Vidas entrelaçadas: uma socioantropologia urbana das proximidades e das distâncias sociais em um bairro popular

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the lives residents of a popular urban neighborhood of Recife city, named Vasco da Gama. From a socioanthropological perspective, it is shown how the residents of this neighborhood - which, seen “from afar and outside”, could be handled as part of a homogeneous social configuration - live differentially the social reality that surrounds the periphery of a unequal city. Observing Vasco da Gama “from close and inside”, the research describes its internal composition, unveiling the proximities and the distances between residents and the environs, taking in account both the correlations of the sociological aspects with the urban configuration and the meanings that individuals elaborate and assign to parts they distinguish inside the neighborhood. Thus, it is evolved the thesis in which the location someone lives in the region and the position in which someone places in social structure condition the way they deal with a set of experiences that affects the popular existence in Brazilian urban peripheries. To verify the thesis validity, it was done an intense field research with participant observation and in-depth interviews during four years (2015-2019). Through an ethnographic interpretation of the observed social reality and the content analysis for more than 60 interviews with young and adult residents, it was possible to realize how individual lives interlink through memories, social trajectories, biographic narratives and social experiences, evidencing the sociocultural structure of a field of possibilities that gets involved in the definition of social dispositions and path of individuals, who live in more or less common social conditions. Thereby, the own author’s life becomes part of the analyzes, as far as I am also a former resident of the researched universe. I was born and lived in Vasco da Gama, with my nuclear family, throughout my childhood and youth. That is why, in methodological terms, this thesis presents a radically reflexive experiment of sociological imagination and objectification that reclaims and updates the debate about the difficulties and virtues to strange the familiar world. Because of the access to university, I lived an experience of upward social mobility and returning to Vasco da Gama as a researcher evidenced the mismatches not intentionally established between me and the place that affects my own social origin. Therefore, it was necessary to look for the paths to reinsert myself in the reality in which I was naturally part before, in order to visualize it again from a native sight to then, as a sociologist, staring and objectifying it again. This way, it was possible to understand how residents’ lives are interlinked inside of local reality and to analyze how they themselves understand and act in face of plurality, proximities and social distances that configure the neighborhood. Furthermore, I could observe how they realize and distinguish, according to a social classification and declassification native system, the vicinities as urban zones, as stated by the concept evolved by myself in this thesis.