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Based on both archival research and two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in an Argentine shantytown with high levels of air, water, and ground contamination, this article examines the social production of environmental uncertainty. First, we dissect residents' perceptions of contamination, finding widespread doubts and mistakes about the polluted habitat. Second, we provide a sociologically informed account of uncertainty and the erroneous perceptions that underlie it. Along with inherent ambiguity surrounding toxic contamination, the generalized confusion about sources and effects of pollution is the result of two factors: (1) the “relational anchoring” of risk perceptions and (2) the “labor of confusion” generated by powerful outside actors. We derive two implications from this ethnographic case study: (1) Cognitive psychology and organizational sociology can travel beyond the boundaries of self-bounded communities and laboratory settings to understand and explain the collective production and reproduction of ignorance, uncertainty, and error. (2) Research on inequality and marginality in general, and in Latin America in particular, should pay close attention to the contaminated spaces where the urban poor live.

Based on ethnographic reanalysis and on current qualitative research on poor people's politics, this article argues that routine patronage politics and nonroutine collective action should be examined not as opposite and conflicting political phenomena but as dynamic processes that often establish recursive relationships. Through a series of case studies conducted in contemporary Argentina, this article examines four instances in which patronage and collective action intersect and interact: network breakdown, patron's certification, clandestine support, and reaction to threat. These four scenarios demonstrate that more than two opposing spheres of action or two different forms of sociability, patronage, and contentious politics can be mutually imbricated. Either when it malfunctions or when it thrives, clientelism may lie at the root of collective action.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, this article studies the workings of Peronist “political clientelism” among the urban poor. It analyzes the web of relations that some slum-dwellers establish with local political brokers to obtain medicine, food, and solutions to other everyday concerns. The article also explores the main functions of the “problem-solving networks,” which are resource control and information hoarding, and pays particular attention to an underexplored dimension of the operation of clientelism: clients' own views on the network.

In the last decade, the Argentine interior became a landscape of violent protest. Structural adjustment or `austerity programs' are undoubtedly at the root of this upsurge in contention. But there are crucial local mediations worth exploring. Based on archival research, in-depth interviewing and secondary sources, this article draws upon the recent `relational turn' in the study of collective action to explore some of the processes that led to two of the most violent episodes of collective claim-making in contemporary Argentina: the riots in Santiago del Estero (1993) and Corrientes (1999).