Social differentiations and production of values from the margins. Ambulant commerce and informal waste collection in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

MARIANO D. PERELMAN

Minneapolis

Congreso; 115th AAA Annual Meeting; 2016

American Anthropologist Organization

By addressing the way people that perform ambulant vending and garbage collectionin Buenos Aires make life worth living, the paper seeks to contribute in the discussionof the production of making value and making difference. Analysisof the practices and the social relations that create these circuits ofcommerce points to the multiple connections between different forms of marketrelations. These involve people, moralities, and different regimes offormalities/ informalities, and of legalities/ illegalities.  Instead of asserting that they are distinctfrom the rest of the economy (i.e. as marginalized sector) my intention is tounderstand the way they are mutually constructed. Following from this I willaddress its effect on subjectivities, on social integration, and on howordinary people understand a life worth living. Activities that appear to be at the margins will be instead approachedethnographically as theconstruction of difference regimes. This illuminates the heart of the production ofvalue and social control.  The paper isbased in a long-term fieldwork started in 2002. This made possible for me tofollow the changes in macro economic processes and the impacts, resistances,appropriations on everyday practices of ordinary people. It also made possiblethe comprehension of the way neoliberal ideas and values (which started with thecivic- military coup in 1976 and were especially developed during the neoliberal decade -1989/2002) are rooted inordinary people practices of making a living (as an embodied habitus) that contribute inthe production of value and differences.