Article

Citizenship, political
agency and technologies
of the self in
Argentinean trade
unions

Critique of Anthropology
33(1) 110128
! The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X12466678
coa.sagepub.com

Sian Lazar
University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract
The paper presents findings from research on political subjectivity and citizenship with
two public-sector trade unions in Buenos Aires. I outline some of the relations between
trade unionism and citizenship in Argentina and then explore the concept of contencion
(containment), a group-based technology of the self which is fundamental to the construction of political agency and citizenship within the most active members of these
trade unions.
Keywords
Citizenship, trade unions, political subjectivity, containment

Introduction
In this article, I analyse self- and subject-creation in a political community as an
aspect of citizenship, with a focus principally on the political community of the
trade union, especially its most active members. It is now common for theorists and
anthropologists of citizenship to make a distinction between citizenship as legal
status and practices of citizenship and to argue through, for example, discussions of
cultural citizenship (Rosaldo, 1994) or the dierences between formal and substantive citizenship (Holston, 2008; Sassen, 2003) that particular conditions aect the
quality of citizenship enjoyed by dierent categories of citizen. However, less frequently do scholars question what political community it is that citizens are citizens
of, or that non- or second-class citizens are claiming (full) citizenship of; since the
Corresponding author:
Sian Lazar, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, University of
Cambridge, UK.
Email: sl360@cam.ac.uk

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

111

normative, Marshallian version of that political community is the nation-state.

In this article, I want to propose a more Aristotelian position that works from
the basis that citizenship is membership in the polis; that it is an analytical language
for the relationship between the person and the political community broadly conceived. The most important consequence of this is the fact that the nature of that
political community requires specication at any given point and in any given
context.
Despite the inuence of T.H. Marshall on anthropological thinking about citizenship, actually, there is no reason to yoke citizenship solely to the nation state. In
Early Modern Europe the prime political community was the city, and it continues
to be a very important political community today (Bookchin, 1995; Holston, 2001;
Isin, 2000, 2007; Lazar, 2008). Furthermore, some of the most relevant political
communities of advanced capitalism operate on a supra-national scale: global, as in
the idea of cosmopolitan or world citizenship (Hannerz, 1990), but also transnational as for activist groupings (Nguyen, 2005) or citizen-migrants (Ong,
1999). Other political communities may be non-state or stateless (Feldman, 2007).
If citizenship names the relationship between person and polis, my proposition is
that it therefore names political subjectivity and subject-making. The subjectivity of
citizens of a particular nation-state has been explored mostly in the literature on
nationalism (e.g. Anderson, 1991; James, 1988; Mandel, 2008). In contrast, this
article explores the subjectivity of activist unionists primarily as members of the
political community (polis) of their union, albeit with their citizenship of the
Argentine nation state as a context and point of articulation (explicitly and
implicitly).
I draw on recent eldwork with two unions of public sector workers: the Union
del Personal Civil de la Nacion (Union of National Civil Servants, hereafter
UPCN) and the Asociacion de Trabajadores del Estado (Association of State
Workers, hereafter ATE). Here, the phrase public sector workers covers a wide
range of occupations civil servants in ministries and municipal departments, also
hospital workers (including nurses but not doctors), lab-workers, technicians and
artists employed by state-run theatres, academics, and some educational workers
(although not teachers). Over the course of 9 months in 2009, I conducted extensive
interviews with unionists from both ATE and UPCN in both their workplace and
the union oces, attended plenaries, assemblies (at the level of the Sectional oce
and at the workplace), and other meetings; attended classes for new delegates run
by both organisations; and attended demonstrations, press conferences, and other
public events associated with union activity. My main informants were union
leaders, from union delegates at the level of the administrative unit (e.g. government department) to those with positions in the central oces of the sections
pertaining to the city of Buenos Aires (i.e. not simply aliates). This focus
means that my study does emphasise those people who were usually relatively
happy with how their union acted, although that did not mean they were entirely
uncritical (Lazar, 2012). Furthermore, currently, relations between these union
hierarchies and their members are not on the whole characterised by the violence

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

112

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

and antagonism that has been an important part of Argentine unionism since the
mid-20th century (Munck et al., 1987; Torre, 1998).1 At the time of my eldwork,
those union members who were dissatised tended not to violently confront the
leadership as has happened in the past, but simply leave the union altogether. If
they were UPCN members dissatised with its political position, they may join
ATE, but also many public sector workers also chose not to be members of any
union, as I discuss below.

Trade unions and citizenship in Argentina

Despite experiencing probably the ercest structural adjustment on the continent
during the 1990s, the basic citizenship equation in Argentina from the top-down
perspective remains that a) full citizenship rights are recognised by the government
predominantly for formal sector workers and b) the articulation between those
workers and the state is mediated by trade unions; and this has been the case
since the rise of peronism in the mid-20th century. The combination of these two
factors results in a highly collective form of substantive citizenship for a signicant
proportion of those who have the formal status of citizen. Citizenship in Argentina
is therefore intimately linked to the role of trade unions as collective political
subjects.
Since the mid-20th century, both formal and substantive citizenship in Argentina
have been linked to occupation and most readily available to formal sector workers.2 This is especially evident with respect to social rights, which were granted on
the model of the male breadwinner in a registered job (Grassi, 2003; Usami, 2004).
Social insurance schemes such as pensions and health insurance were made available progressively to dierent categories of workers from the mid-20th century on
(Usami, 2004). These schemes were run by the trade unions, a position they vigorously defended at the time and continue to do so today. But Juan Domingo
Peron also made trade unions the channel for political rights and participation, in
the process granting industrial workers in particular a sense of themselves as central political actors recognised as such (James, 1988). This is a kind of citizenship
that goes a long way to explaining their continued loyalty to Peron after 1955.
UPCN was formed in 1948 with Peron as the rst aliate, and therefore is very
much part of the general capture of the labour movement by peronism.
When Peron was exiled in 1955, the focus of the resistance movement and indeed
peronism itself became the industrial trade unions, who were known as the spinal
column of peronism, a phrase often heard today. From the early 1960s, unions
entered a period of tension between bureaucratised, business unionism and more
radical clasista currents, inuenced by Trotskyist elements, the remnants of the
anarchist movement and the socialist and communist parties (Torre, 1998). The
resultant culture of mobilisation in Argentina (Atzeni and Ghighliani, 2009)
peaked with the return of Peron in 1973, his death in 1974 and the subsequent
political instability that culminated in the coup of 1976. Then, between 1976 and
1983, the dictatorship attacked the unions on 3 fronts: rst, political repression.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

