The Winding Paths of Political Ethnography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.804Keywords:
Political ethnography, clientelism, collective action, gray area, suffering, sociology of waitingAbstract
The text reviews the author’s extensive and productive career in the difficult craft of political ethnography. Through a reflective account of his own ethnographic experience, he highlights the importance and complexity of the craft; and therefore refers us to the findings, obstacles, problems, limitations and projections of ethnographic practice in politics. The document is divided into five sections, each corresponding to the research topics addressed by the author’s ethnographic career. These review the relation and usefulness of political ethnography in the study of clientele networks, collective action, and in the study of the gray area of politics, environmental suffering, and the topic of waiting as an expression of the relations of social domination. The document closes with an invitation and a warning in regard to the craft of ethnography.
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References
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Auyero, Javier. 1999. “This is Like the Bronx, Isn’t it? Lived Experiences of Marginality in an Argentine Slum”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23: 45-69.
—. 2003. Contentious Lives. Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
—. 2007. Routine Politics and Collective Violence in Argentina. The Gray Zone of State Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2009. Poor People’s Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
—. 2012a. “The Political Ethnographer’s Compagnon”. Tributes to Charles Tilly. Última modificación 27 de noviembre. http://essays.ssrc.org/tilly/.
—. 2012b. Patients of the State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Auyero, Javier y Lauren Joseph. 2008. “Politics under the Ethnographic Microscope”. En Politics under the Microscope: Readings in Political Ethnography, editado por Lauren Joseph, Javier Auyero y Matthew Mhaler, 1-18. Nueva York: Springer.
Auyero, Javier, Pablo Lapegna y Fernanda Page. 2009. “Patronage Politics and Contentious Collective Action: A Recursive Relationship”. Latin American Politics and Society 51 (3): 1-31.
Auyero, Javier y Matthew Mahler. 2011. “Invisible Acts, Invisible Connections”. En Meanings of Violence, editado por Gabriela Polit Dueñas y María Helena Rueda, 197-234. Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Auyero, Javier y Tim Moran. 2007. “The Dynamics of Collective Violence: Dissecting Food”. Social Forces 85 (3): 1341-1367.
Auyero, Javier y Débora Swistun. 2009. Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of the Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1990. The Logic of Practice. California: Stanford University Press.
—. 1998. Practical Reason. California: Stanford University Press.
—. 1999. Acts of Resistance. Nueva York: New Press.
—. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. California: Stanford University Press.
Brass, Paul. 1996. Riots and Pogroms. Nueva York: NYU Press.
—. 1997. Theft of an Idol. Nueva Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Calvo, Ernesto y María Victoria Murillo. 2004. “Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market”. American Journal of Political Science 48 (4): 742-757.
Cohen, Stanley y Laurie Taylor. 1972. Psychological Survival. The Experience of Long-Term Imprisonment. Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Das, Veena, ed. 1990. Mirrors of Violence. Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Jesus, Carolina. 2003. Child of the Dark. The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Nueva York: Signet.
Diani, Mario y Doug McAdam. 2003. Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Nueva York: Free Press.
Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of Power. Health, Human Rigths, and the New War on the Poor. California: University of California Press.
Flaherty, Michael. 1999. A Watched Pot. How We Experience Time. Nueva York: NYU Press.
—. 2010. The Textures of Time. Agency and Temporal Experience. Filadelfia: Temple University Press.
Flaherty, Michael, Betina Freidin y Ruth Sautu. 2005. “Variation in the Perceived Passage of Time: A Cross-National Study”. Social Psychology Quarterly 68: 400-410.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Nueva York: Vintage.
—. 2000. Power. Essential Works of Foucault. 1954-1984. Nueva York: The New Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Nueva York: Basic Books.
Giddens, Anthony. 1986. The Constitution of Society. Nueva York: Polity Press.
Giraudy, Agustina. 2007. “The Distributive Politics of Emergency Employment Programs in Argentina”. Latin American Research Review 42 (2): 33-55.
Goldstein, Donna. 2003. Laughter Out of Place. Race, Class, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press.
González de la Rocha, Mercedes, Janice Perlman, Helen Safa, Elizabeth Jelin, Bryan R. Roberts y Peter M. Ward. 2004. “From the Marginality of the 1960s to the ‘New Poverty’ of Today: A LARR Research Forum”. Latin American Research Review 39 (1): 183-203. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1555388.
Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State”. American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375-402.
—. 2005. “Narratives of Corruption: Anthropological and Fictional Accounts of the Indian State”. Ethnography 6 (1): 5-34.
