Claudio Ezequiel Benzecry

The High of Cultural Experience Toward a Microsociology of Cultural Consumption

Does the experience of cultural consumption have its own sui generis attraction and value in itself, or is it an index of external social ranking? Four criteria are proposed that are observable in microsociological detail: (1) bodily self-absorption in the cultural experience, creating an intense internal interaction ritual; (2) collective effervescence among the audience; (3) Goffmanian front-stage self-presentation in settings of cultural consumption; and (4) verbal discourse during and around the cultural experience. Data from highly committed opera fanatics in Buenos Aires are used to document the extreme pole of cultural consumption that rejects external social hierarchies in favor of pure musical experience. This individualized and internal style of music consumption resembles religious mysticism, and what Weber in his typology of orientations to religious experience called virtuoso religiosity, as distinct from typical social class orientations to religion and to music.

What did we say they’ve said? Four encounters between theory, method and the production of data

Following Reed (2010, 2011), we can think of ethnography as the encounter between two sets of meanings: those of the ethnographer on those of the subjects whose lives are being studied. If we are able to recognize the contested, unfinished, reflexive and complex character of how people think about themselves, we should be able to imagine ourselves in the same terms and go into the field armed with a theoretical helmet with interchangeable lenses, imagining which theoretical concepts would best fit the case. In this paper, I develop how this approach finds a fruitful analogue in psychoanalysis as a practical endeavor that produces a particular kind of truth; what we can learn from that equivalency; how this epistemological approach works in parallel to Reed’s plea for theoretical pluralism; and what are then the consequences of this book for practitioners of cultural ethnography.

Meaning in Action: Outline of an Integral Theory of Culture:

and European contexts might have benefited from. Differences in immigration policies underlie important variants in models of integration that are inexorably associated with patterns of acculturation of first and second generation immigrants. For example, CILS was collected a few years after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which, after granting legal status to 1.6 million unauthorized immigrants (Kerwin, Brick, and Kilberg 2012), marked the beginning of restrictive immigration policies in the United States. In Spain, extraordinary and (most importantly) permanent regularization programs granted legal status to more than one million unauthorized immigrants between 1996 and 2007. Another important element associated with contextual variation is the different levels of observed inequality between the two countries. Gini coefficients in Spain between 2008 and 2012 were consistently lower than those in the United States between 1992 and 1995. Fiske’s stereotype content model (2012), in which higher inequality leads to the magnification of social hierarchies, might aid in explaining differential levels of ambition in the observed contexts. Legacies (Portes and Rumbaut 2001), Ethnicites (Rumbaut and Portes 2001), and, undoubtedly, Spanish Legacies constitute a trilogy that advances our understanding of core mechanisms behind identity formation, adaptation, and integration processes in increasingly diverse but still contextually different postindustrial societies.

La lógica práctica del dominio clientelista

On the bases of a series of analytical exams of three rounds of ethnographic field-work in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and with a micro-sociological approach of empirical analysis, this article sets out to reorient the study of clienteles’ politics towards its every day nature, and recognize the relevant role played by the close links mediating agents keep with their closest and most reliable followers- Thus it aims to contribute to better understand and explain the practical features of clientelist domination. Against what’s commonly asserted, this paper maintains clientelist politics takes place in daily life’s routine (and not only in the context of campaigns and elections), and that the behaviour of the most loyal clients must not be understood nor explained as a product of rational action or normative conducts, but as resultant of clientelist habits, that is, a set of cognitive and affective political dispositions, produced by repeated interactions that take place within the inner circles of the followers of the mediating agents.

The Practical Logic of Political Domination: Conceptualizing the Clientelist Habitus

This article aims to redirect the study of patronage politics toward its quotidian character and acknowledge the key role played by brokers’ strong ties with their closest followers to better understand and explain the practical features of clientelist domination. This article argues that clientelist politics occur during routine daily life and that most loyal clients’ behavior should be understood and explained neither as the product of rational action nor the outcome of normative behavior but as generated by a clientelist habitus, a set of cognitive and affective political dispositions manufactured in the repeated interactions that take place within brokers’ inner circles of followers. The article also has as a secondary objective to contribute to dispositional sociology through the conceptualization of the clientelist habitus. It does so by showing the active work agents engage in as they prevent disjunctures provoked by what Bourdieu calls the “hysteresis effect.”

