Multitudes urbanas: De las figuras y lógicas prácticas de la identificación política

Abstract

The anthropological perspective on urban phenomena is closely related to an «aesthetics of fragment» which is insufficient for thinking about those rapidly changing processes of political identifications in the city. In the first part of this article, I will review some theoretical figures (from society or network to the appealing image of «social foam» which has been proposed by Sloterdijk.) Then, I will present an ethnography of the processes of becoming and dissapearing of a center of squatters in Madrid that was both welcomed and criticized all around the city. Considering this case, I will try an ethnographic approach to the theoretical questions posed in the first part: how the logics of political identification work, and how useful some new figures of theory are in order to think about the challenges of urban phenomena from an anthropological point of view.