Hall, Edward T. 1959. The Silent Language. Nueva York: Anchor Books.
Helmke, Gretchen y Steven Levitsky. 2004. “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics”. Perspectives in Politics 2: 725-740.
Hoffman, Kelly y Miguel Ángel Centeno. 2003. “The Lopsided Continent: Inequality in Latin America”. Annual Review of Sociology 29: 363-390.
Holzner, Claudio. 2004. “The End of Clientelism? Strong and Weak Networks in a Mexican Squatter Movement”. Mobilization 9 (3): 223-240.
Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2003. “The Ontology of ‘Political Violence’: Action and Identity in Civil Wars”. Perspectives on Politics 1: 475-494.
Kirschke, Linda. 2000. “Informal Repression, Zero-Sum Politics and Late Third Wave Transitions”. Journal of Modern African Studies 38 (3): 383-403.
Levine, Robert. 1997. A Geography of Time. Nueva York: Basic Books.
Levitsky, Steven y Lucan A. Way. 2007. “Linkage, Leverage and the Post-Communist Divide”. East European Politics & Societies 21 (1): 48-66.
Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street Level Bureaucracy. Nueva York: Russell Sage Foundation.
—. 1984. “Bureaucratic Disentitlement in Social Welfare Programs”. The Social Service Review 58 (1): 3-27.
Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. Nueva York: Palgrave.
Mann, Leon. 1969. “Queue Culture: The Waiting Line as a Social System”. American Journal of Sociology 75: 340-354.
Marx, Karl. 1887. Capital, vol. 1. Nueva York: New World.
Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow y Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
Munn, Nancy. 1992. “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay”. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 91-123.
Nichter, Simeon. 2008. “Vote Buying or Turnout Buying? Machine Politics and the Secret Ballot”. American Political Science Review 102 (1): 19-31.
Ortner, Sherry. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173-193.
—. 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Paley, Julia. 2001. Marketing Democracy. Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictarship Chile. Berkeley: California University Press.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian Alfred. 1954. The People of the Sierra. Nueva York: Criterion Books.
Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Quirós, Julieta. 2006. Cruzando la Sarmiento. Los piqueteros en la trama social del sur del Gran Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: IDES.
Remmer, Karen. 2007. “The Political Economy of the Patronage: Expenditure Patterns in the Argentina Province, 1983-2003”. Journal of Politics 69 (2): 363-377.
Roldán, Mary. 2002. Blood and Fire. La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Roth, Julius. 1963. Timetables: Structuring the Passage of Time in Hospital Treatment and Other Careers. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merril.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1994. Death without Weeping. California: California University Press.
Schneider, Jane y Peter Schneider. 2003. Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia and the Struggle for Palermo. California: California University Press.
Schutz, Alfred. 1964. “The Problem of Social Reality”. Collected Papers 1. La Haya: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schweizer, Howard. 2008. On Waiting. Londres: Routledge.
Scott, James C. y Benedict J. Kerkvliet. 1977. “How Traditional Rural Patrons Lose Legitimacy (in Southeast Asia)”. En Friends, Followers, and Factions: A Reader in Political Clientelism, editado por Steffen W. Schmidt, 483-507. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sorokin, Pitirim y Robert Merton. 1937. “Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis”. American Journal of Sociology 42: 615-629.
Stokes, Susan. 2005. “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina”. American Political Science Review 99 (3): 315-325.
Svampa, Maristella y Sebastián Pereyra. 2003. Entre la ruta y el barrio: la experiencia de las organizaciones piqueteras. Buenos Aires: Biblos.
Szwarcberg, Mariela. 2010. “Clientelismo en democracia. Lecciones del caso argentino”. Nueva Sociedad 225: 139-155.
Tarrow, Sidney. 1996. “The People’s Two Rhythms: Charles Tilly and the Study of Contentious Politics”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 38: 586-600.
Thompson, Edward. P. 1994. Customs in Common. Nueva York: The New Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”. En Bringing the State Back In, editado por Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer y Theda Skocpol. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1986. The Contentious French. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
—. 1997. Roads from Past to Future. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
—. 1998. Durable Inequality. Berkeley: California University Press.
—. 2003. The Politics of Collective Violence. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
—. 2007. Democracy. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2008. Credit and Blame. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tilly, Charles y Sidney Tarrow. 2006. Contentious Politics. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Weitz-Shapiro, Rebeca. 2006. “Partisanship and Protest: The Politics of Workfare Distribution in Argentina”. Latin American Research Review 41: 122-147.
