draws on a unique data source to dissect the inner workings of police collusion: transcripts of wiretapped conversations, embedded in thousands of pages of court cases in which state agents have been prosecuted for collaborating with drug market groups. We catalogue and analyze the wide range…
Violence and the Gray Zone of Politics
In this essay, I illustrate a relational perspective on gray zone politics, one that shifts the substantive and analytic focus of inquiry from groups and places (this trafficking gang, those neofascists, etc.) to the hidden links between them and established actors within the political field (be they state authorities, elected officials, or members of security forces)
Socorro
This article examines the ways in which the urban poor in Argentina help one another in the arduous task of making ends meet when neither the formal labor market nor state welfare policies are able to secure their subsistence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article makes one substantive, one analytic, and one theoretical claim. Substantively, the article argues by way of empirical illustration that the urban poor are hardworking…
Collusion and Cynicism at the Urban Margins
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 …
How Do the Urban Poor Survive? A Comparative Ethnography of Subsistence Strategies in Argentina, Ecuador, and Mexico
Poor People's Survival Strategies
Nearly a half-century ago, two scholars north and south of the US border called attention to the role played by reciprocity networks in poor peoples' survival strategies. This article provides a synthetic picture of the qualitative research on those strategies, focusing not only on mutual aid networks but also on clientelist politics and popular protest. These are, we argue, oftentimes complementary ways of everyday problem-solving. Furthermore, …
Afterword. Going Granular
Taking Bourdieu to the Shantytown
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
Unprotected
[I]n a context of few job opportunities and skyrocketing prices, the poor believed that dwindling state support indicated that the government had ceased to protect them
Conclusions
Teaching and Learning the Craft
Ethnography is not only a set of tools with which to collect data, but an epistemological vantage point from which to apprehend the social world. In this vein, we articulate a model of teaching and learning ethnography that entails focusing on how to construct an ethnographic object. In this chapter, we describe our way of teaching ethnography as not simply a method of data collection, but as a manner of training that pays particular attention – …
The Ambivalent State
Over the past few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have shifted from analyzing the state’s neglect and abandonment to documenting its harsh interventions and punishing presence. Most of this research has focused on the overt actions and inactions of the state. Yet we know very little about the covert world of state action that is hidden from public view. The Ambivalent State offers an unprecedented look into the clandestine rel…
Faire patienter, c’est dominer
Que fait l’attente ? Plutôt que de l’analyser de façon entièrement négative, comme une privation, Javier Auyero souligne ce que cette situation a de productif : elle façonne les comportements et cantonne les revendications, en premier lieu chez les pauvres, confrontés plus que les autres à cette situation asymétrique. Dans un entretien qui retrace les grandes lignes d’une recherche ethnographique menée dans les services sociaux de Buenos Aires, l…
En el vientre de la bestia. Reconstrucción relacional de la campaña contra el fracking en Texas
Este artículo ofrece un relato relacional del surgimiento, desarrollo, e impacto de un movimiento social en contra del fracking urbano en Denton, Texas. Destacamos el rol que juegan las interacciones entre los activistas de base, los funcionarios locales, y otros interlocutores en la construcción política de un entendimiento común del riesgo ambiental. Basándonos en la literatura sobre percepciones de riesgo y los efectos de los movimientos socia…
Los sinuosos caminos de la etnografía política
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, limitacionesy proyecciones del ejercicio etnográfico en lo político. El escrito se divide en cinco apartados, correspondientes a los temas de …
Grassroots Activism in the Belly of the Beast
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 r…
Drug Market Violence Comes Home
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 w…
Patience, Protest, and Resignation in Contaminated Communities
Desde abajo
The Social Production of Toxic Uncertainty
Based on both archival research and two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in an Argentine shantytown with 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 informed account of uncertainty and the errone…
Political Clientelism, Democracy, and Market Economy
Patients of the State
From the client's point(s) of view
Patronage Politics and Contentious Collective Action
Based on ethnographic reanalysis and on current qualitative research on poor people's politics, this article argues that routine patronage politics and nonroutine collective action should be examined not as opposite and conflicting political phenomena but as dynamic processes that often establish recursive relationships. Through a series of case studies conducted in contemporary Argentina, this article examines four instances in which patronage a…
