Notas sobre La productividad social de los procesos políticos. Miradas antropológicas. Fernando Balbi y Julieta Gaztañaga (Comps.). Buenos Aires: Antropofagia. 2024, 168 pp

Abstract

This is a review of the book "The Social Productivity of Political Processes: Anthropological Perspectives," compiled by F. Balbi and J. Gaztañaga, and published in 2024 by Antropofagia. The work offers a theoretical and empirical framework to contribute to the understanding of the situated ways in which political processes are produced in state societies, thereby shaping the world we inhabit. The book as a whole is the result of meticulous work that articulates theory and fundamental procedural aspects for the practice of anthropological research. Its greatest contribution is that it manages to embed the understanding of what is commonly defined as "politics" within the course of the social fabric of which it is a part and which it helps to reproduce, while, in turn, reproducing itself as an apparently distinct sphere of activity. Each case is constructed from the procedural, comparative, and ethnographic analysis made possible by the dialogue between the empirical elements that give it specificity and a true inversion of the theory of value systematized by David Graeber