Apropiación, Not Kinship

This article discusses how resignifications of the human rights NGO Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo contributed to transformations of post-dictatorial culture. For decades hegemonic media and perpetrators engaged state terror’s reasoning to confront Abuelas’ call for “restitution” of the children who “disappeared” during the last dictatorship in Argentina. Drawing on both the junta’s self-appointed role of saviors and the benevolence of nurture, Catholic couples had thus rescued children from irresponsible “subversive” parents. In their struggle against state terror Abuelas’ metaphor apropiación resignified nurture as violence, pushing politico-cultural change towards a universal right to identity.

Oscar Lewis’s Blind Spot

This article deals with the question of the applicability of Lewis’ concept of the culture of poverty to the situation of the socially excluded localities in urban setting inhabited by Roma (“Roma ghettoes”). The “Roma ghettoes” are shown to be places of a specific cultural pattern which emerged in the process of reaction and adaptation to the long-lasting poverty of its inhabitants. This pattern matches most of the parameters of the culture of poverty - with the exception of an elaborated system of kinship. An analysis of its role in “Roma ghettoes,” however, shows that the complex system of kinship does not prevent poverty, but may re/produce it.