Sociology has long shied away from the problem of populism. This may be due to suspicion about the concept or uncertainty about how to fit populist cases into broader comparative matrices. Such caution is warranted: the existing interdisciplinary literature has been plagued by conceptual confusion and disagreement. But given the recent resurgence of populist politics in Latin America and elsewhere, sociology can no longer afford to sidestep such analytical challenges. This article moves toward a political sociology of populism by identifying past theoretical deficiencies and proposing a new, practice-based approach that is not beholden to pejorative common sense understandings. This approach conceptualizes populism as a mode of political practice-as populist mobilization. Its utility is demonstrated through an application to mid-twentieth-century Latin American politics. The article concludes by sketching an agenda for future research on populist mobilization in Latin America and beyond.Although the demarcation of [objects of study] is not an end in itself . . . , it is of prime importance. Before we can pose questions of explanation, we must be aware of the character of the phenomena we wish to explain. (Smelser 1963:5) The resurgence of so-called neopopulism across Latin America has breathed new life into an old analytical problem. Over the past two decades, politicians like Peru's Alberto Fujimori, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and Bolivia's Evo Morales have generated legitimacy and support by mobilizing marginalized social sectors into publicly visible and contentious political action, while articulating an anti-elite, nationalist rhetoric that valorizes ordinary people. For both scholars and political commentators, the intuitive point of comparison has been with an earlier generation of populist leaders-such as Peru's Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Brazil's Getúlio Vargas, and Argentina's Juan Domingo Perón-whose charismatic styles have come to define a romantic stereotype of Latin American political culture. Given the significance and prevalence of populist politics, it is remarkable that the phenomenon has received almost no attention from sociology. To remedy this deficiency, this article presents a new theoretical approach that treats populism as a mode of political practice. This

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Scholars have recognized that contentious political action typically draws on relatively stable scripts for the enactment of claims making. But if such repertoires of political practice are generally reproduced over time, why and how do new modes of practice emerge? Employing a pragmatist perspective on social action, this article argues that change in political repertoires can be usefully understood as a result of situated political innovation-i.e., of the creative recombination of existing practices, through experimentation over time, by interacting political agents for whom old repertoires were proving inadequate to the changing context of action. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by applying it to explain the historical emergence of a new set of populist mobilizing practices in early twentieth-century Peru. The results have implications for the study of political action and historical change.The question of political stability and change is of longstanding sociological concern. Marx's (1969 [1852], 1968 [1871]) political sociology famously foregrounded the dramatic transformation of political structures; and subsequent studies of revolutions, regime transitions, political institutional change, voter Theor Soc

While the problem of intersubjectivity has motivated a great deal of sociological research, there has been little consideration of the relationship between intersubjectivity-sustaining practices and the physical environment in which these are enacted. The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) is a strategic site for exploring this relationship. With its labyrinthine layout and bewildering exhibits, the MJT provides a natural "breaching experiment" in which concrete elements of the space disrupt normal competencies for sustaining presumptions of intersubjectivity. Using ethnographic data on visitor interaction, this article specifies two disruptive aspects of the physical environment and identifies four methods of repair on which visitors rely to reestablish presumptions of intersubjectivity. The analysis of spatially situated processes of intersubjective disruption and repair in an extreme case such as the MJT is a first step toward "emplacing" the intersubjectivity problem in more everyday settings. Ever since Schutz's "sociologization" of Husserl's phenomenology, the problem of intersubjectivity has motivated much sociological research. The central question is that of how interacting subjects, with no ability to see through any eyes but their own, are able to take it for granted that they share reciprocal perspectives with one another -to operate as if it can be assumed that how one experiences the world is, more or less, how others experience it. As Schutz (1967a:316) put it: "I take it for granted, and I assume my fellow-[hu]man does the same, that I and my fellow- [hu] man would have typically the same experiences of the common world if we changed places…." Research in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis has illuminated the practices by which subjects manage this presumption of intersubjectivity "for all practical purposes" (Schutz 1967a:12), showing that its ongoing maintenance is Theor Soc (

While sharing fundamental similarities with other colonial and postcolonial experiences, Latin America has a unique history of having been the proving ground for early Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects, of having experienced a relatively long duration of-but also historically early end to-these projects, and of negotiating a particular and complex trajectory of internal and external post-colonial relations. What can the study of this distinct colonial and post-colonial experience contribute to a broader program of postcolonial sociology? Conversely, what can a revitalized postcolonial sociology contribute to the study of Latin America? This article develops provisional answers to these questions by reviewing major currents in South and North American scholarship on the Latin American colonial and post-colonial experience. Some of this scholarship self-consciously identifies with broader movements in postcolonial studies; but much of it-both historical and contemporary-does not. By bringing together diverse strands of thought, this article sheds new light on what postcolonialism means in the Latin American context, while using the comparative leverage that this set of often overlooked cases provides to contribute to a new program of postcolonial sociology.