This article aims at describing and evaluating the contributions that an anthropological perspective may bring to the analysis of immigrants' ethnic associations. We conceive these associations as bounded social spaces where the different social agents involved hold a continuous process of co-construction and signification. We deem that the main line of analysis should be to inquire how certain kinds of practices articulate each other in order to conform these social spaces as identity territories. In order to achieve this purpose we intend to examine the articulation and negotiation of time and space, as social constructs, that act recreating ethnic boundaries. These processes, embedded in power relations, are the ground from which social agents select certain cultural features (diacritics) that work as identity signs. Diacritics, thus, are considered as the heritage that represents the culture and tradition of the group around the ethnic associations, through a process that stipulates certain criteria for authenticity. This compels us to examine the processes related with the construction of the past, memory and heritage. The methodology applied consists mainly in the qualitative analysis of the information based upon ethnographical fieldwork techniques, and the data bank created from the survey of immigrants and their descendants in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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South America power relations spatiotemporal analysis Argentina Buenos Aires [Argentina] ethnicity social behavior immigrant population