Política local y formación del estado: Procesos históricos de formación de espacios y sujetós sociales en un municipio rural Mexicano, 1914-1998

This dissertation deals with the participation of different social groups in unending historical processes of formation of a series of spaces of social relations of which they themselves are part —such as their rural villages and corporate landholding organisations. It focuses on the unequal and conflictive participation of diverse local groups in the founding, transformation and conservation of various specific social spaces that have been very important for their livelihoods during most of the twentieth century. In other words, we analyse how different local groups have engaged in historical processes of construction of a part of the specific social conditions of their social action anchored in —but not restricted to— a rural zone in western Mexico.

This study takes on several analytical challenges that go beyond its ethnographic specificities. It centres on the relationship among the social practices of particular human groups, certain specific spaces of social relations, and the historical processes of formation and redefinition of those groups, practices, spaces and relationships among them —both in economic, political and identity terms. From a supplementary perspective, we propose an analysis of the historical processes of construction and redefinition of the shifting set of particular spaces of social relations ( social field ) with respect to which said groups, practices and institutions they rely upon become intelligible as socially produced and producing —constituent and constituting. Thus, neither the specific social spaces nor the social field are determined a priori .

           What are the implications of this theoretical stance for pervasive notions of the State as an acting entity, agent, actor or organization distinct from other social actors, from "society" or from "civil society"? In order to answer this question, we had to weave an ethnographic study of the conflictive participation of social groups in historical processes of construction of specific social spaces of which they themselves are part with the elaboration of a concept of local politics and clarification of the concept ofMexicanStateformation. The determination of these two concepts had to be congruent with a focus on contentious historical processes of formation of those and other hierarchically interrelated social spaces. It is in terms of these processes that we come to understand how the groups, the social inequalities among them, their collective practices and identities, the institutions upon which they differently and contentiously rely are socially created or built as well as constituting or producing.