113

Thousands of unionists were disappeared, union leaders and delegates went into
exile, and the military junta put their people in charge of oppositional unions, a
process called intervention (Atzeni and Ghighliani, 2009; Pozzi, 1988). For example, UPCN was intervened, while ATEs leadership remained loyal to the military
junta. Meanwhile, the mid-1970s saw the beginnings of a reorientation of the
Argentine economy away from industry and towards a speculative economy
based upon nancial services; along with policies of privatisation of some stateowned enterprises. Finally, anti-union legislation was introduced, such as the Law
of Social Services of 1980, which removed labour union control over union hospitals, hotels, clinics and other social entities (Munck et al., 1987; Pozzi, 1988).
Throughout this experience, most of the unions remained resolutely peronist.
But in the 1980s, the relationship between party political peronism and the unions
changed, culminating in the 1990s when the party moved to incorporate the popular classes through neighbourhood-based clientelistic structures rather than
through the unions (Levitsky, 2003). This enabled Menems nominally peronist
government to introduce neoliberal reforms such as labour exibilisation measures
and extensive privatisation of state enterprises. This in turn provoked a split within
the peronist CGT, as dissident unions principally the teachers and ATE broke
away to form the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA) in 1992. The
dominant unions within the CGT were compensated (Etchemendy, 2005) in a
number of dierent ways, including through allowing them to control the workers
shares in privatised companies, and protecting collective labour legislation, even
while severely eroding individual labour rights.
These processes of structural adjustment of the economy and compensation of
the traditional unions created more division between protected formal sector workers and those working in the informal sector, or unemployed. This is Argentinas
experience of a dierentiated citizenship regime (see Holston, 2008 for Brazil). That
division between formal and informal sector workers was exacerbated by the
infamous economic crisis of 2001/2 (Rock, 2002), when the recession meant that
the informal sector ballooned, on top of a gradual decline in formal sector employment over the previous two decades. The percentage of the economically active
population in formal employment reduced from around 65% in 1980 to 36% in
2002.3 The crisis aected the labour movement as a whole too, as non-traditional
labour and social movement actors such as the unemployed workers organisations
and the worker-controlled factories grew more prominent.
So, changes in structural conditions meant a reduction in the possibilities for the
exercise of citizenship as exclusively mediated by formal sector trade unions. These
changes are by no means unique to Argentina, as globally trade unions have been
severely weakened as a result of neoliberal legislation that attacked worker representation and encouraged labour exibilisation (Munck, 2004). Nonetheless, in
Argentina, perhaps surprisingly, from around 2005 the traditional peronist
unions began to increase their activity and political power; and while no longer
as inuential as they were in the past, they have undergone considerable resurgence. Factors that have encouraged this are the 2003 election of Nestor Kirchner,

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

114

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

and his decision to recognise and work with the CGT,4 as well as more structural
ones resulting from economic growth and the nature of the labour market
(Etchemendy and Collier, 2007). Formal sector employment was up to around
half of the EAP in 2009, a signicant increase relative to the 2002 gure.5
Furthermore, the shifts in the economy have not as in other countries gone
towards ununionised sectors, or to sectors dicult to organise; but to ones that
have successfully organised, such as the truck drivers. In the public sector, there
have also been some moves by the Kirchner governments to provide signicant
benets for state workers, and thereby bolster the position of their principal interlocutor, UPCN.6
Today, unionisation is estimated to be something like 39% in the private,
formal, sector (Gonzalez et al., 2009), which would mean that less than 20% of
all private sector workers are members of a union, since the informal sector is not
characterised by a high degree of union-based organisation. Within the public
sector, the gure is much higher, around 64% in 2001 according to an estimate
from Marshall and Perelman (2004). Estimates generally are dicult to achieve,
and unionisation varies according to administrative entity. For instance, UPCN
claim that 100% of the permanent workers and 34% of the contracted workers in
the Secretary of the Environment and Sustainable Development are aliated to
their union alone. In the National Registry of Persons (part of the Ministry of the
Interior and a UPCN stronghold), the gures are 87% of permanent workers and
90% of contracted workers. Other state entities have a much lower rate of unionisation. Nevertheless, especially in the public sector, unions continue to be a crucial
political actor in Argentina, and as such shape citizenship for more citizens than
just their activists or aliates. Beyond that, the formal sector unions hold a
great deal of symbolic power, precisely because of the history that I have just
sketched.

