Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses the ambiguities in political representation by focusing on the informal practices, face-to-face relations, and subjective knowledge that shapes local politics, inquiring about the intertwinement of hegemonic and anti-hegemonic spaces, practices, and discourses.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores political representation and politics in their ambiguities, reflecting upon how an anthropological approach to local politics can reveal a field of practices and discourses that challenges a view of political ideologies and top-down state strategies as cohesive forces. Inquiring how the hegemonic notions of national and cultural belonging, as well as otherness, operate in local politics, we focus on the ambiguous subjective ways local politicians mobilize, perceive and act upon the concepts of “race”, ethnicity and nation vis-à-vis political party frameworks and bureaucratic procedures. It's based on an ongoing ethnography about Portuguese political parties’ views on immigration and racial and ethnic discrimination in articulation with the legal and symbolic boundaries of national belonging. At the local level, we focus on the political life of Loures, a multicultural town in the Lisbon district, where we follow the practices of politicians and social technicians involved in the negotiation of the meanings and means of “inclusive integration” of racialized or/and migrant populations.

We find local politicians’ actions often sustained on informal practices, face-to-face relations, and subjective knowledge, leading to complex relations between racialized populations and ethnically discriminated groups and political representatives. While creating alternative spaces of mobilization and participation in the face of the state's inadequacies in guaranteeing certain rights and opaque bureaucracies, their political gains and emancipatory potential remain uncertain. We thus inquire about the intertwinement of hegemonic and anti-hegemonic strategies within the political volatility that emerges from the overlap of subjective relations and political representation concerning marginalized populations.