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"Auyero, Javier"
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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 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.
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.
Journal Article
The ambivalent state : police-criminal collusion at the urban margins
\"Over the last few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have shifted analysing 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. 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 relationships between cops and drug dealers in Argentina. Drawing on a unique combination of ethnographic research and documentary evidence, including hundreds of pages of wiretapped phone conversations, sociologists Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering analyse the inner-workings of \"police-criminal collusion\" and its connections to drug markets and the depacification of daily life. Through rich descriptions of the actual clandestine interactions between drug dealers and police, they argue that an up-close examination of covert state action exposes the workings of an \"ambivalent state\": one that enforces the rule of law while at the same time and in the same place functions as a partner to what it defines as criminal behaviour. The Ambivalent State develops a political sociology of violence that focuses not only on takes place in police stations, criminal courts, and poor neighbourhoods, but also the clandestine actions and interactions of police agents, judges, and politicians that structure daily life at the urban margins. By way of empirical demonstration, the book makes an urgent call for scholars to incorporate clandestine action into explanations of the state. Collusion, policing, the state, crime, violence, urban marginality, legal cynicism, Argentina, ethnography\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Afterword. Going Granular
The articles in this special issue demonstrate that ethnography is an unparalleled way of penetrating and making sense of what the state is and does, of how ordinary citizens think and feel about it and, in the process, perpetuate and/or challenge existing relationships with it.
Journal Article
In harm's way : the dynamics of urban violence
\"Arquitecto Tucci, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires, is a place where crushing poverty and violent crime are everyday realities. Homicides--often involving young people--continue to skyrocket, and in the emergency room there, victims of shootings or knifings are an all-too-common sight. In Harm's Way takes a harrowing look at daily life in Arquitecto Tucci, examining the sources, uses, and forms of interpersonal violence among the urban poor at the very margins of Argentine society.Drawing on more than two years of immersive fieldwork, sociologist Javier Auyero and Marâia Berti, an elementary school teacher in the neighborhood, provide a powerful and disarmingly intimate account of what it is like to live under the constant threat of violence. They argue that being physically aggressive becomes a habitual way of acting in poor and marginalized communities, and that violence is routine and carries across various domains of public and private life. Auyero and Berti trace how different types of violence--be it criminal, drug related, sexual, or domestic--overlap, intersect, and blur together. They show how the state is complicit in the production of harm, and describe the routines and relationships that residents, particularly children, establish to cope with and respond to the constant risk that besieges them and their loved ones.Provocative, eye-opening, and extraordinarily moving, In Harm's Way is destined to become a classic work on violence at the urban margins\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
PATIENTS OF THE STATE: An Ethnographic Account of Poor People’s Waiting
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 office 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. Basado en seis meses de trabajo etnográfico en la sala de espera del Ministerio de Desarrollo Social de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, este trabajo examina las experiencias que los pobres urbanos tienen de la espera. El artículo estudia la sala de espera como un sitio de intensa sociabilidad en medio de una generalizada incertidumbre. Las experiencias de la espera convencen a los destituidos que tienen que ser pacientes, transmitiendo—de manera implícita—un mensaje estatal: tienen que ser beneficiarios sumisos. Un análisis de las dinámicas socioculturales de la espera nos ayuda a entender cómo (y porqué) los beneficiarios de los programas de asistencia se convierten no en ciudadanos sino en pacientes del estado.
Journal Article
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 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.
Journal Article
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 deeply political in a threefold sense: (a) it is entangled with the intermittent and contradictory form in which the police intervene in this relegated neighborhood, (b) it has the potential to give birth to collective action that targets the state while simultaneously signaling it as the main actor responsible for the skyrocketing physical aggression in the area, and (c) it provokes paradoxical forms of informal social control as residents rely on state agents who are themselves enmeshed in the production of this violence.
Journal Article
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 action nor the outcome of normative behavior but as generated by a clientelist habitus, a set of cognitive and affective political dispositions manufactured in the repeated interactions that take place within brokers’ inner circles of followers. The article also has as a secondary objective to contribute to dispositional sociology through the conceptualization of the clientelist habitus. It does so by showing the active work agents engage in as they prevent disjunctures provoked by what Bourdieu calls the “hysteresis effect.”
Journal Article
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 erroneous perceptions that underlie it. Along with inherent ambiguity surrounding toxic contamination, the generalized confusion about sources and effects of pollution is the result of two factors: (1) the \"relational anchoring\" of risk perceptions and (2) the \"labor of confusion\" generated by powerful 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 in particular, should pay close attention to the contaminated spaces where the urban poor live.
Journal Article