Workers and bandits: appointment categories, political meanings

Abstract

This article presents the trajectory of a family, living in a favela in the east side of São Paulo, studied between 2005 and 2007. From this trajectory, the political implications of social categorization, widely disseminated in common sense, which oppose “ workers ”and“ bandits ”. The text is divided into four parts. In the first part, the context of recent changes in the social organization of the outskirts of São Paulo is presented. In the second, the characteristics of the ethnography undertaken appear. In the third, we see the ways in which the “world of crime” invades the domestic dynamics of favela families, and how it starts to dispute space, in them, with other socially more legitimate landmarks. In the fourth part, it is argued that this dispute process, in the social fabric, is simultaneous with the bipolar appointment, in the public world, of "workers" and "bandits". Then, the plasticity of these categories and their ways of operating politically are verified.