A vida no crime é louca: as relações criminais em um complexo de favelas

Abstract

This research is an attempt to understand the sense of actions practiced by people involved with criminal activities at popular neighborhoods. The focus analytical and the field search is on the Grande Tancredo Neves, a roughly 40 thousand inhabitant’s complex of slums that interconnect and segregate themselves by drugs and guns trafficking, but also join themselves and approach by neighborhoods networks, affective and kinship relations, as well as by trading and services. I aim make an hermeneutics analysis of criminal relations and theirs manners to do the crime operated by poor “criminals”, seeking understand theirs subjective processes: the territorial’s feelings, the construction of a marginal identity, the “choice” by criminal “career”, the sociability networks, the behavior’s codes, the rituals and liminal moments of “thug life”, the famous “cruelty”, and, at last, theirs ambiguous actions: in one sense, resistance and antidiscipline against hegemonic order; by other side, reproduction of some power and domination mechanisms of this structure. At all, I want to understand the poor criminal agent not as isolated of your social and historic configuration, but inserted in a netlike phenomenon, therefore, in an infinite and complex interdependent network of relations, that often activate contradictory actions. I bring some theoretical-methodological paths that I am following to arrive at the object, as well as attempt to make a dense description of the Grande Tancredo Neves, in addition to analyze the sociability manners and networks of local people. This investigation is developed under three battlefronts: i. a theoretical-reflexive diving in previous writings with similar themes; ii. an historical-documental analysis of newspapers and magazines, mainly of local press; iii. above all through an ethnography immersion, “up close and from inside”. The methodological techniques performed are direct and participant observation, non-systematized interviews – chats at sidewalks, bars, corner stores, street markets, public squares etc. – and semi-structured interviews, from a script previously elaborated. These ones are made mainly with criminal agents of diverse modalities, as robbery, assault, drugs and guns trafficking etc., but also occur with people non-involved with criminal activities – by the way, these persons constitute the absolute majority of local inhabitants.