Emotions have achieved a certain prominence in recent studies of collective action. Based on a rationalist conception of the latter, many of the authors concerned have developed a cognitive view of emotion adhering to a western tradition of thought that divorces the rational from the irrational, mind from body and private from public. Emotions thereby become factors capable of explaining people's motivations in collective actions. In this article I review part of my ethnographic study of recovered factories in Buenos Aires in order to analyze emotions as political practices. I suggest shifting the debate away from irrational/rational action and towards an understanding of political practices as embodied experience. This aim in mind I analyze the workers' descriptions of the moment of occupation. This reconstruction shows us the importance of emotion in articulating the experience and in pursuing their claims. At the same time, the public display of feeling enables the workers to legitimate their demands and garner political support.
Emotions; Political Practices; Rationality; Recovered Factories; Buenos Aires