The Argentine dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 set out to transform Argentine society. Employing every means at its disposal - including rampant violation of human rights, union busting, and regressive economic policies - the dictatorship aimed to create its own kind of order. Lindsay DuBois's The Politics of the Past explores the lasting impact of this authoritarian transformative project for the people who lived through it. DuBois's ethnography centres on José Ingenieros, a Buenos Aires neighbourhood founded in a massive squatter invasion in the early 1970s, and describes how the military government's actions largely subdued a politically engaged community. DuBois traces how state repression and community militancy are remembered in Joé Ingenieros and how the tangled and ambiguous legacies of the past continued to shape ordinary people's lives years after the collapse of the military regime. This rich and evocative study breaks new ground in its exploration of the complex relationships between identity, memory, class formation, neoliberalism, and state violence.

The study of twentieth-century Argentine history is undergoing a radical transformation. Both Argentine and U.S. historians of Argentina are recasting the great debates in the historiography by challenging the Buenos Aires-centered focus of most of the existing historical scholarship and offering a new perspective on the country's modern history. Argentina's supposed 'exceptionalism' is being challenged by these historians. The persistence of political clientilism and oligarchic rule, enclave economies and pre-capitalist social relations, the role of traditional institutions such as the Church and family, intense class conflict and working class militancy, all approximate Argentina closer to the Latin American experience than the previous historiography would suggest. This book is a unique collaboration between Argentine and U.S. historians of this 'other Argentina.'

Describes the power that can be imposed, and the misery that is caused, especially for the poor, by the simple act of waiting. This title also describes a variety of different situations, including waiting for national identity cards, for welfare agencies, and the endless waiting for relocation from the slums.

The recent tumult of Ukraine's Orange Revolution and its aftermath has exposed some of the deep political, social, and cultural divisions that run through the former Soviet republic. Examining Odessa, the Black Sea port that was once the Russian Empire's southern window onto Europe, Kaleidoscopic Odessa provides an ethnographic portrait of these overlapping divisions in a city where many residents consider themselves separate and distinct from Ukraine. Exploring the tensions between local and national identities in a post-Soviet setting from the point of view of everyday life, Tanya Richardson argues that Odessans's sense of distinctiveness is both unique and typical of borderland countries such as Ukraine. Kaleidoscopic Odessa provides a detailed account of how local conceptions of imperial cosmopolitanism shaped the city's identity in a newly formed state. Richardson draws on her participation in history lessons, markets, and walking groups to produce an exemplary study of urban ethnography. Ethnographically sophisticated and methodologically innovative, Kaleidoscopic Odessa will interest anthropologists, Slavists, sociologists, historians, and scholars of urban studies.