Introductory Note to Politics under the Microscope
Confused because exposed
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) a…
The Hyper-Shantytown
Ethnographic observation, archival data, surveys and newspaper reports are combined to depict the social transformation of Argentine shantytowns during the last two decades, focusing on three different kinds of violence that impact the lives and social strategies of their residents: daily interpersonal violence, intermittent state repression, and the structural violence of mass unemployment. These violences are interrelated expressions of the bro…
This is a lot like the Bronx, isn't it?' Lived experiences of marginality in an Argentine slum
Based on life-stories, in-depth interviews and informal conversations, this article focuses on the lived experiences of the inhabitants of a slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The first part of the article explores the political-economic context of deepening marginalization of the slum population in contemporary Argentina, paying special attention to the mutually reinforcing processes of massification of under- and unemployment, impoverishment and …
The Practical Logic of Political Domination
This article aims to redirect the study of patronage politics toward its quotidian character and acknowledge the key role played by brokers' strong ties with their closest followers to better understand and explain the practical features of clientelist domination. This article argues that clientelist politics occur during routine daily life and that most loyal clients' behavior should be understood and explained neither as the product of rational…
In harm's way at the urban margins
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…
Glocal Riots
In the last decade, the Argentine interior became a landscape of violent protest. Structural adjustment or 'austerity programs' are undoubtedly at the root of this upsurge in contention. But there are crucial local mediations worth exploring. Based on archival research, in-depth interviewing and secondary sources, this article draws upon the recent 'relational turn' in the study of collective action to explore some of the processes that led to tw…
The Dynamics of Collective Violence
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 collected by the authors on 289 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 impor…
Los cambios en el repertorio de la protesta social en la Argentina
L'espace des luttes
Violence and the State at the Urban Margins
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 sta…
Chuck and Pierre at the Welfare Office1
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
When everyday life, routine politics, and protest meet
Poor People's Survival Strategies
Nearly a half-century ago, two scholars north and south of the US border called attention to the role played by reciprocity networks in poor peoples' survival strategies. This article provides a synthetic picture of the qualitative research on those strategies, focusing not only on mutual aid networks but also on clientelist politics and popular protest. These are, we argue, oftentimes complementary ways of everyday problem-solving. Furthermore, …
From 'making toast' to 'splitting apples
The judge, the cop, and the queen of carnival
Re-Membering Peronism
The Politics of Interpersonal Violence in the Urban Periphery
Based on 30 months of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in a high-poverty, crime-ridden area in metropolitan Buenos Aires, this paper scrutinizes the political character of interpersonal violence. The violence described here is not the subaltern violence that, thoroughly documented by historians and social scientists, directs against the state, the powerful, or their symbols. It is a violence that is neither redemptive nor cleansing, but it is…
Visible Fists, Clandestine Kicks, and Invisible Elbows
Argentina 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…
Tiresias in Flammable Shantytown
Based on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Flammable shantytown, a highly contaminated poor barrio in Argentina, this article examines the links between environmental suffering, social domination, and collective perceptions of time. We show that the ways residents think and feel about (and cope with) pollution are deeply entangled with their perceptions of the past and of the future. We thus argue that an ethnographic account of the lived ex…
La cultura que vuelve». Una revisión de las perspectivas de análisis cultural en la sociología norteamericana
No presenta resumen
Wacquant in the Argentine Slums
This is a lot like the Bronx, isn't it?' Lived experiences of marginality in an Argentine slum
Based on life-stories, in-depth interviews and informal conversations, this article focuses on the lived experiences of the inhabitants of a slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The first part of the article explores the political-economic context of deepening marginalization of the slum population in contemporary Argentina, paying special attention to the mutually reinforcing processes of massification of under- and unemployment, impoverishment and …