Union membership as political subject-making

Having thus provided an overview of the conditions of possibility for national
citizenship as linked to formal sector trade unions, I shift now to a focus on citizenship as self-making (as opposed to being made, following Ong (1996)) within
the union. Union activism both creates and requires particular forms of political
subjectivity and subject-making, and here I examine one of those, encompassed in
the notion of containment, or contencion. I argue that contencion is both a therapeutic practice of containment through counselling and a kind of encompassment
of the individual by the collectivity, often described through the verb form (me
contiene, me siento contenido, and so on). Together, these represent a complex of
union activity that, I argue, is also an idiom of collectivity which can be thought of
as a group technology of the self. Foucault describes technologies of the self as
permit[ting] individuals to eect by their own means or with the help of others a
certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

115

way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of

happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault, 1988: 18).

For Foucault himself the others of this formulation were, in early Christian
practice, the teacher (or Master) and confessor; among the Stoics, they included
friends to whom individuals would write detailed letters as part of their practices
of care of their selves (Foucault, 1988, 1990 [1984]). Others have brought the
notion of care of the self to bear on contemporary societies, analysing psychotherapeutic practice and self-help manuals etc (Rose, 1989) or religious ethical
practices based on meditation or renunciation (Cook, 2010; Laidlaw, 2002). For
very good reasons, the focus has mostly been on how the individual acts upon
himself (Foucault, 1990 [1976]). My analysis seeks to apply this concept to more
collective practices implied by a more expansive interpretation of Foucaults brief
mention of the help of others. Rather than applying the Foucauldian notion of
technologies of the self to the individual self in society, I examine technologies of
care of the self that occur at a mediating position between individual and
society.7
Contencion appeared in multiple contexts in my eldwork, from informal conversations to interviews, when we were discussing the role of the union delegate, but also with respect to the relationship between individual aliate and their
union. Thus, I argue, it is a concept that is used to describe both political leadership
and political membership of the community of the trade union. For example, some
of my UPCN interviewees explicitly discussed the sense of protection, family, and
personal support provided by being an active member of the trade union:
UPCN gave me identity, I feel part of UPCN, I dont feel alone, whatever happens, Im
from UPCN. And UPCN is everywhere, its going to protect me, it helps me with my
children in school, it gives me a summer camp [for the children], it gives me social
coverage, [. . .]. UPCN gave me identity wherever I am, or if there is a demonstration
and although people come from other ministries, were all from UPCN, and thats
fantastic. UPCN embraced me (me abrazo), and its a paternalistic gure.
To me, UPCN gave me an identity, that I needed, and an embrace that I lost when
I moved to Bs As city, when I left the party, and UPCN gave me this peronist identity,
that encompasses me (que me abraza). I feel contained (contenido), it gave me identity, I am from UPCN. [. . .]
Im part of UPCN, Im part of an organisation in an individualistic society. [. . .]
UPCN gave me a place where were all equal, where it gives me everything that
I need, or they give me everything they can give, and they protect me, thats what
UPCN gives me.
UPCN is like my family, I have my wife but UPCN is also my family. [. . .] Perhaps
its dicult to explain with words, but UPCN is like a feeling (un sentimiento),8
were part of something, Im not alone in the street or at work, UPCN is always
there with me.
[Anon. 13.04.2009]

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

116

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

Notable here is this delegates phrase I feel contained. Quite often I was told
that part of the job of a delegate was to contain (contener) the aliate, or that
theres a lot of containment (hay mucha contencion). Of course, contencion was
not the only mode of relationship between delegate and aliate, but the claim by
activists that it was such an important aspect of their job and experience makes it
deserve some scrutiny, in my view. Here, I want to explore three dimensions, or
meanings of containment in everyday talk in Argentina. First, contencion refers to
the therapeutic practice of containment, a concept that originated in the work of
Wilfred Bion, a British Kleinian psychoanalyst (Bion, 1959; Douglas, 2007;
Hinshelwood, 1989).9 Freudian psychoanalysis has been very popular in
Argentina since the 1950s. Today, Argentina is second only to the US in its
number of psychoanalysts aliated with the International Psychoanalytic
Association, and second only to France in the size of its community of Lacanian
psychoanalysts (Bass, 2006: 434).10 Mariano Ben Plotkin has argued that a psychoanalytic culture developed in Argentina over the course of the 20th century, to
the point that since the 1960s, psychoanalysis has provided a framework of intelligibility to many Argentines for whom psychoanalysis still functions as a lens that
lters reality (Plotkin, 2003: 229). He maintains that the 2000s have seen a banalisation of psychoanalysis as it has permeated popular discourse. British Kleinian
theories were the most inuential in Argentina until the Lacanians began to dominate in the 1970s (Plotkin, 2001), and so it is plausible that the notion of containment travelled from Britain to Argentina and entered into everyday speech through
the inuence of Kleinian psychoanalysts in Argentine society.
The psychoanalyst Hazel Douglas provides the following succinct denition of
containment:
Containment is thought to occur when one person [the container] receives and understands the emotional communication of another [the contained] without being overwhelmed by it, processes it and then communicates understanding and recognition
back to the other person. This process can restore the capacity to think in the other
person. (Douglas, 2007: 33)

The rst container-contained relationship is that between the mother and infant,
but in therapy that relationship is then replicated with the therapist being the
container (Bion, 1959; Hinshelwood, 1989). The everyday understanding of containment among middle class residents of Buenos Aires portenos is heavily
inuenced by this, and some of my interlocutors spoke of it in very similar
terms. For example, Sabrina Rodriguez argued that taking on a therapeutic role
was one of the many tasks of a union delegate:
There is a diverse set of jobs. Sometimes they are about containment, because a
comrade (companero) is overwhelmed with work and needs someone who listens to
them, contains them, and calms them the psychosocial situation. Argentina is like
the rest of the world, going through [an economic] crisis and we have to contain

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

117

comrades for whom money doesnt cover what it used to, or the husband or wife has
been left without work. So, often it is just the theme of containment, from comrade to
comrade, no?, and thats part of daily life.

