During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American countries witnessed unprecedented struggles over the terms of national sovereignty, civic participation, and social justice. Nowhere was this more ...visible than in Peronist Argentina (1946-1955), where Juan and Eva Perón led the region's largest populist movement in pursuit of new political hopes and material desires. Eduardo Elena considers this transformative moment from a fresh perspective by exploring the intersection of populism and mass consumption. He argues that Peronist actors redefined national citizenship around expansive promises of a vida digna (dignified life), which encompassed not only the satisfaction of basic wants, but also the integration of working Argentines into a modern consumer society. From the mid-1940s onward, the state moved to boost purchasing power and impose discipline on the marketplace, all while broadcasting images of a contented populace.Drawing on documents such as the correspondence between Peronist sympathizers and authorities, Elena sheds light on the contest over the dignified life. He shows how the consumer aspirations of citizens overlapped with Peronist paradigms of state-led development, but not without generating great friction among allies and opposition from diverse sectors of society. Consumer practices encouraged intense public scrutiny of class and gender comportment, and everyday objects became freighted with new cultural meaning. By providing important insights on why Peronism struck such a powerful chord,Dignifying Argentinasituates Latin America within the broader history of citizenship and consumption at mid-century, and provides innovative ways to understand the politics of redistribution in the region today.
Our Indigenous Ancestors complicates the history of the erasure of native cultures and the perceived domination of white, European heritage in Argentina through a study of anthropology museums in the ...late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carolyne Larson demonstrates how scientists, collectors, the press, and the public engaged with Argentina’s native American artifacts and remains (and sometimes living peoples) in the process of constructing an “authentic” national heritage. She explores the founding and functioning of three museums in Argentina, as well as the origins and consolidation of Argentine archaeology and the professional lives of a handful of dynamic curators and archaeologists, using these institutions and individuals as a window onto nation building, modernization, urban-rural tensions, and problems of race and ethnicity in turn-of-the-century Argentina. Museums and archaeology, she argues, allowed Argentine elites to build a modern national identity distinct from the country’s indigenous past, even as it rested on a celebrated, extinct version of that past. As Larson shows, contrary to widespread belief, elements of Argentina’s native American past were reshaped and integrated into the construction of Argentine national identity as white and European at the turn of the century. Our Indigenous Ancestors provides a unique look at the folklore movement, nation building, science, institutional change, and the divide between elite, scientific, and popular culture in Argentina and the Americas at a time of rapid, sweeping changes in Latin American culture and society.
While most people live far from the sites of oil production, oil politics involves us all. Resources for Reform explores how people's lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated ...oil industry through a close look at Argentina's experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.Examining Argentina's conversion from a state- controlled to a private oil market, Elana Shever reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. This engaging ethnography offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. It reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.
In 1951 an Argentine newspaper announced that the standard of living of workers in Argentina was "the highest in the world." More than half a century later, Argentines still look back to the ...mid-twentieth century as the "golden years of Peronism, " a time when working people, who had struggled to make ends meet a few years earlier, could now buy ready-made clothing, radios, and even big-ticket items like refrigerators. Milanesio explores this period marked by populist politics, industrialization, and a fairer distribution of the national income by analyzing the relations among consumers, consumer goods, manufacturers, advertising agents, and Juan Domingo Perón's government (1946–1955). Combining theories from the anthropology of consumption, cultural studies, and gender studies with the methodologies of social, cultural, and oral histories, Milanesio shows the exceptional cultural and social visibility of low-income consumers in postwar Argentina along with their unprecedented economic and political influence. Her study reveals the scope of the remarkable transformations fueled by the new market by examining the language and aesthetics of advertisement, the rise of middle- and upper-class anxieties, and the profound changes in gender expectations.
Postmemories of Terror focuses on how young Argentineans remember the traumatic events of the military dictatorship (1976-83). This fascinating work is based on oral histories with sixty-three young ...people who were too young to be directly victimized or politically active during this period. All were born during or after the terror and possessed an entirely mediated knowledge of it. Susana Kaiser explores how the post-dictatorship generation was reconstructing this past from three main sources: inter-generational dialogue, education and the communication media. These conversations discuss selected and recurrent themes like societal fears and silences, remembering and forgetting, historical explanations and accountability. Together they contribute to our understanding of how communities deal with the legacy of terror.
