The following is a sociological report on a particular segment of an opera audience. Its purpose is to explicate the processes of initiation in an activity typically considered "high culture." It differs from other accounts of cultural consumption in that it is concerned not with the correspondence between social background and taste, but with the processes whereby taste is assembled. Drawing upon an 18-month-long ethnography on opera fans in Buenos Aires, this paper has two aims. First, it shows that passionate opera fans enjoy opera based on their belief that opera is something that needs to be learned in order to be properly enjoyed. Second, it describes three diverse instances in which people learn about opera. Furthermore, this paper also has a theoretical objective: to extend and refine the classic model of affiliation and initiation into cultural practices established by Howard Becker with his case study of marijuana use. Homeless at the doorstepsOne of the two lateral entrances of the Colón Opera House of Buenos Aires faces a walking section of Arturo Toscanini Street. The entrance is a tall, white door beneath a large façade sustained by a solid pair of Ionic columns. The once bright yellow walls surrounding it have faded and reveal humidity stains. Passersby leave leaflets there offering all kinds of services including weight loss programs and cheap toner replacements for office printers, and once performances are over, homeless men find shelter from the cold on the three gray steps. This is where those seated in the cazuela and tertulia-the upper floors with the cheapest tickets-gather in order to enter the opera house. Depending on the title, people congregate anywhere from an hour and a half to 20 minutes before the door opens for the opportunity to claim a good spot on the standing room floors-one with an unobstructed Qual Sociol (2009) 32:131-151

This article aims to redirect the study of patronage politics toward its quotidian character and acknowledge the key role played by brokers’ strong ties with their closest followers to better understand and explain the practical features of clientelist domination. This article argues that clientelist politics occur during routine daily life and that most loyal clients’ behavior should be understood and explained neither as the product of rational action nor the outcome of normative behavior but as generated by a clientelist habitus, a set of cognitive and affective political dispositions manufactured in the repeated interactions that take place within brokers’ inner circles of followers. The article also has as a secondary objective to contribute to dispositional sociology through the conceptualization of the clientelist habitus. It does so by showing the active work agents engage in as they prevent disjunctures provoked by what Bourdieu calls the “hysteresis effect.”

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to believe that scholarship suffered for it. Maybe the delays helped, giving you more time to research, reflect, and write.But digital libraries and electronic communication networks can facilitate scholarly production. If, for example, you are interested in the theme of this volume, cultural production in a digital age, you can print these contributions; identify, link to, and download cited articles in other journals (and so on); search the network for academic, journalistic, and professional publications on similar themes; buy books (including texts you would never find in local bookstores); and assemble your own portable bibliography over the next few hours, all without leaving your seat. If your interest relates to a collaborative project, you can e-mail colleagues to keep them updated on your progress or provide direct links to useful articles (although you lose efficiency when you e-mail friends about unrelated matters in the process). When you begin writing and distributing your text via e-mail, colleagues and collaborators will use word processing software to insert edits, queries, and comments, returning the document to you electronically, and paving the way for an interactive intellectual exchange. The speed of communication facilitates collaboration in real time, but so does the standardization of formats, the ease of access to working files, the ability to record different iterations of the text, and the declining significance of distance made possible by digital networks.We do not yet know whether technologies that reduce the barriers of time, space, and access help to advance social science or how they affect the outcome of intellectual work. But there is no question that digital technologies have changed the way scholars and academic institutions operate (Koku, Nazar, and Wellman 2001) and that the cultivation of novel research practices and the outcome of conflicts over the control, circulation, and application of advanced technologies in the university will shape the conditions of intellectual production. This volume of the Annals explores whether and how digital technologies and the actors who use and design them have altered cultural production more broadly, in fields ranging from journalism to gambling, social movements to marketing. We use an expansive concept of cultural production here since we are concerned with different kinds of symbolic, textual, and meaning-making activities. We include the news media, advertising, and emerging political cultures (particularly those generated by Web designers, net activists, and civic groups), as well as the traditional arts. The contributors work in different academic disciplines-sociology, anthropology, business management, and communications-and use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to assess recent changes in creative fields. But whether they analyze activists, media industries, or public policies, the articles in this volume cohere around a set of issues that are central to cultural producers, consumers, and citizens today. T...

Following Reed (2010 , 2011) , we can think of ethnography as the encounter between two sets of meanings: those of the ethnographer on those of the subjects whose lives are being studied. If we are able to recognize the contested, unfinished, reflexive and complex character of how people think about themselves, we should be able to imagine ourselves in the same terms and go into the field armed with a theoretical helmet with interchangeable lenses, imagining which theoretical concepts would best fit the case. In this paper, I develop how this approach finds a fruitful analogue in psychoanalysis as a practical endeavor that produces a particular kind of truth; what we can learn from that equivalency; how this epistemological approach works in parallel to Reed’s plea for theoretical pluralism; and what are then the consequences of this book for practitioners of cultural ethnography.