She linked the process of containment to values of solidarity:

Youll see here [. . .] always a climate of solidarity, of being concerned with the other
comrade, of helping each other, within the delegation. [. . .] For example, when I leave
this oce and I see a comrade who is sat down with another comrade at 8, 9 at night,
who is crying, in a situation that may even be personal, and she listens to him, she
contains him, and that is the nice thing, and its the personal part of each [delegate].
[Sabrina Rodriguez 13.05.2009]

Ariel Negrete, another UPCN General Secretary, told me that in the delegates
job, there is a lot of containment (hay mucha contencion), and said that one was
often like a psychologist. Later, when I asked him about these comments in an
interview, he elaborated:
About containment, well the worker seeks out the union delegate not just for
union problems. He or she has a problem and goes to talk to the union delegate, and
the rst thing the delegate does is listen to all the comrades. And (. . .) what we do is
contain from that place (contener desde ese lugar), listen, . . . [People] come to listen to
someone who gives them some kind of positive message, or of trust or of hope, that this
will all come out in the end, that there will be some kind of solution. For example, the
other day a comrade came, and she had heard that her house might be foreclosed,
nothing to do with a union problem, and here we contained her, we called a lawyer,
he explained to her what she should do; and this containment is also something that we
delegates do. (. . .) People have to go to someone who helps them rethink, recapacitate
themselves; and well, we do that task, and we do it a lot.
[Ariel Negrete 17.06. 2009]

Informants also used the term contencion just in passing, when referring for
example to delegates abilities to deal with aliates problems, using phrases
such as capacidad de contencion. I think that it is plausible to argue that contencion as therapeutic technique is a commonplace among middle class portenos.
Another example comes from a letter in the magazine of Accord Salud, a private
health insurance scheme connected to UPCN. The writer, a mother of two children
who went on a summer camp organised by UPCN, says:
I would like to thank you on behalf of myself and my family, for the help we received
from the teachers, also the warden and the driver, to make my childrens trip full of
happiness despite the pain that they were going through. From all these people they
received help, love and containment, in the worst moment of our lives, because of a
family tragedy. I would like to stress the human quality of all these people, who were

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

118

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

able to be with the children the most when it meant containing them; and it was clear
that they did this from their hearts.
[Infopersonal. La revista de accord salud No 52, August 2007]

So, the journey from British psychoanalytical theory into Argentinean popular
speech is then quite a good indication of the general popularisation of psychoanalysis in Argentina. The specic way this popularisation occurred may also have
inuenced how the term has gained extra layers of meaning, extending from an
understanding of a kind of therapeutic practice to a politicised notion of group
belonging. This is the second meaning of the term that I explore in this paper.
Psychoanalytical practice in Argentina developed in two quite particular ways:
rst, the promotion of group-based social change through psychoanalytical therapy, and second, the treatment of survivors of (political) trauma. Psychoanalysis
has not escaped the political divisions of Argentine society more widely, and different analysts advocated dierent relationships between clinical practice and political militancy, taking political positions both in favour of and in opposition to
military governments.11 During the 1960s Enrique Pichon Rivie`re developed his
theory that mental troubles could be repaired by associative interaction into a kind
of social programme of outreach psychoanalysis based upon the social psychology
of groups.12 During the 1960s1970s some more radical psychoanalysts were active
members of guerrilla groups, others treated guerrilla soldiers at times in parks
and restaurants without revealing names to each other and still others became
involved in human rights activism. The professional association even split in the
mid 1970s over the matter of the political involvement of the psychoanalyst
(Hollander, 1990). Today, the website www.contencionemocional.com describes
the activities of an NGO founded in 1991 by Carlos Sica, a student of Alfredo
Moatt (himself a student of Pichon Rivie`re) that sends social pyschologists to
oer contencion psicologica to victims (and their families) of other notable traumatic events, such as the 2004 re in the Cromanon nightclub and Hurricane
Katrina.
Ideas about group-based and politically committed psychotherapy link to the
second use of the concept of containment by my informants, who often simply
called the union a lugar de contencion (place of containment) and used containment to talk about a kind of group encompassment of an individual. Containment
can therefore refer to the way that the union oers delegates a kind of context, both
in the sense of a political context and as a space of protection and for selfactualisation. ATE is particularly associated with the former, and UPCN with
the latter, but both unions do both kinds of containment. The following quote
from an ATE delegate illuminates the former:
Well, the fact of belonging to a group, to a collective, at least it contains you (te
contiene), it makes you feel good, because you might be with people, some more your
friends, others less so, but you feel contained (te sents contenido) in 4 or 5 small things
you feel contained, you know that were here for something in common.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

119

Lets say, of all those who are here whether were 5 or 25, we all have some
point in common with each other. Just today we were talking about this, about
some of our aliates, probably politically we just dont coincide at all, but they
feel part [of the organisation] and for them, belonging to the organisation is very
important. What I mean is, they say to you Im from ATE, you hear them talk
and you think I dont share anything [laughs], of politics, of their vision of life,
whatever, but here they feel part [of something], we all feel part [of something],
because something unies us. Even though it might be only one thing, it unies
the 220 or 250 aliates that we are. Theres something that unies us, and its
something that isnt material, rather it has something to do with living together,
with conceptions of life.
[Anon. ATE-Malbran 12.07.2009]

This reects well the anonymous UPCN delegates reference to the sense of
commonality he has with delegates from other administrative entities when they
meet at demonstrations (above).
One informant explicitly linked the psychological, political and group-based
notions of contencion when I asked him to explain the concept to me during a
group interview. He was a member of both UPCN and one of UPCNs peronist
neighbourhood groups, which works mostly with older people from Parque
Patricios, in southern Buenos Aires. He said
Containment, in reality, you have, generally, in their old age, people nd
themselves I mean either the husband or the wife dies, and they nd themselves
alone, they have problems of depression, from being alone. So, these people come to
us and from here we work a lot in group containment, its like doing group therapy.
So you work and you contain them, you insert them into the group, because here they
always have an activity. [. . .] So, from that they begin to feel useful.