Ceci n’est pas un événement

How do we study the social not as something outside of us that is fixed eternal but rather as contingent, conjectural, and yet patterned and patterning? And if we take this seriously, how do we understand people doing politics when the possibility of transcendence has evaporated? The tragedy of tragedy is precisely the loss of fatum, the disappearance of a world traversed by signs of a manifest destiny against which heroic figures have to fight in order not to perish or become defeated by inevitability. In analyzing this (i.e. the confusion of tongues that comes with understanding the world as unscripted and its unraveling as open to multiple potential paths), Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s What is an Event elegantly and lyrically explores the manifold ways in which temporality and cultural forms go (or do not go) together. The title of this review essay alludes to René Magritte’s work, The treachery of images, but also to the sprawling reflection on the divorce between words and things that Foucault (1983) elaborated after it in addition to many other pieces where he did so – like The order of things (1980). While Foucault is conspicuously absent from the manuscript, WagnerPacifici brings other French post-structuralist travelers to the fore in order to understand whether an event exists or whether it becomes such after the semiotic and performative work of gestures. In doing so, the book provides a thorough account of the tension between representational and non-representational strategies to narrate the ongoing character of social life. Aiming to go beyond the binary of structure-event, the book departs from the work of Braudel and the Annales School by combining the works of Deleuze, Badiou, and Latour with pragmatist-inspired US scholarship in semiotics (mostly Austin, Searle, and Davidson) and sociology (Sewell, Abbott). In doing so, the book is a unique gem that aims to incorporate authors who have been absolutely ignored or obliterated from conversations in US sociology (as Deleuze has been via Latour) and reflects on the comparative travels of some pragmatist-inspired ideas about the different functions of language in describing, performing, or crystallizing reality.

José Emilio Burucúa

ose Emilio “Gaston” Burucua is professor of cultural history at the National University of San Martin in Buenos Aires (fig. 1). In his work, Burucua draws on the Warburgian tradition in art history to explore the complex intersections of art and science, from Renaissance Europe to the New World. He has produced rigorous scholarship on the history of European early modernity, as well as analyzed Argentinean and Hispano-American art history. The name of the journal he edits, Eadem utraque Europa (Europe Both and the Same), summarizes his intellectual project well: to understand European modernity, its conflicts and contradictions, in relation to Latin America as well as to its own past. He has been central to the modernization of the local historiographical field in Argentina, presiding over curricular changes at the University of Buenos Aires during the 1980s, as well as to related fields like art history and conservation. Taller de Restauracion de Arte, the conservation institute he directs, has restored over two hundred works of art since 2004. His major books are Corderos y elefantes: La sacralidad y la risa en la modernidad clasica, siglos XV a XVII (Lambs and Elephants: Sacredness and Laughter in Classical Modernity, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries; 2001) and Historia, arte, cultura: De Aby Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg (History, Art, Culture: From Aby Warburg to Carlo Ginzburg; 2003). More recently, he published El mito de Ulises en el mundo moderno (The Myth of Ulysses in the Modern Era; 2013), for which he received the national award for art history essays published in Argentina during the years 2010–14, and “Como sucedieron estas cosas”: Representar masacres y genocidios (“How These Things Came About”: Representing Massacre and Genocide) (2014), written in collaboration with Nicolas Kwiatkowski

The Sociology of Wind Bands: Amateur Music Between Cultural Domination and Autonomy

industrial restructuring, globalization (although she briefly mentions its effects, such as moving jobs abroad), skill-biased technological change, and so on—instead all negative labor market shifts are attributed to the civil rights movement. Finally, DiTomaso misrepresents the nature of the tension between labor rights and civil rights and argues, ‘‘virtue is not necessarily associated with one side or the other’’ (p. 66). The only resolution, she argues, would be ‘‘if the institutional protections of labor rights are extended to other people through civil rights, not by using civil rights to undermine labor rights and destroy workers’ institutional protections’’ (p. 66). By and large, the white working class experienced the civil rights movement as the latter, ‘‘having led to policies that undermine their hold on decent jobs and decent pay, not as having led to the extension of decent jobs and decent pay to other people’’ (p. 66). While this statement is true in the abstract, it ignores the racist history of unions, which were vehicles for white opportunity hoarding and black/ minority exclusion. In the final pages of the concluding chapter, DiTomaso acknowledges this fact by writing, ‘‘Thus, there was a direct tension between labor rights, represented by solidarity with the union, and civil rights, as reflected in the efforts of blacks to gain access to the jobs that had been hoarded by white union members’’ (p. 322). This was the one and only real conflict between labor rights and civil rights. Most unions defined the achievement of civil rights as irreconcilable with their protections; hence to argue that there is no virtue with either labor or civil rights or to suggest that civil rights should only be extended in a way that protects labor rights is to live in an imaginary world. To document and recognize the racist and exclusionary history of unions in the conclusion, after spending the entire book equating labor and civil rights, is problematic. Despite these issues, this book will be useful to those interested in stratification, work/labor, white privilege, and racial inequality.

