“You see other persons in ourselves”: Experience of political rapport in territorially based organizations placed in Buenos Aires

Abstract

This article is the result of a qualitative inquiry started on 2001, whose principal interest was the study of territorially-based process of social organization and mobilization. From the eighties, is possible to find two main approaches in the study of political bonds in the underclass: those which suppose the perfect matching between public demands and individual reasons for political involving and those which sustain an absolute alienation between those demands and participants’ individual interests. From the study of two life stories, we observe that political participation leaves traces on the way how subjects articulate their experiences. That is to say, in the way how they give sense to their past and present attitudes and perceptions and in the manner they anticipate their future. This point of view let us overcome the interrogation about reasons that explain political mobilization and its related reifying interpretations about construction of the political rapports.