The Parque Patricios group also organises activities for young people. Later in
the discussion and when asked about the needs of the neighbourhood, the same
delegate said,
This is a lower middle class neighbourhood, youre going to nd unemployed youths,
theres a lot of need for work, youll nd people who have a lot of problems with
drugs, its one of the neighbourhoods which is having the biggest problems with
addictions; lack of containment for these kids [pibes], all this is connected, because
the person who doesnt have work takes to the street. [. . .] And then, here, people need
work [. . .]. In the southern neighbourhoods, this happens a lot, perhaps youd go to a
dierent side [of the city] and the needs would be dierent, or youd be able to work
more on the basis of cultural [activities] or some other kind. Here, you have to work
more on this kind of containment.
[Parque Patricios, 14.07.2009]

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

120

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

Nestor Llano, a long time ATE and CTA militant and member of the leadership
of ATE-Capital also made the connection between youth unemployment, drugs
and the lack of containment:
This country had ten years of happiness [. . .] with peronism. [. . .] A child grew up,
arrived [at school] well-nourished, she could think, she could study, she could play,
she could, she could and she could. Today a kid, [. . .], cant; and apart from that, the
problem we have with children, the non-containment, the issue of drugs, thats worldwide, but here we feel it. What I mean is that fundamentally it is most felt where
homes have been destroyed these children are cause and eect [. . .] these children
have lost their family and their family lost work, and the father lost the family.
[Nestor Llano, 4.2.2009]

What emerges from these quotes is containment as a kind of political encompassment: giving people a context, something to belong to as a means of creating a
better society, or dealing with the problems of contemporary society. It could
indeed be viewed as a programme of active citizenship conceived in collective
terms. Containment thus becomes a way to name practices of solidarity that are
common to trade unions everywhere.
Within the unions, that aspect of containment is practised in a variety of ways:
for ATE in particular it is highly politicised, as delegates enact their belonging
primarily through political activity such as meetings, demonstrations, political discussions in the union oce over mate and cigarettes, and so on. UPCN delegates
also participate in such explicitly political activities as street demonstrations and
other mobilisations, although at nothing like the frequency of ATE. But they
complement their political activities with a wide range of organisational activities
revolving around encompassment as the provision of a space of protection and for
self-actualisation. They have a signicant programme of professional training in
public administration, regular meetings of the delegates responsible for equality of
opportunities, youth, culture and so on. They promote cultural activities, such as
photography or creative writing competitions. They have a stand at the annual
Buenos Aires book fair, where they hold debates and presentations. My interlocutors were very proud of both sets of activities. Particularly active UPCN delegations also hold events at their place of work, for example to celebrate International
Womens day. Some produce material and give advice for the workers on their
oce on a wide range of topics outside of the progress of political actions or
collective bargaining, such as work-place bullying (violencia laboral), preventive
health, or swine u.
A major practice of encompassment was enacted through care, specically the
care for the health of individual aliates. UPCN is particularly proud of the fact
that it controls the health insurance scheme for civil service workers, Union
Personal. UP is widely considered to be a very eective health insurance
scheme (obra social) unlike some of those controlled by unions - and it is

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

121

open to all civil servants, whether aliated to UPCN or not. One delegate called
the health insurance scheme an important source of containment. Delegates
often saw one of their most important services to their aliates as providing
support and advice in managing the health care system: for example, they
would help them through bureaucratic procedures, telephone clinics to make
appointments or check up whether test results were back, and so on. In informal
conversations, delegates advise each other on what they could expect from Union
Personal, recommending it, advising what plan it might be necessary to sign up
for, what one could expect, what the level of treatment was like, and so on.
Sometimes, the union delegation will also take on wider responsibilities associated with the health of workers. For example, one delegate told me that he
joined UPCN because when his baby daughter fell very seriously ill, it was only
the UPCN activists who took care of him, even though he was not an aliate
at the time. They arranged for hospital treatment, and also ensured that he got
paid leave from work to be with his daughter in hospital. Through these practices, UPCN makes real the social rights encapsulated in union-controlled
health insurance schemes and thus makes their aliates social citizenship substantive; or at least it does so for those aliates prepared to come to the union to
request help.
UPCN also has a well-developed range of subsidies (subsidios) for aliates,
which are gifts, mostly of a stay in a hotel, that mark particular life events, from the
birth of a child to weddings, wedding anniversaries and death of an aliate. One of
the day to day activities of the delegate in charge of Accion Social is to assist
aliates in applying for these gifts. UPCN also negotiates discounts with travel
agents, kindergartens and other medical services; it provides school materials for
preschool and primary school children each year; it also has three recreational
facilities for its aliates.13 Nowadays, the benets that delegates most often
pointed to after the obra social were the school materials and the childrens colonia
de vacaciones, summer camp. People would joke about how an aliates children
would go to the union summer camp each year, then, when they were 18, get a
government job. They told this story mostly to illustrate how UPCN cared for its
aliates and their families in an all-encompassing way, from childhood through to
adult working life. ATE also negotiates various discounts for its members and
organises a school childrens summer camp.
The summer camp evokes a link between family and employment that is important in the Argentine state, where jobs are thought to be allocated according to
social networks which incorporate both kinship and union membership, as one
ATE delegate told me:
Well, nobody goes to work for the state by presenting their CV at the reception
window; people get work for the state because they are someones family member,
through the unions or through the functionary [i.e. the politically appointed top civil
servant]. [. . .] An 18 year old kid doesnt get in on his own merits, he gets in because he
is someones family. There was in the Radical party epoch I got in in 2002, in that

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

122

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

moment because of the [unions] relationship with the minister we could ll up [job]
contracts. But, well, thats how you get a job working for the state.
[. . .]
One of the businesses that [the unions] have always done is getting people jobs
always, always. Every local oce of any union in the state has a le of CVs from
friends, family members, from aliates, who ask you. Thats how it works.