Willis, Paul. 1997. Learning to Labor. Nueva York: Columbia University Press.
Young, Gerardo. 2002. “La trama política de los saqueos de diciembre”. Clarín Digital, diciembre 19. http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2002/05/19/p-389500.htm
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1979. Patterns of Time in Hospital Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Auyero, Javier. 1999. “This is Like the Bronx, Isn’t it? Lived Experiences of Marginality in an Argentine Slum”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23: 45-69.
—. 2003. Contentious Lives. Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
—. 2007. Routine Politics and Collective Violence in Argentina. The Gray Zone of State Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2009. Poor People’s Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
—. 2012a. “The Political Ethnographer’s Compagnon”. Tributes to Charles Tilly. Última modificación 27 de noviembre. http://essays.ssrc.org/tilly/.
—. 2012b. Patients of the State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Auyero, Javier y Lauren Joseph. 2008. “Politics under the Ethnographic Microscope”. En Politics under the Microscope: Readings in Political Ethnography, editado por Lauren Joseph, Javier Auyero y Matthew Mhaler, 1-18. Nueva York: Springer.
Auyero, Javier, Pablo Lapegna y Fernanda Page. 2009. “Patronage Politics and Contentious Collective Action: A Recursive Relationship”. Latin American Politics and Society 51 (3): 1-31.
Auyero, Javier y Matthew Mahler. 2011. “Invisible Acts, Invisible Connections”. En Meanings of Violence, editado por Gabriela Polit Dueñas y María Helena Rueda, 197-234. Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Auyero, Javier y Tim Moran. 2007. “The Dynamics of Collective Violence: Dissecting Food”. Social Forces 85 (3): 1341-1367.
Auyero, Javier y Débora Swistun. 2009. Flammable. Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of the Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1990. The Logic of Practice. California: Stanford University Press.
—. 1998. Practical Reason. California: Stanford University Press.
—. 1999. Acts of Resistance. Nueva York: New Press.
—. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. California: Stanford University Press.
Brass, Paul. 1996. Riots and Pogroms. Nueva York: NYU Press.
—. 1997. Theft of an Idol. Nueva Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Calvo, Ernesto y María Victoria Murillo. 2004. “Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market”. American Journal of Political Science 48 (4): 742-757.
Cohen, Stanley y Laurie Taylor. 1972. Psychological Survival. The Experience of Long-Term Imprisonment. Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Das, Veena, ed. 1990. Mirrors of Violence. Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Jesus, Carolina. 2003. Child of the Dark. The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Nueva York: Signet.
Diani, Mario y Doug McAdam. 2003. Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1965. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Nueva York: Free Press.
Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of Power. Health, Human Rigths, and the New War on the Poor. California: University of California Press.
Flaherty, Michael. 1999. A Watched Pot. How We Experience Time. Nueva York: NYU Press.
—. 2010. The Textures of Time. Agency and Temporal Experience. Filadelfia: Temple University Press.
Flaherty, Michael, Betina Freidin y Ruth Sautu. 2005. “Variation in the Perceived Passage of Time: A Cross-National Study”. Social Psychology Quarterly 68: 400-410.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Nueva York: Vintage.
—. 2000. Power. Essential Works of Foucault. 1954-1984. Nueva York: The New Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Nueva York: Basic Books.
Giddens, Anthony. 1986. The Constitution of Society. Nueva York: Polity Press.
Giraudy, Agustina. 2007. “The Distributive Politics of Emergency Employment Programs in Argentina”. Latin American Research Review 42 (2): 33-55.
Goldstein, Donna. 2003. Laughter Out of Place. Race, Class, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press.
González de la Rocha, Mercedes, Janice Perlman, Helen Safa, Elizabeth Jelin, Bryan R. Roberts y Peter M. Ward. 2004. “From the Marginality of the 1960s to the ‘New Poverty’ of Today: A LARR Research Forum”. Latin American Research Review 39 (1): 183-203. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1555388.
Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State”. American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375-402.
—. 2005. “Narratives of Corruption: Anthropological and Fictional Accounts of the Indian State”. Ethnography 6 (1): 5-34.
Hall, Edward T. 1959. The Silent Language. Nueva York: Anchor Books.
Helmke, Gretchen y Steven Levitsky. 2004. “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics”. Perspectives in Politics 2: 725-740.
Hoffman, Kelly y Miguel Ángel Centeno. 2003. “The Lopsided Continent: Inequality in Latin America”. Annual Review of Sociology 29: 363-390.
