Revolutionary abandon: Circles and machines in Sandinista Nicaragua

In Nicaragua, the political trajectory of the governing FSLN has been understood as a transition from underground revolutionary circle toward clientelistic political machine. This article traces the emergence of these two key images in political and scholarly discourse, and shows how they have come to inform everyday politics in a community of rural government supporters, who—within a defunct agrarian cooperative—struggle to participate in the government's project of fostering an “Organized People.” For those excluded from this populist political model, the views of inclusion produced by ideas about circles and machines give rise to alternative strategies for contesting what James Ferguson terms “abjection.” The case demonstrates the value, for an emerging anthropology of political “abandonment,” of attending to the formal properties of political images.