The allocation of jobs according to particular social networks is of course a

feature of public sector employment across the world, including in the UK; it is the
involvement of the union in the creation of such networks that makes Argentina
special. Usually, the link between employment, kinship and union membership was
not articulated quite as explicitly as in the above quote, but it was common for
people to tell me about their family members in government employment or to talk
about their route to government employment through connections like the union
summer camp or another social network, or to talk about how a particular administrative entity was a family both literally and metaphorically. The point here is not
one about how state employment may or may not be organised, but to show how
unions can care for almost every aspect of an aliates life. This is a kind of
encompassment well beyond the individualised containment of the therapeutic
relationship.
It does not always live up to its promise, nor do all aliates desire the total kind
of encompassment that I have described. Furthermore, nor does it create organisations entirely without internal dissent. Indeed, both ATE and UPCN have
developed ways in addition to containment to deal with dissent and critique, ranging from violence to the incorporation of contrary positions, to expulsion of
disruptive elements. ATE activists felt that one of the most important points was
their unions horizontal nature, which allowed for critique and dissent from within
the union structure, even positively encouraged it. For UPCN, containment was
one among an armoury of weapons that could be used to maintain internal coherence and discipline, and they were often very successful in that aim. UPCN activists
repeatedly emphasised the organic, vertical, nature of their union, the repetition
perhaps indicating the challenges involved in maintaining rigorous discipline.14
However, UPCN was also helped by the fact that usually those within UPCN
who do not agree with its verticalism will leave, and either join ATE or forego
union membership altogether.
A third dimension of contencion linked to the total nature of the union is that of
containment in the sense of preventing a person from taking their complaint further. This particular dimension has implications for the nature of political citizenship understood as political agency. On a societal level, the way that the Parque
Patricios group quoted above spoke about their work of contencion as giving
unemployed young people a group to belong to brings to mind both containing
them in the way that union delegates talk about being given a home or a collective
context, but also stopping the youth from going o the rails. Sabrina Rodriguez
and Ariel Negrete spoke of containment as a process of dealing with the individual

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

123

eects of widespread economic crisis such as a house repossession on an individual, person-to-person level. This aspect of contencion correlates for UPCN with
an ideology of unionism as resolving problems through negotiation, rather than
seeing the union as defending the worker through an antagonistic relationship with
the employer, much more ATEs position. UPCN is certainly prepared to defend its
aliates, but sees antagonism as a last resort. For UPCN delegates, it is far better
to resolve problems as they come up and usually on an individual level, and this
orientation often underlies the way they talk about containment.
One potential outcome of this kind of containment is the diversion of political
agency and organisation away from movements that seek to address economic
crisis or resolve contradictions between labour and capital/employer on a structural
level. And some ATE delegates criticised this tendency in UPCN using words that
explicitly evoke this third meaning of the concept of contencion:
They have a practice of being ocialist: Kirchner governs today, Menem yesterday,
in the middle De la Rua what the union is going to do is sit itself down with the
government and say well, we are here, this is the service we can oer: contain the
demands, negotiate and regulate the proposals you have for the workers, and be a
nexus.

One Spanish translation of levee, or oodbank, is dique de contencion; and one

highly politicised activist argued that peronist unionism has historically been the
oodbank of the workers struggle ([el Peronismo] ha servido historicamente como
dique de contencion de la lucha de los trabajadores.). His comments have much to
do with the rivalry between the two unions, and in turn between two kinds of unionism: peronist and clasista or oppositional, tensions that have run through the history
of Argentine organised labour. They represent a critique of ocialism and peronism
on the part of ATE which reects to some extent the criticisms of 20th century
Peronism made by historians and political scientists and discussed in the rst section
of this paper. And, as with that set of arguments, ATEs critique also tells only part
of the story, since UPCN and the other peronist unions in the CGT are certainly
prepared to mobilise, and when they do so they are often very eective, certainly in
their own terms and also more widely. However, they mobilise with dierent aims in
view put crudely, the well-being of their members rather than the liberation of their
class. They also use dierent methods, emphasising negotiation and the exercise of
personal connections at high levels of union and political bureaucracy over mass
demonstrations, which are viewed as a last resort. UPCN delegates maintain that
these methods are also more eective, even possibly more appropriate for the present
political context than ATEs more oppositional tactics.

