Intimacy and the public sphere. Politics and culture in the Argentinian national space, 194655 Earlier versions of this text were presented at the Laboratoire de Sciences Sociales, cole Normale Superieure (Paris, March 2002), at the University of Chicago (May 2001), in the Universidad de Buenos Aires (November 2000); at the Ncleo de Antropologia da Poltica (NuAP, Rio de Janeiro, September

Abstract

This text examines a series of family conflicts, judicial battles and political struggles having as their main stage the city of Salta, situated in the extreme north-west of Argentina. This constellation of events merges with the political chronology of the country: it begins in 1946, the year of Juan Peron's election as president, and ends in 1955, when he was overthrown by a coup d'etat. The objective of the text is to analyse the relations between sentiments and actions associated with social spaces of different natures and scales, such as the space of the ‘good families’ of Salta, of the ‘spirit’ of the Argentine north-west, or of the people from Argentina's interior and of those from its centre. By studying the relationships between native conceptions of intimacy and publicity that are at play in this case, the article proposes an outline of a social phenomenology of the social space concerned with the temporal dimension of social life.