Social Anthropology Seminar - Dr. Juan M. del Nido
| Dates: | 7 February 2022 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Dr. Juan M. del Nido |
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The Stranger that Stays as Such: Uber, competition and the logics of alterity in Buenos Aires
Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economics and Social Change
From the moment it arrived in Buenos Aires April 12, 2016, Uber framed itself as a complement to the taxi industry and as an “innovation”. Yet, a superficially ecumenic, anxious for modernity and keen on a sort of iconic cosmopolitanism segment of the middle class saw Uber and the taxi industry as competitors locked in a structural opposition guaranteed, ultimately, by the company’s condition as an outsider, impervious to the alleged taxi “mafia” and other vices of Argentine public life. Materialising the known trope of competition as an economic solution to a political problem, the company’s business practices, its mythologised “success” around the world by then, and seemingly unstoppable penetration of Buenos Aires generated the logics of an economic version of Sahlin’s stranger king: an outsider with its own motiva¬tions but “other” with respect to conflicts framed as political and local. This presentation examines the logics, rhetorics and affects that, regardless of their truth value or empirical consistency, consolidated the structural opposition between economics, objectivity, and competition, on the one hand, and the political, the vitiated and monopolised on the other that framed the experience of the conflict for those residents.
Please register here : https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qdO2hqjouHtNwQF4AQQ-ruCzVYKrnHGzN
Speaker
Dr. Juan M. del Nido
Role: Seminar Speaker
Organisation: University of Cambridge
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
2.016 / 017 2nd Floor Boardroom
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
