Changing scales and the scales of change: ethnography and political economy in Antofagasta, Chile

Abstract

his article is an elucidation of what anthropology can say about social and economic change, and about its relationship to political economy at large. I locate the argument within the recent debate about ‘modernity’ in anthropology, because of the debate’s conspicuousness, and because of its concern with describing and analysing ‘change’. The argument is based on an ethnographic and institutional analysis of urban change in the city of Antofagasta, Chile, focusing particularly on a series of recent local proposals for economic and urban regeneration. The material is used to illustrate the many different ‘scales’ through which projects of ‘modernity’ are put to work and understood in Antofagasta, to argue that the concept of ‘modernity’ is of little use save as a heuristic term, and to suggest that we should look instead to the kinds of complex connections that different orders of analysis afford. Ethnography has its own scale, which participates in, but does not exhaust, the order of political economy.