Playing One's Trump: Street Sociability Patterns and Neighbourdhood-use in a Lisbon Suburb

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Sociability and Collective Efficacy

Abstract

This paper analyses the daily gathering of a group of retired men who meet to play cards on their neighborhood's main street sidewalk. This practice is understood as an «focused gathering» (Goffman, 1970), a notion that enables to understand how a specific sociability pattern emerged on the street and how the public character of the encounters gave rise to a «neighborhood-use» (Blokland, 2003). Based on ethnographical observations carried out as resident in the neighborhood, throughout more than a year, I analyze the encounter workings (rituals, recruitment of players, attention focus, division of labor), I relate them to interaction among residents, by-standers, passers, and local workers and its effect on the instillation of sociability among street users and on the making of sidewalk place. By playing cards on the sidewalk these men literally and metaphorically play their trump-card. By acquiring «street-characters» properties (Jacobs, 1971), these men reconfigure their social networks. Their activity engender a significant «neighborhood-use» - an often invisible, under-noticed, daytime-group practice on a predominantly residential setting. However, the case suggests these men’s sense of self is also influenced: card playing helps these retired working and lower middle-class men to infuse emotional support among themselves; it offers them opportunities to express memories and to share present life experiences in the neighborhood. At the end I re-examine the card playing activity, by stressing the relation between the players’ role-repertoires (Hannerz, 1980), social networks and life-cycle position, and the neighborhood’s changing social composition within a wider metropolitan framework.

Author

• João Pedro Nunes, Nova University-Lisbon