Re-Membering Peronism
Performing Evita
Based on the first ethnography of urban political clientelism ever carried out in Argentina, this paper focuses on the public performances of female political brokers belonging to the Peronist Party. Drawing on the analytical tools provided by cultural sociology and the anthropology of performance, the paper explores the way in which brokers, through their "presentation of the self," attempt to foster impressions in their audiences and construct …
From the client's point(s) of view
The Logic of Clientelism in Argentina
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, this article studies the workings of Peronist “political clientelism” among the urban poor. It analyzes the web of relations that some slum-dwellers establish with local political brokers to obtain medicine, food, and solutions to other everyday concerns. The article also explores the main functions of the “problem-solving networks,” which are resource control and i…
The Hyper-Shantytown
Ethnographic observation, archival data, surveys and newspaper reports are combined to depict the social transformation of Argentine shantytowns during the last two decades, focusing on three different kinds of violence that impact the lives and social strategies of their residents: daily interpersonal violence, intermittent state repression, and the structural violence of mass unemployment. These violences are interrelated expressions of the bro…
Glocal Riots
In the last decade, the Argentine interior became a landscape of violent protest. Structural adjustment or 'austerity programs' are undoubtedly at the root of this upsurge in contention. But there are crucial local mediations worth exploring. Based on archival research, in-depth interviewing and secondary sources, this article draws upon the recent 'relational turn' in the study of collective action to explore some of the processes that led to tw…
Los cambios en el repertorio de la protesta social en la Argentina
A favor de una etnografía sobre clientelismo político y peronismo
The judge, the cop, and the queen of carnival
Contentious Lives
Relational riot
On December 16, 1993, thousands of public employees sacked and burned three government buildings (the Government House, the courthouse, and the legislature) and the private residences of nearly a dozen local politicians and officials in the Argentine city of Santiago del Estero. Drawing upon the recent ‘relational turn’ in the sociology of collective action, the article examines four different processes at the root of this contentious episode: a)…
The Geography of Popular Contention
This article examines the spatial dimensions of a highly singular riot in contemporary Argentina: the episode that came to be known as the Santiagazo. On 16 December 1993, thousands of public employees sacked, burned, and looted three government buildings (the Government House, the Courthouse, and the Legislature) and the private residences of nearly a dozen local politicians and officials in the city of Santiago del Estero. Based on in-depth int…
The Moral Politics of Argentine Crowds
Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this article reconstructs protesters' actions, collective beliefs, and shared self-understandings during two recent contentious episodes in contemporary Argentina, the 1993 Santiagazo and the 1996 pueblada in Cutral-co. Drawing upon E.P. Thompson's and J. Scott's notion of moral economy, the anaysis dissects the crowds' beliefs as to what are right and wrong political practices. The notion of…
Political Clientelism, Democracy, and Market Economy
When everyday life, routine politics, and protest meet
L'espace des luttes
On Domination and Inequality
Daniel lives with his sister, Jimena, in Flammable shantytown (realname, despite the irony); a poor enclave located in Dock Sud, Avellaneda,in the province of Buenos Aires, adjacent to a large petrochemicalcompound that houses Shell-Dapsa and Petrobras among other largecompanies. What follows is the transcript of part of a dialogue that thethree of us had in July 2004
Introductory Note to Politics under the Microscope
Celebratory Stories and Their Troubles
A joint product of more than six years of work and a hundred or so in-depth interviews, this book presents 35 profiles of men who, in different capacities ranging from community organizers to social workers, radical historians to researchers and journalists, and artists to lawyers, took or take active part in antiracist struggles doing different sorts of things: writing, advocacy, teaching, lecturing, etc. After a brief preface and introduction, …
The Political Makings of the 2001 Lootings in Argentina
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, politica…
Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina
Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds were injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent - particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival …
The Dynamics of Collective Violence
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 collected by the authors on 289 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 impor…
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