Making a Living in a Home-Based Entrepreneurship: Moral Economies of Uncertainty in Urban Brazil

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  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 13: Food Access and Inequality

Abstract

This article examines how working-class families in urban Brazil govern economic
uncertainty through home-based forms of entrepreneurship. Drawing on ethnographic
research conducted between 2020 and 2025 with delivery workers and their families in the
metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, it explores the moral and relational dimensions of
domestic economic life amid post-pandemic transformations in labor. By tracing continuities
between earlier collective strategies—such as self-building and mutual aid—and
contemporary family-based enterprises, the paper situates the phenomenon of popular
entrepreneurship within a longer genealogy of everyday efforts to “make a living” and sustain
a dignified life. It argues that homes function as moral and economic infrastructures through
which gendered labor, kinship, and entrepreneurial practices are intertwined. The study
contributes to debates on the anthropology of economy, moral economies, and the governance
of uncertainty in the Global South.

Author

• Ana Raquel Couto, Federal Fluminense University