Os patrões da vida loka: uma etnografia do corpo no crime

Abstract

This thesis deals with the participation of young people in the retail drug trade carried out by criminal collectives, called facções, and the processes of subjectivation and corporealization. The main objective is to describe and analyze processes of territorial and corporal spatialization of criminal dynamics and thus contribute to the understanding of the social reproduction of these collectives (including their economic activities). To this end, ethnographic research was carried out in a neighborhood in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador, whose fieldwork sought to apprehend and describe youth membership in the local facção, their participation in the routine of the retail drug trade, intentional acts of physical violence perpetrated and/or suffered, lifestyles and consumption practices. In a first moment, after describing the territorialization of recent supralocal processes - related to criminal dynamics, illegal markets (of drugs and firearms) and legal markets, and state action - and their effects on the neighborhood's daily life, the thesis analyzes the persona of the patrão da vida loka and develops the hypothesis according to which transformations in the subjectivity and sociability of participants in illegal markets indicate the emergence of a specific type of collective assemblage of desire, interpreted through the notion of "crime-expenditure". Subsequently, in order to advance the understanding of the embodiment processes of crime-expenditure and its effects on subjectivity and sociability, the thesis explores a constitutive dimension of the social ordering of the facções, namely the semantic (dis)fit between body and territory, which is produced through two mimetic chains: body, territory and faction; and perpetrator, weapon and victim's body. The analysis of the operationalization of these chains in situations involving violent conflicts reveals their importance both for the constitution of the collectivity facção and the production of radical otherness, and for the production of the aura of power of these collectives. Therefore, we conclude that these processes of mimetic investiture of the body are part of the foundation of the violent reciprocity that characterizes the functioning of illegal markets in the neighborhood.