Conclusions
Without coming to a political judgement about the validity of the dierent tactics
and political strategies of the two unions, I want to conclude by suggesting that

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

124

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

containment in all its dimensions is an important part of what one might call a
psychic economy15 of citizenship in Argentina. It is a thread that runs
through citizenship at multiple scales: rst, the individual citizenship of the tradeunion-as-political-community. This is enacted through the therapeutic relationship
between aliate and delegate, as well as between worker and delegate. Secondly,
containment is a crucial aspect of social citizenship, as a group of citizens social
rights are put into eect by means of membership of the union as enacted through
associated practices. These practices might be navigating health insurance schemes,
getting jobs, organising childcare, leisure, and so on. Finally, containment works to
shape citizens political citizenship, as it channels discontent, at times damming it
(continuing the ood metaphor), at others dissipating it through many ultimately
ineectual protests, and at still others, directing its overow.
Containment is one of the very important aective dimensions of political
agency and citizenship in this context. Keeping in mind the three dimensions
that I have discussed in this article, it is evident that within the union, one possible
avenue for its members is the transformation of individual therapeutic relationships
into a sense of commonality through shared political activity and identity. Those
activists who respond positively to such processes come to feel they have a context,
they belong to something bigger. Furthermore, contencion means that people feel
that there is the possibility of recourse, that the union is an entity that individuals
can turn to when things are dicult, because of divorce, or the eects of the economic crisis, for example. This is important in corporatist societies when the state
does not or will not or cannot do that for its citizens.
Not all unions contain in the same way: when individuals experience dicult
circumstances, ATE says to them that they have to ght collectively for their liberation as a class or for a fairer economic and political system. UPCN says we will
look after you. Neither necessarily fully achieves that promise, but ATEs position
is attractive to plenty of people, while UPCN responds to a felt need for care
among many others. That need for care may go some way to explaining the attractiveness of populism and corporatist politics in a general sense. This psychic economy also has implications for the political agency of public sector workers in
Buenos Aires. For my informants, political agency is conceptualised collectively;
and, I argue, brought into being through a series of technologies of the self (selfmaking in Ongs terms), of which containment in all three dimensions is a very
important part. What may make it quite unusual analytically is the fact that it is a
group technology of the self. This needs to be understood as a slight modication
of Foucaults theory, since although there is space within his theory for group
technologies of the self of the kind I have described in this article, when he
describes technologies of the self, his focus and that of his best elucidators, such
as Rose (1989, 1999) is much more on the individual qua individual, albeit in
relation to society, often as mediated by a confessor gure. Approaching containment as a group technology of the self allows me to propose that it constitutes an
ethnographic theory of the self that diers quite markedly from the Liberal possessive individualism at the basis of normative (Marshallian) conceptualisations of

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

125

citizenship, and consequently creates dierent understandings and experiences of

political agency and citizenship.
Notes
1. Violence in general is an important issue when discussing trade unions in Argentina, but
not the only one for an understanding of unions, and it was not a significant part of my
fieldwork experience and subsequent research with these unions in particular. The most
important and at times, violent conflict between ATE and UPCN now (since 2007) is
the dispute over the government takeover of INDEC or the national statistics office.
This was of particular concern for ATE, who argued that UPCN had been complicit in
the processes of government interference with inflation statistics, and accussed the
UPCN delegation in INDEC of violence towards them. My UPCN contacts were
very careful to keep me away from their INDEC people, so I only have one side of
the story.
2. For a discussion of the distinction between formal and substantive citizenship, see
Holston (2001) and Sassen (2003).
3. I used several sources for these estimates, so they are calculated slightly differently.
Figures for 1980: Bayon (2006) estimated that in 1950, 56.8% of economically active
population (EAP) were in urban formal employment, 22.8% in informal employment
(including rural workers). The figures for 1980 were 65% and 25.7%, respectively based
on ECLAC figures.
Figures for 19982002: Tornarolli and Concorni (2007):
1998: 42% of EAP in formal employment, 40% in informal employment, 13%
unemployed,
2002: 36% of EAP in formal employment, 42% in informal employment, 18%
unemployed.
Note: Tornarolli and Concorni elaborated these gures based upon the
Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (EPH) conducted by INDEC; I converted
the gures into % of EAP.
4. And refusal to recognise the CTA.
5. Figures for 2009 (formal sector employment 53% of EAP): UCA newsletter February
2010, elaboration based upon EPH, INDEC http://www.uca.edu.ar/uca/common/
grupo12/files/Boletin_Empleo_24_0210.pdf (accessed 27 July 2010).
6. These include moves of large numbers of short-term contract workers to more secure job
contracts, participation in collective bargaining processes (largely in response to UPCN
mobilisation demanding that), quite generous pay settlements, and expansion of state
employment.
7. In another article I focus on more individual forms of subject-making within the unions
(Lazar, 2012).
8. Note that Peronism is often called a sentimiento in this way.
9. Curiously, although the notion of containment appears frequently in the everyday talk
of my interlocutors, as I show below, it is very much associated with British analytical
psychotherapy, as it is not common in either the US or France (Douglas, 2007).
10. Note that Argentinas population is around 1/8th that of the US and less than 2/3rds
that of France (Bass, 2006).

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

126

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

11. Psychoanalysis is often criticised for helping patients to live in their environment, not to
change it. It is possible that the growth of Lacanian psychoanalysis during the worst of
the military dictatorship years was due to its emphasis on the analysts couch rather than
a contribution to social change, in contrast to some earlier trends such as those initiatives led by Pichon Riviere or the team who worked at Lanus hospital, including Hernan
Kesselman (Hollander, 1990; Vezzetti, 2003).
12. One such initiative encouraged the residents of a small town to overcome their resistance
to the installation of a public water supply (Vezzetti, 2003).
13. This last is quite common to most of the wealthiest unions, which run hotels, traditionally located in the beach resort of Mar del Plata. The union-run hotels boomed in the
1950s and gave members of the Argentine working class their first ever access to a
vacation. UPCNs recreational centres are the remnants of this mid-20th century trend.
14. For further discussion of this, see Lazar (2012).
15. With thanks to Vinh-Kim Nguyen for this formulation.