Holzner, Claudio. 2004. “The End of Clientelism? Strong and Weak Networks in a Mexican Squatter Movement”. Mobilization 9 (3): 223-240.
Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2003. “The Ontology of ‘Political Violence’: Action and Identity in Civil Wars”. Perspectives on Politics 1: 475-494.
Kirschke, Linda. 2000. “Informal Repression, Zero-Sum Politics and Late Third Wave Transitions”. Journal of Modern African Studies 38 (3): 383-403.
Levine, Robert. 1997. A Geography of Time. Nueva York: Basic Books.
Levitsky, Steven y Lucan A. Way. 2007. “Linkage, Leverage and the Post-Communist Divide”. East European Politics & Societies 21 (1): 48-66.
Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street Level Bureaucracy. Nueva York: Russell Sage Foundation.
—. 1984. “Bureaucratic Disentitlement in Social Welfare Programs”. The Social Service Review 58 (1): 3-27.
Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. Nueva York: Palgrave.
Mann, Leon. 1969. “Queue Culture: The Waiting Line as a Social System”. American Journal of Sociology 75: 340-354.
Marx, Karl. 1887. Capital, vol. 1. Nueva York: New World.
Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow y Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
Munn, Nancy. 1992. “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay”. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 91-123.
Nichter, Simeon. 2008. “Vote Buying or Turnout Buying? Machine Politics and the Secret Ballot”. American Political Science Review 102 (1): 19-31.
Ortner, Sherry. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1): 173-193.
—. 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Paley, Julia. 2001. Marketing Democracy. Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictarship Chile. Berkeley: California University Press.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian Alfred. 1954. The People of the Sierra. Nueva York: Criterion Books.
Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Quirós, Julieta. 2006. Cruzando la Sarmiento. Los piqueteros en la trama social del sur del Gran Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: IDES.
Remmer, Karen. 2007. “The Political Economy of the Patronage: Expenditure Patterns in the Argentina Province, 1983-2003”. Journal of Politics 69 (2): 363-377.
Roldán, Mary. 2002. Blood and Fire. La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Roth, Julius. 1963. Timetables: Structuring the Passage of Time in Hospital Treatment and Other Careers. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merril.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1994. Death without Weeping. California: California University Press.
Schneider, Jane y Peter Schneider. 2003. Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia and the Struggle for Palermo. California: California University Press.
Schutz, Alfred. 1964. “The Problem of Social Reality”. Collected Papers 1. La Haya: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schweizer, Howard. 2008. On Waiting. Londres: Routledge.
Scott, James C. y Benedict J. Kerkvliet. 1977. “How Traditional Rural Patrons Lose Legitimacy (in Southeast Asia)”. En Friends, Followers, and Factions: A Reader in Political Clientelism, editado por Steffen W. Schmidt, 483-507. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sorokin, Pitirim y Robert Merton. 1937. “Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis”. American Journal of Sociology 42: 615-629.
Stokes, Susan. 2005. “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina”. American Political Science Review 99 (3): 315-325.
Svampa, Maristella y Sebastián Pereyra. 2003. Entre la ruta y el barrio: la experiencia de las organizaciones piqueteras. Buenos Aires: Biblos.
Szwarcberg, Mariela. 2010. “Clientelismo en democracia. Lecciones del caso argentino”. Nueva Sociedad 225: 139-155.
Tarrow, Sidney. 1996. “The People’s Two Rhythms: Charles Tilly and the Study of Contentious Politics”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 38: 586-600.
Thompson, Edward. P. 1994. Customs in Common. Nueva York: The New Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”. En Bringing the State Back In, editado por Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer y Theda Skocpol. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1986. The Contentious French. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
—. 1997. Roads from Past to Future. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
—. 1998. Durable Inequality. Berkeley: California University Press.
—. 2003. The Politics of Collective Violence. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
—. 2007. Democracy. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2008. Credit and Blame. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tilly, Charles y Sidney Tarrow. 2006. Contentious Politics. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Weitz-Shapiro, Rebeca. 2006. “Partisanship and Protest: The Politics of Workfare Distribution in Argentina”. Latin American Research Review 41: 122-147.
Willis, Paul. 1997. Learning to Labor. Nueva York: Columbia University Press.
Young, Gerardo. 2002. “La trama política de los saqueos de diciembre”. Clarín Digital, diciembre 19. http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2002/05/19/p-389500.htm
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1979. Patterns of Time in Hospital Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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Published
2019-06-30
How to Cite
Auyero, J. (2019). The Winding Paths of Political Ethnography. Revista Colombiana De Antropología, 55(2), 169–190. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.804
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