Patients of the State

“Javier Auyero’s ethnographic study of lines and waiting rooms in Argentina analyzes the experience of submission to bureaucratic time and of waiting for the state to correspond beneficently as, “temporal processes in and through which political subordination is reproduced” (2). Auyero shows how waiting, or more precisely, making people wait, acts as a material and ideological tool for dominating underclass populations. Auyero’s great contribution is to lead readers to consider systematically the ways in which such power is inscribed, reproduced, and normalized.” - Adriana M. Garriga-L opez, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

“Patients of the State is an insightful and long-overdue exploration of how the worst Latin American welfare programs reinforce powerlessness and subcitizenship even as they sporadically relieve economic misery. Vividly describing the phenomenally cavalier ways in which the governmental agencies of Buenos Aires waste poor people’s time and resources, Javier Auyero calls attention to the insidious violence of systems that sap political initiative and hobble complex and delicate urban survival strategies. With this study, he has once again opened new pathways for the study of contemporary Latin American poverty.” - Brodwyn Fischer, author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

“In this brilliant, insightful, and sensitive investigation, Javier Auyero brings careful ethnographic research to bear on the routine temporal experiences of people who seek help and social services from the state. In doing so, he shows us how the state constructs political dominance through the control of its citizens’ time and temporal experience. By making the urban poor wait for whatever they need, the state creates subordination and political resignation. Patients of the State will have a major impact on scholarly and public discourse; it helps us see what is happening to millions of people around the world.” - Michael G. Flaherty, author of The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience

"Patients of the State shines in providing empiricalevidence in support of the importance of waiting for understanding the ways in which power and domination are played out in practice in the relations between the urban poor and the front-line bureaucrats of the state.... [It] shines in providing empirical in support of the importance of waiting for understanding the ways in which power and domination are played out in practice in the relations between the urban poor and the front-line bureaucrats of the state."  - Marcela López Levy, Journal of Latin American Studies