Welfare bureaucrats and territorial politics in post-liberal Argentina, 2003-2008.

PERELMITER, LUISINA

Evanston, Illinois, Estados Unidos

Workshop; Latin-American Studies Workshop of the Center for International and Comparative Studies, Northwestern University; 2010

Center for International and Comparative Studies, Northwestern University

The presentation summarizes the arguments of my PhD Dissertation regarding the daily practices of welfare bureaucrats in recent Argentina. First, it presents what I call a negative consensus in the way Argentinean state has been visualized by academic research. The ideas of weaknesses and lack of capacities has been pervasive points of departure to examine state actors and public policies. I argue that this point of departure elude a question about what actually compose state bureaucracies and practices. Second, I present my research, an ethnography of intra-bureaucratic grouping logics and daily practices in the National Ministry of Social Development, in contemporary Argentina. Then I present my findings, structured in three ideas: 1) Different groups within the agency dispute legitimacy to ground state representation based on their ability to provide solutions to the problem that, in a context of social emergency and political crisis, faced the national State: distance. 2) Distance should be understood not only as geographical but also as epistemological, political and emotional. The State developed a series of strategies to transform territorial distance into local presence, faceless work into face-to-face relationships, standardized knowledge into felt knowledge, and bureaucratic detachment into political and emotive commitment. 3) Although these strategies reconfigured the composition and practices of lower-level state agents, they had not been effective to reverse perceptions of state distance among recipients of welfare benefits. Proximity is episodic. Paradoxically, the episodic nature of central state agents presence in the territory contribute to unify an otherwise very fragmented welfare bureaucracy. I finish pointing out some theoretical implications of the findings.