Downward mobility, stories of suffering and the ideals of the Argentine middle class

VISACOVSKY, SERGIO EDUARDO

Berlín

Workshop; Critical Approaches to transitional Scenarios: perspectives from the global south.; 2012

Wiessenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

In this article I want to show that although Argentine crisis of 2001 was an unprecedented situation which demanded particular responses and interpretations, these could only be generated by means of existing cultural resources. Crisis situations are privileged scenarios for studying certain objects. Events such as crises uncover underlying principles that structure social life. Indeed, the specific conditions that led to the crisis enabled the middle class stories about nation to be made explicit or revealed. I argue that the crisis favored the public circulation of the middle class story and the role of work in social mobility. As we shall see, the middle class story is, at the same time, a way of narrating the national history. In other words, the crisis exposed how a part of Argentine people perceived Argentina. Several segments of the Argentine society accepted a set of beliefs about why some people had progressed and others were standstill as a truth; how progress could be achieved; how progress could be made decently, who were eligible to progress and who would never progress. While hard work and efforts were considered necessary conditions for progress, not all hard work and efforts were suitable. Thus, crisis was a time when many people retested their beliefs such as: not all manners of work driving to progress and not all modes can be considered an acceptable progress.