CRISIS AND CULTURAL CHANGE (original) (raw)

El Apag�n en Buenos Aires 1999 Manejo de crisis en los sectores privados y p�blicos en la Argentina

2002

un incendio en el túnel de cables, el cual genera la interrupción de energía eléctrica en diez (10) barrios porteños. Más de 150.000 clientes de Edesur (aproximadamente 600.000 personas) en Capital Federal son afectados por el apagón en el primer momento; en sus domicilios, en oficinas, en bancos, en el tren subterráneo y por las calles. El apagón dura once días en pleno verano con temperaturas arriba de los +30 o C. Un problema técnico que aparentó ser de rápida solución se transformó rápidamente en un conflicto social y una crisis económica y política que duraría más de dos meses. El presente estudio de caso analiza la crisis social y política que fue producida a partir del apagón en Buenos Aires desde una perspectiva teórica cognitiva-institucional, en la cual los procesos de toma decisiones y de comunicación son vitales. Aspectos tales como definición del problema, procesamiento de información, politización de crisis y acciones simbólicas son analizados dentro del contexto cultural, político y económico de Buenos Aires y Argentina. Una de las dimensiones centrales en este análisis es la cuestión de los procesos de privatización de los servicios públicos, siendo una característica de la política económica argentina de la última década. Este trabajo es un estudio sobre el reciente apagón de Buenos Aires y también una contribución a las discusiones teóricas sobre manejo de situaciones de crisis en las esferas de 'lo privado' y de 'lo público'; del Estado y del Mercado.

When Time Freezes: Socio-Anthropological Research on Social Crises

Social and cultural anthropologists have made a unique, relevant and anti-normative contribution to the study of crises. By means of ethnographic fieldwork in specific settings, anthropologists have provided significant information on how social groups try to cope with critical situations in everyday life resorting to different strategies, forms of cooperation or political action. Simultaneously, anthropology has brought to light the role played by cognitive schemata and symbolic resources in making sense of crisis situations, turning them intelligible and developing possible resolutions. Anthropology has carried out important studies on how people experience time, give meaning to and produce plausible images of the future in crisis situations, when time freezes. The main theoretical contributions to the study of crises will be discussed, together with a number of empirical studies among which special attention will be paid to those carried out in Latin America, including my own research on the experiences and responses of the middle class during the 2001 Argentine crisis. Los antropólogos sociales y culturales han hecho una contribución única, relevante y anti-normativa a los estudios de crisis. Mediante el trabajo de campo etnográfico en escenarios específicos, los antropólogos han proporcionado información importante sobre cómo los grupos sociales tratan de hacer frente a situa-ciones críticas en la vida cotidiana por medio de diferentes estrategias, formas de cooperación o acción política. Al mismo tiempo, la antropología ha puesto de manifiesto el papel que desempeñan los esquemas cognitivos y los recursos simbólicos para dar sentido a las situaciones de crisis, tornándolas inteligibles y desarrollando posibles soluciones. La antropología ha llevado a cabo importantes estudios sobre cómo las personas experimentan el tiempo, dan sentido y producen imágenes del futuro plausibles en situaciones de crisis, cuando el tiempo se congela. Aquí se discutirán las principales contribuciones teóricas a los estudios de crisis, junto con una serie de investigaciones empíricas, entre las cuales se prestará especial atención a aquellas llevadas a cabo en América Latina, incluso mis propios estudios sobre las experiencias y las respuestas de la clase media durante la crisis argentina de 2001.

Blackouts: a sociology of electrical power failure

Electricity fuels our existence. It powers water purification, waste, food, transportation and communication systems. Modern social life is impossible to imagine without it. This article looks at what happens when the power goes off. It scrutinises the causes and consequences of accidental electrical power cuts. It begins by identifying the reasons for power failure. In doing so, power generation systems are identified as critical infrastructures. They are more fragile than is commonly supposed, and the argument is made that they are getting frailer. Irrespective of cause, blackouts display similar effects. These social patterns are identified. They include measurable economic losses and less easily quantified social costs. Financial damage, food safety, crime, transport issues and problems caused by diesel generators are all discussed. This is more than a record of failures past. It is contended that blackouts are dress rehearsals for the future in which they will appear with great...

Critical Social Analysis of Crisis

Praktyka Teoretyczna, 2021

In this article, we offer a critical social analysis of crisis in light of capitalist development and, above all, in the post-2008 world. We discuss five approaches in the social sciences that deal with the problem of crisis and develop some theore­tical lines for a critical approach to the theme. We argue that precarity can be an important topic for grasping the current crises via critical approaches. The text also presents the six articles that are part of the issue we edited for Praktyka Teoretyczna entitled “Latency of the crisis.”

Workers’ Responses to the Argentine Crisis: The Case of a Cartonero Co-operative

2017

This research is located in the aftermath of Argentina's economic collapse in December 2001. In broad terms, it questions how subaltern or marginalised populations contest disadvantage in an environment of economic meltdown. Following the economic crash, unprecedented levels of unemployment, poverty and social marginalisation generated a variety of organic 'survival' responses. These initiatives took various forms and adopted differing approaches, including confrontational activity of piquetero organisations, whilst more institutional or structured actions of cooperative projects formed from workplace recovery. A further response was cartoneo, the practice of gathering and selling recyclable waste. Working as a cartonero, or waste gatherer was generally adopted as a last resort strategy by desperately poor, marginalised individuals from predominantly informal and semi-formal settlements in peripheral areas of the Greater Buenos Aires Province (GBA) and other urban areas nationally. 1 Possibly taking their lead from the broader trends in cooperative organisation, numbers of waste gatherers, or cartoneros, banded together to form cooperatives. The subject of this thesis is one such project, the Tren Blanco cooperative , established in Villa Independencia, an impoverished shanty town in José León Suárez, San Martín department, GBA. The topic was selected on the basis of the opportunity it afforded to present a subaltern study and bottom-up account of the event from the perspective of the protagonists. Appropriate to this aim, the focal aspect of the study was obtained by a qualitative oral approach of informal and semi-structured interviews combined with ethnographic observation conducted between July and August 2007. Secondary resource materials, including academic literature and other media sources, were used to provide a contextualisation of the event within both the broader context of Argentina's socioeconomic history and the more specific context of late twentiethcentury and early twenty-first-century history. Literature on the subject of social 1 Gran Buenos Aires (GBA) is defined by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC) as the area including Buenos Aires City and twenty-four surrounding municipalities of Buenos Aires Province. The total area of GBA is 3,833 km². INDEC, '¿Qué es el Gran Buenos Aires?',