Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Routine Crisis, Sarah Muir explores the prevailing sentiment within the Argentine middle‐class that not only have things gone wrong with their country, but that they will never be put right again. The book tracks the “radical negativity” of the middle‐class in the wake of the country's millennial economic crisis. This crisis entailed an economic collapse, the largest sovereign debt default in world history, sky‐rocketing rates of unemployment and poverty, and, as a result of currency devaluation, the over‐night loss of lifetimes’ worth of savings. For the Argentine middle‐class, Muir tells readers, these events were experienced not only as a financial loss, but as a loss of hope in the future; they crystalized the repeat political and economic crises through which Argentina had passed during the twentieth century and reframed them as proof that the country would never live up to its modernist dreams. While the political class bore the brunt of the blame during the civil unrest of December 2001, when crowds gathered in Argentina's major cities to demand “Que se vayan todos” (Out with all of them), Muir is attentive to the way middle‐class Argentines consider themselves complicit in the corruption that led to the crisis they were living through. Muir suggests that her interlocutors had come to see Argentina as a pathologically corrupt society, a stance that “inverted the familiar idea that national history is a teleological progression toward a better future” (93). In Routine Crisis, Muir not only captures a sensibility of hopelessness, but also lucidly explicates the social and political implications of the middle‐class embrace of disillusion as a historical outlook.