Violent margins

• In Event: Márgenes, violencia y narrativa

Abstract

Urban violence is arguably one of the most pressing problems besieging Latin American democracies. While journalistic, ethnographic, and other accounts of poor people’s lives point to a number of ways in which individuals and communities respond to violence —for example, through direct retaliation, collective action, and lynchings — the specialization and balkanization of research on violence in the social sciences has prevented an integrated and nuanced account of community and individual responses to increased interpersonal violence at the urban margins. Drawing on three years of collective ethnographic research in a violence-plagued community in metropolitan Buenos Aires, the presentation presents a typology of poor people’s responses to urban violence. The presentation also argues that diverse forms of violence among the urban poor: a) serve more than just retaliatory purposes, b) link with one another beyond only dyadic relationships, and c) become a repertoire of action. Residents rely on violence to address individual and collective problems (from disciplining a misbehaving child to establishing authority in the neighborhood and/or at home). As a result, violence takes the form of a Tillyian repertoire of action – a routine way of acting on individual and collective interests.

Author

• Javier Auyero, University of Texas/Austin