The Path Not Taken? Culture, Materials, and Pleasure in Action

groups (Haitians and Nicaraguans) fared in the city in the 1980s and were confronted with the changing landscape resulting from the Mariel boatlift and the Liberty City riots. In Miami: Mistress of the Americas, Jan Nijman (2011) describes the transformation of Miami from one the most inaccessible parts of the country to the first hemispheric city—the most centrally connected city in the Americas: post-industrial, global, multicultural, segregated, and transient. Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami explores immigrant livelihoods in a rising global city, challenges the role of the Cuban enclave in the contemporary Latino immigrant community, and critically assesses the neoliberal and racial projects of the state as a numerous and increasingly diverse flow of Latino immigrants arrive in the city and make it their home. In short, Aranda, Huges, and Sabogal offer a conceptually sophisticated and rich analysis of immigration in a segregated, unique, and rising global city; they provide new methods for the inclusion of emotions and subjective perceptions needed in the literature on international migration; and they pave the way for the incorporation of more nuanced analysis on the confluence of class, racial, and ethnic rivalries and legal status in urban areas with high concentrations of immigrants.

Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina’s Music Scene

One good way to summarize Troubling Gender would be to say that it scrutinizes how gender and genre intersect. That would be partially wrong, as the usual way in which sociologists imagine the relationship with a text is as an intersection between its content and individuals or groups negotiating over its meaning. Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán, on the other hand, go beyond that, aiming to show the complex and contradictory ways in which lyrics that are sexually charged, obscene, and misogynist are contextually appropriated, mobilized, performed, enacted and sometimes transformed by young people from the poor periphery of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area—and how that results in particular and fleeting sexual identifications. In order to do so, the authors enter into a fruitful dialogue with third wave feminism scholarship, the sociology of intimacy, and previous studies of music lyrics. Chapter One provides an introduction to the history and the social world of cumbia in Buenos Aires that serves to contextualize the material in the rest of the book. The second chapter moves to show what people do with the musical materials (more than anything with lyrics) and how the nuanced identifications they construct about themselves relate to economic changes that have resulted in new family and gender configurations, as well as in new sexual practices now available to young men and women from popular sectors. The book advances slowly by first interviewing and then providing ethnographic material to investigate the meaning that pibes and pibas (a category that expresses the liminal character of those interviewed: old enough to enter the labor market and reproduce, but without having the means to live self sufficiently on their own) attach to the lyrics they listen and dance to, and how that frames the new mating etiquette in which they participate. Chapter Two also shows how some of the lyrics of the genre deal with the new subject positions occupied by las pibas, showing how sex becomes de-coupled from marriage and family and becomes autonomous, separating itself from love. Most of the lyrics show a confusion of tongues, in which young men try to make sense of the newfound active position young women exercise. Chapter Three discusses what ‘‘boys’’ have to say, emphasizing how attitudes toward the sexual practices described in and inscribed by the songs vary according to who the young men are with and to whom they are addressed (a friend, a girlfriend, a one night stand, an ex). Chapter Four, which is the most interesting and complex one, does the same for the ‘‘girls’’ showing how women distance or appropriate the lyrics depending on the situation and the company. Vila and Semán are part of a larger team that has been exploring issues of gender and sexuality within the popular sectors of Metropolitan Buenos Aires for the last decade or so; the other scholars who have partaken in this project are Malvina Silba, Eloı́sa Martı́n (who wrote the first chapter to the book) and Marı́a Julia Carozzi. The text in fact generously includes a minoritydissenting report by Carozzi, in which she advances two criticisms to the book’s main argument. The first is that the authors Reviews 433