Ethnography is uniquely equipped to look microscopically at the foundations of political institutions and their attendant sent of practices, just as it is ideally suited to explain why political actors behave the way they do and to identify the causes, processes and outcomes that are part and parcel[...]
Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registrat[...]