Editorial Type:
Article Category: Research Article
| Online Publication Date: 21 Feb 2006
The Moral Politics of Argentine Crowds
The Moral Politics of Argentine Crowds
Page Range: 311 – 326
Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this article reconstructs protesters' actions, collective beliefs, and shared self-understandings during two recent contentious episodes in contemporary Argentina, the 1993 Santiagazo and the 1996 pueblada in Cutral-co. Drawing upon E.P. Thompson's and J. Scott's notion of moral economy, the anaysis dissects the crowds' beliefs as to what are right and wrong political practices. The notion of moral politics, it is argued, calls for simultaneous attention to the content of protesters' beliefs, to their origin, and to their impact on the course of the events.
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