La política del valor y la política del significado: tendiendo puentes

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute conceptually to an anthropological approach to politics and power situated ethnographically. The starting point is a review of everything from classical debates about the relationship between anthropology and ideology to contemporary discussions on ethnographic theory. Then, with the discussion limited to the study of political processes involving the state, it focuses on a case from contemporary Argentina that expresses and materializes the political dimension of public infrastructure. It examines significant associations between infrastructure and federalism established and mobilized by political actors committed to creating an interprovincial regionalization among the provinces of Cordoba, Entre Rios and Santa Fe. This corpus of data, from which the observations and arguments presented arise, is the result of a decade of research developed from an ethnographic perspective with a methodology that privileged fieldwork based on participant observation and open interviews. Finally, it proposes a response to the theoretical and methodological question of how to complement ethnographical study of the concrete material effects of the state with the productive and creative dimensions of politics by building bridges between the politics of meaning and the politics of value.

Keywords

• State (Thesaurus); ethnographic theory
• political process
• infrastructure