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Part one.Labor movements, society and the state.The Egyptian workers' movement: problems of organization and politics /Anne AlexanderandMostafa Bassiouny /From the grassroots to the presidential palace: Evo Morales and the coca growers' union in Bolivia /Thomas Grisaffi /The labour union movement and 'alternative' culture in Tunisia: the long view of a close relationship /Mohamed-Salah Omri.

The state and the unions, in space and time -- Militancia : an ethics and politics of the self -- Family and intergenerational transmission of militancia -- Pedagogy and political community -- Containment as care -- Containment as political encompassment

AbstractIn this article I argue for a kinship anthropology of politics, understood as a focus on the day‐to‐day imbrications of kinship and politics in a given political space, and the implications of that for the construction of political subjects. I describe kinship within shop‐floor‐level trade union delegations of state employees in Argentina in three different ways: first, languages of kinship mobilized to describe political allegiance and dispositions, especially inheritance; second, family connections in recruitment and activism; and, third, practices of kinning as relatedness. The combination of these three kinship modes creates the union as kin group, and enables it to act on the world politically in order to transform it.

This article explores how practices of participation are linked to political values within two state workers' unions in Argentina. Distinct approaches to organization, described by informants as vertical and horizontal, are linked to the historical development of two main trends in the Argentine labor movement. The article examines both the organizational practices and narratives about those practices and argues that organizational praxis is an important means of articulating understandings of democracy, linked to differing ideas of the role of a trade union in relation to government. [trade unions, democracy, Peronism, social movements, horizontality, verticality]

This book is a study of security and community justice in a recently-settled barrio of Cochabamba, in Bolivia. It is engaging, well-written, honest, and illuminating; and it is extremely rich in the debates that it tackles. A short review cannot do full justice to its wealth of ideas and arguments, so instead I present reflections on some key elements.

This paper responds to the challenge to conceptualize political activity through temporal as well as spatial perspectives, and does so by means of a discussion of the different temporalities experienced by union and social movement activists. It is based on fieldwork with activists from two public sector workers' unions in Buenos Aires and residents and street vendors' organizations in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. I discuss two coexisting temporalities, or social experiences of time (Munn): 'historical time', a sense of emplacement within a historical narrative of political action that looks back to the past and to illustrious ancestors and forwards to an imagined set of possibilities for the future; and 'attritional time', one of constant protest or negotiation, the continuance of the day to day of political life when there is no resolution in sight to a particular conflict or problem, coupled occasionally with a dramatization of what can become quite banal over time. Finally, I discuss a kind of event‐based mediation between different temporalities, specifically revolution as a clash or meeting of attritional time and historical time, coexisting but separately experienced temporalities. This mediation involves both the revolutionary actions themselves and the practices of hailing, both contemporaneous and retrospective, which include scholarly research as well as other forms of social commentary. I suggest that this hailing might be in part enacted through a promise or assertion of discontinuity and rupture in the flow of time (Harris), even when events may not have been experienced as such at the time itself. Thus, different social experiences of time meet in a politics of time, to co‐construct kairos, or revolution.

In this essay I undertake an ethnographic analysis of the notion of comparison through a discussion of comparative research on the role of trade unions in the constitution of citizenship in El Alto, Bolivia, and in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Based on fieldwork with street traders in El Alto and public‐sector workers in Buenos Aires, the essay introduces the notion of 'disjunctive comparison' as an intrinsically anthropological mode of comparison. The article then puts into play my propositions about the specificity and validity of disjunctive comparison, by way of an ethnographic exploration of union membership as a creation of self and political agency. I conclude by connecting that analysis of self and political agency to citizenship in my two fieldwork sites.RésuméLe présent essai constitue une analyse ethnographique de la notion de comparaison à travers l'examen d'une recherche comparative sur le rôle des syndicats dans la constitution de la citoyennetéà El Alto, en Bolivie, et à Buenos Aires en Argentine. À partir d'un travail de terrain mené auprès des marchands de rue à El Alto et des employés du secteur public à Buenos Aires, l'auteure introduit la notion de « comparaison disjonctive » comme mode de comparaison intrinsèquement anthropologique. L'article met ensuite en application ses propositions sur la spécificité et la validité de la comparaison disjonctive, par le biais d'une exploration ethnographique de l'appartenance syndicale comme mode de création du soi et de l'agencéité politique. L'auteure conclut en reliant cette analyse du soi et de l'agencyà la citoyenneté sur ses deux sites de terrain.