References
Anderson B (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Atzeni M and Ghighliani P (2009) Labour movement in Argentina since 1945: the limits of
trade union reformism. In: Phelan C (ed.) Trade Unionism Since 1945: Towards a
Global History, Volume 2: The Americas, Asia and Australia. Bern: Peter Lang,
pp. 223248.
Bass J (2006) In exile from the self: national belonging and psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires.
Ethos 34(4): 433455.
Bayon MC (2006) Social precarity in Mexico and Argentina: trends, manifestations and
national trajectories. CEPAL Review 88: 125143.
Bion W (1959) Attacks on linking. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40: 308315.
Bookchin M (1995) From Urbanization to Cities. Toward a New Politics of Citizenship.
London: Cassell.
Cook J (2010) Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic
Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Douglas H (2007) Containment and Reciprocity: Integrating Psychoanalytic Theory and Child
Development Research for Work with Children. London: Routledge.
Etchemendy S (2005) Old actors in new markets: transforming the populist/industrial coalition in Argentina, 1989-2001. In: Levitsky S and Murillo MV (eds) Argentine Democracy.
The Politics of Institutional Weakness. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press,
pp. 6287.
Etchemendy S and Collier RB (2007) Down but not out: union resurgence and segmented
neocorporatism in Argentina (2003-2007). Politics & Society 35(3): 363401.
Feldman I (2007) Difficult distinctions: refugee law, humanitarian practice, and political
identification in Gaza. Cultural Anthropology 22(1): 129169.
Foucault M (1988) Technologies of the self. In: Martin L (ed.) Technologies of the Self: A
Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock, pp. 1649.
Foucault M (1990 [1976]) The History of Sexuality. Volume 1 An Introduction. London:
Penguin.
Foucault M (1990 [1984]) The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality: Volume 3. London:
Penguin.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

Lazar

127

Grassi E (2003) Politicas y Problemas Sociales en la Sociedad Neoliberal: La Otra Decada

Infame. Buenos Aires: Espacio.
Hannerz U (1990) Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture. In: Featherstone M (ed.)
Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage, pp. 237252.
Hinshelwood RD (1989) A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association
Books.
Hollander NC (1990) Buenos Aires: Latin Mecca of psychoanalysis. Social Research 57(4):
889919.
Holston J (2001) Urban citizenship and globalization. In: Scott J (ed.) Global City-Regions.
New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 325348.
Holston J (2008) Insurgent Citizenship. Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Isin E (2000) Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City. London: Routledge.
Isin E (2007) City.State: critique of scalar thought. Citizenship Studies 11(2): 211228.
James D (1988) Resistance and Integration. Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946
1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laidlaw J (2002) For an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311332.
Lazar S (2008) El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Lazar S (2012) Disjunctive comparison: citizenship and trade unionism in Bolivia and
Argentina. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 349.
Levitsky S (2003) From labor politics to machine politics: the transformation of partyunion linkages in Argentine Peronism, 1983-1999. Latin American Research Review
38(3): 336.
Mandel R (2008) Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in
Germany. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marshall A and Perelman L (2004) Sindicalizacion: Incentivos en la Normativa Sociolaboral.
Buenos Aires: IDES.
Munck R (2004) Labour and Globalisation. Results and Prospects. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Munck R, Galitelli R and Falcon R (1987) Argentina from Anarchism to Peronism: Workers,
Unions and Politics 1855-1985. London: Zed Books.
Nguyen V-K (2005) Antiretroviral globalism, biopolitics, and therapeutic citizenship.
In: Ong A and Collier S (eds) Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics and Ethics as
Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 124144.
Ong A (1999) Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Plotkin MB (2001) Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a
Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Plotkin MB (2003) Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the
Present. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Pozzi PA (1988) Argentina 1976-1982: labour leadership and military government. Journal
of Latin American Studies 20(1): 111138.
Rock D (2002) Racking Argentina. New Left Review 17: 5586.
Rosaldo R (1994) Cultural citizenship in San Jose, California. PoLAR 17: 5763.
Rose N (1989) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015

128

Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

Rose N (1999) Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Sassen S (2003) The repositioning of citizenship: emergent subjects and spaces for politics.
Berkeley Journal of Sociology 46: 425.
Senen Gonzalez C, Trajtemberg D and Medwid B (2009) La expansion de la afiliacion
sindical: analisis del modulo de relaciones laborales de la EIL. In: Ministerio de
Trabajo GdA (ed.) Trabajo, Ocupacion y Empleo. Estudios Laborales 2008. Buenos
Aires: Ministerio de Trabajo, Empleo y Seguridad Social, pp. 1334.
Tornarolli L and Conconi A (2007) Informalidad y Movilidad Laboral. Un Analisis
Empirico para Argentina. In: Documentos de Trabajo. Areas de Trabajo: Mercado
Laboral y Empleo. Nro. 59. Vol. 2011. CEDLAS, Universidad Nacional de la Plata.
Torre JC (1998) The ambivalent giant: the Peronist labor movement, 1945-1995. In: Brennan
J (ed.) Peronism and Argentina. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, pp. 125140.
Usami K (2004) Transformation and continuity of the Argentine welfare state: evaluating
social security reform in the 1990s. Developing Economies XLII(2): 217240.
Vezzetti H (2003) From the Psychiatric Hospital to the street: Enrique Pichon Riviere and
the diffusion of psychoanalysis in Argentina. In: Plotkin MB (ed.) Argentina on the
Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the Present. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, pp. 141174.

Author biography
Sian Lazar is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Archaeology
and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK. She has conducted research on
collective politics and citizenship in Bolivia and Argentina. She is the author of El
Alto, Rebel City. Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke University Press,
2008), and co-author of Doing the Rights Thing. Rights-based development and
Latin American NGOs (London, ITDG publishing, 2003).

Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at Durham University on June 18, 2015