Bodies in Crisis Sutton, Barbara
2010, 20100218, 2010-02-18, 20100101
eBook
Born and raised in Argentina and still maintaining significant ties to the area, Barbara Sutton examines the complex, and often hidden, bodily worlds of diverse women in that country during a period ...of profound social upheaval. Based primarily on women's experiential narratives and set against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis and intensified social movement activism post-2001,Bodies in Crisisilluminates how multiple forms of injustice converge in and are contested through women's bodies. Sutton reveals the bodily scars of neoliberal globalization; women's negotiation of cultural norms of femininity and beauty; experiences with clandestine, illegal, and unsafe abortions; exposure to and resistance against interpersonal and structural violence; and the role of bodies as tools and vehicles of political action.Through the lens of women's body consciousness in a Global South country, and drawing on multifaceted stories and a politically embedded approach,Bodies in Crisissuggests that social policy, economic systems, cultural ideologies, and political resistance are ultimately fleshly matters.
Few tasks are as crucial for the future of democracy in Latin America—and, indeed, in other underdeveloped areas of the world—as strengthening the rule of law and reforming the system of taxation.
In ...this book, Marcelo Bergman shows how success in getting citizens to pay their taxes is related intimately to the social norms that undergird the rule of law. The threat of legal sanctions is itself insufficient to motivate compliance, he argues. That kind of deterrence works best when citizens already have other reasons to want to comply, based on their beliefs about what is fair and about how their fellow citizens are behaving. The problem of free riding, which arises when cheaters can count on enough suckers to pay their taxes so they can avoid doing so and still benefit from the government’s supply of public goods, cannot be reversed just by stringent law, because the success of governmental enforcement ultimately depends on the social equilibrium that predominates in each country. Culture and state effectiveness are inherently linked.
Using a wealth of new data drawn from his own multidimensional research involving game theory, statistical models, surveys, and simulations, Bergman compares Argentina and Chile to show how, in two societies that otherwise share much in common, the differing traditions of rule of law explain why so many citizens evade paying taxes in Argentina—and why, in Chile, most citizens comply with the law. In the concluding chapter, he draws implications for public policy from the empirical findings and generalizes his argument to other societies in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Under violent military dictatorship, Operation Condor and the Dirty War scarred Argentina from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, leaving behind a legacy of repression, state terror, and political ...murder. Even today, the now-democratic Argentine government attempts to repair the damage of these atrocities by making human rights a policy priority.
But what about the other Dirty War, during which Argentine civilians--including indigenous populations--and foreign powers ignored and even abetted the state's vicious crimes against humanity? In this groundbreaking new work, David Sheinin draws on previously classified Argentine government documents, human rights lawsuits, and archived propaganda to illustrate the military-constructed fantasy of bloodshed as a public defense of human rights.
Exploring the reactions of civilians and the international community to the daily carnage, Sheinin unearths how compliance with the dictatorship perpetuated the violence that defined a nation. This new approach to the history of human rights in Argentina will change how we understand dictatorship, democracy, and state terror.
The Invisible Poor Demombynes, Gabriel; Verner, Dorte
2010, 2008, 04-14-2010, 2010-02-01, Volume:
v.No.183
eBook, Book
Open access
Many of the poorest Argentines are invisible in official statistics. Four million rural residents and another 12 million in small urban areas lie outside the reach of the Permanent Household Survey ...(EPH), which is the basis for poverty figures and most data on social conditions in the country. According to the best estimate, roughly a third of rural residents, more than a million people, live in poverty. The urban bias common too many countries have been accentuated by the lack of data on the rural poor. With little information on their condition, it is exceedingly difficult for policy makers to design policies and programs to help move people out of poverty. The report is organized as follows: chapter one profiles rural poverty base on the limited existing data, including the first in-depth analysis of rural poverty ever conducted with the 2001 population census. Chapter two presents findings from the new qualitative study of the rural poor conducted in the first half of 2007. Finally, chapter three concludes with a discussion of methodology for rural poverty analysis, focusing on the issues related to expanding the EPH to full national coverage.
Victor Mirelman, in his study of the greatest concentration of Latin American Jewry, examines the changing facade of the Argentinean Jewish community from the beginning of mass Jewish immigration in ...1890 to its decline in 1930. During this period, Jews arrived from Russia, Poland, Romania, Syria, Turkey and Morocco Each group founded its own synagogues. mutual help organizations. hospitals. cultural associations. and newspapers of particular vitality was the Yiddish press and the Yiddish theatre. Jewish immigrants were also especially active politically. particularly in the Socialist Party and in the workers' unions. Based on research in the Argentine archives. Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890-1930 describes the immigration and settlement process. studies the first generation of Argentine-born Jews. and provides an understanding of assimilation and acculturation. Mirelman discusses the religious life of the community differentiating between the Ashkenazim and the various Sephardic groups and devotes chapters to Zionism, to Jewish culture in Yiddish. Hebrew. and Spanish. to education; and to social action Issues that created conflict and friction are analyzed in detail.
