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Project

Ethnicity, politics and State in popular sectors in contemporary Argentina. Ethnography of a conflict over relocations in a neighborhood of migrants and indigenous populations.

The general objective of my doctoral research is to explore the link between ethnicity, politics and State in contemporary Argentina, from the perspective of inequality and social inclusion. Specifically, I analyse the ways in which categories of ethnic identification are related to the dynamics of daily politics in a popular neighbourhood of indigenous and migrant population located in a peripheral area of the city of La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina). This will be done from the empirical approach to a conflict for relocations in the neighbourhood motivated by the development of a public work of hydraulic infrastructure in the city. The methodology that guided the fieldwork carried out for the thesis in the period 2013-2016 was ethnography. It focused on a prolonged and systematic presence in the field, and in that context, the conduction of in-depth interviews and participant observations. In this period, I have conducted several interviews and participated in meetings, assemblies, and various interaction situations with inhabitants of the neighbour, political leaders, local referents, university agents, and state public officials. This was complemented by the collection of documentary materials (newspapers, official publications, technical reports, informative flyers of political organizations). The next stage of the research project from 2017 onwards will be focused on the deepening of the bibliographic collection and analysis (intending to expand the theoretical view of a mainly locally emplaced research toward global frameworks), the systematization and analysis of the collected data, and the writing of the doctoral thesis. In the following description of the PhD Project I present briefly the principal lines of the theoretical framework of the research and its academic and social possible contributions. The main hypothesis of the research is that ethnic identifications ("indigenous people" or "migrant people") of the inhabitants of the settlement are brought into play in the daily negotiation of resources with State and political actors (in particular in the framework of the process of relocation) to establish different criteria for merit and demerit of these public resources (the lands on which they live, the houses they would receive as part of the relocation). These criteria will have a roll on questioning or reinforcing inequalities in the neighbourhood. And for that reason are constantly disputed in the everyday context of political ties that the local people establish with each other and with external actors. In this process, the various senses, projects and interests that the State brings into play -through their state agents- are disputed, re-interpreted, modified "from below" by the local people.
Date:1 Nov 2017 →  30 Apr 2018
Keywords:ETHNICITY, MIGRATION, ETHNOGRAPHY
Disciplines:Anthropology, Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology
Project type:Collaboration project