On Argentina and the Southern Cone

Alejandro Grimson is a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the university of Buenos Aires. He is quite young, but has written three books in Spanish, edited one, and co-authored another.

"An extraordinary deciphering of one country's engagement for and against neoliberalism. Grimson and Kessler use Argentina as an extreme case to get at the complexity of this enggement and avoid easy interpretations." -- Saskia Sassen, author of Territory Authority Rights"To view Argentina as a Europeanized country in steady decline defies rational explanation. It is neither an exception in Latin America, nor a middle class nation without interethnic conflicts. On Argentina and the Southern Cone moves beyond these common misconceptions by applying a variety of ethnographic perspectives to this multicultural society, which is much more than the sum total of its capital city, Buenos Aires. Utilizing a wealth of solid historical, economic, political and cultural information, the authors have not hesitated to deconstruct commonly held self-serving narratives. Grimson and Kessler have succeeded in placing the everyday reality of a heterogeneous and contradictory country in a regional and international context through which the concept of nation, the needs of the state and neoliberal decomposition appear in a new light."-- Néstor García Canclini, author of Hybrid Cultures

• Introduction Chapter 1: Territory, Nation and Mercosur Chapter 2. Public Reform and the Social Imagination Chapter 3. The Impact of Reforms on Society Chapter 4: New Xenophobias, New Ethnic Politics Chapter 5 Social Responses to the Crisis Conclusions Bibliography Index