Intimacy and the public sphere. Politics and culture in the Argentinian national space, 194655 Earlier versions of this text were presented at the Laboratoire de Sciences Sociales, cole Normale Superieure (Paris, March 2002), at the University of Chicago (May 2001), in the Universidad de Buenos Aires (November 2000); at the Ncleo de Antropologia da Poltica (NuAP, Rio de Janeiro, September 2000), at the Instituto de Desarrollo Econmico y Social (IDES, Buenos Aires, August 2001), at the Universidad Nacional de Salta (Argentina, July 2001), and at the Universidad de San Andrs (Buenos Aires, August 2000). I thank all those who kindly discussed my work on these occasions. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Social Anthropology for their stim