Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.31 (834 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0822352338 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 216 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-09-09 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Intelligent A great book about waiting in line-- something which is so commonplace in Latin America that no one ever thinks about it. This book points out the ways in which waiting serves to disempower people and turn them into 'patients' rather than citizens. Although it is an academic book, it is very easy to read and I got a lot of useful insights from it.
They absorb the message that they should be patient and keep waiting, because there is nothing else that they can do. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital’s outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing. Drawing attention to a significant everyday dynamic that has received little scholarly attention until now, Auyero considers not only how the poor experience these lengthy waits but also how making poor people wait works as a strategy of state control.. Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. Scrutinizing the mundane interactions between the poor and the state, as well as underprivileged people’s confusion and uncertainty about the administrative processes that affect them, Javier Auyero argues that while waiting, the poor learn the
With this study, he has once again opened new pathways for the study of contemporary Latin American poverty.”—Brodwyn Fischer, author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro. “Patients of the State is an insightful and long-overdue exploration of how the worst Latin American welfare programs reinforce powerlessness and subcitizenship even as they sporadically relieve economic misery. Vividly describing the phenomenally cavalier ways in which the governmental agencies of Buenos Aires waste poor people’s time and resources, Javier Auyero calls attention to the insidious violence of systems that sap political initiative and hobble complex and delicate urban survival strategies