Suchergebnisse

Este artículo sigue los flujos de documentación que se producen alrededor de un estudio técnico de ingeniería para la construcción de una vía de evitamiento por el pueblo de Ollantaytambo. En contraste con el énfasis de Max Weber sobre los documentos como instrumentos de racionalización y transparencia, y el enfoque más reciente sobre los documentos como artefactos estéticos e instancias institucionales, yo presto atención a las maneras en que los documentos se implican en la producción de lo político. Indico que los modos en que circulan, acumulando connotaciones múltiples mientras viajan, no generaban claridad, sino una indeterminación que se incrementaba, y sugiero que la calidad política de los documentos tiene que ver precisamente con su carácter dual, pues implican al mismo tiempo la normatividad (con su promesa de justicia y claridad) y el juego de intereses poco limpios. Su promesa dual de certidumbre y ambivalencia era clave para la apertura de espacios de disensión y posibilidad política en el proyecto.

In this article, we deploy the concept of 'affect' to explore processes of state formation in contemporary Peru. Drawing on ethnography concerning a controversial engineering project in the Sacred Valley, we show how the state emerges as an affective force in the ambivalent spaces opened up by the slippages between the stable certainties promised by regulatory frameworks and the doubts generated by the ambiguities they pose. Tracing the tensions, gestures, and tiny shifts in perspective that punctuate an encounter between engineers and local politicians, we complicate the notion that a pre-existing state induces affects in political subjects. Instead, we show how the state emerges as a virtual force—neither quite present nor absent—in an uncertain, highly political field of negotiation.

AbstractDespite the availability of important theoretical insights that could enhance the resilience of rural communities to complex challenges, there is a paucity of guidance on how to apply these insights in practice. This article therefore presents and assesses a deliberative research process using the Delphi technique to elicit expert knowledge from 22 academics, community practitioners and policymakers working in roles related to community resilience delivery in rural Scotland. The participants co‐produced an operational framework for community resilience, with support from researchers who facilitated the three‐stage, interactive process. The methodology enabled participants to work together in an iterative and inclusive manner, culminating in the collective development of a conceptual framework consisting of eight resilience‐enabling factors and corresponding criteria for monitoring change, which can be used to plan practical action and provide feedback to enable ongoing adaptation. The process also produced an in‐depth understanding of participants' perceptions of rural community resilience, identified key factors that enable or impede rural community resilience, analysed the potential to assess community resilience and explored scale‐related issues. The article explores the implications of this framework for those working to make rural communities more resilient and reflects on the benefits and wider application of this type of research approach for developing shared understandings of complex concepts.

This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregrounding and pluralising its material and temporal dimensions. At the same time, it speaks to a renewed centrality and relevance of infrastructure and infrastructural projects in political discourse. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically. Specifically, these contributions intervene in existing geographical debates by bringing to the fore four underexplored dimensions of democratic governance: (im)materiality, connectivity, performativity, and temporality. In doing so, it develops a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance. ; Previous title: Intervention: Democratising infrastructure

In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as 'affect theory'. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this 'affective turn' through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life