On criminals, degenerates and ghost appointees. Affective dimensions in the act of laboring in the state administration.
Abstract
From a socio-anthropological perspective based on the ethnographic method, this article exposes the way in which the discursive modulations of Javier Milei’s government collide with the objective and subjective dimensions of the act of working for the State in a group of street-level bureaucrats in a peripheral region of Argentina. The main guiding assumption of this contribution is that, beyond the dysfunctionalities and conditioning factors of the Argentine public administration system, pride and involvement emerge as affectivities constructed within the framework of the work for the citizen ship to which the function is addressed, and are permanently reissued by its agents.
