Vidas nas ruas, corpos em percurso no cotidiano da cidade

Abstract

This work comes from an ethnographic study of the homeless people in downtown Fortaleza. It aims at understanding their point through the city. The study’s starting point is the homeless person’s body, which is conceived as a prime unit of social experiences. It is their body that goes throughout the city, carrying the marks of a street sociability. The practices studied do not hawed; the are shaped by their own rules of behavior, which, according to De Certeau (1996), in a tactical watt affect the instutionalized forms of power. Thus silently and invisibly, these practices builds new forms of everyday life. The city is the stage where these streets are performed. In this study , downtown is understood as throbbing organism, a space that aggregates many social actors. There the homeless are invisible exceptat night, where they come together in fron of the shops´ doors. A description of the main place occupied by the homeless is presented in a way that such places are understood to be defined territories by usage (Ferrara, 1999). Lastly, the ways followed by the homeless people are narrated on the bassist of their singularity, but they also are aggregated according to their nature, be is survival delirious, of female conditions.