4
Heliópolis and its representations
19th century, there has been an evolution in the Brazilian society in regards to the social representations of the favela{26}. In the last thirty years, the literature focused on the subject has been registering some basic characteristics of the socio-cultural dimension that have helped us to improve our understanding of Heliópolis. Lícia Valladares, in her book The Invention of the Favela, for example, produces an intractable criticism on the "dogmas" commonly accepted in Brazilian society in regards to the favelas, denouncing these creeds, installed in the representation that makes of it the political class, repeatedly tries to reduce the diversity of the favela through limited looks seeking to homogenize it. Supported by this point, we set out to imagine the favela from a perspective of second order, playing to take a step backwards on the way it observes itself compared to the "rest of the society" (which is also a structure).
Among the dogmas mentioned by the author is the specificity of the favela, which sublimates the peculiar way as it occupies the urban space, outside of the regularities and urban standards, without streets well drawn, with scarce or absent services and collective infrastructure. That is, the favela as a specific and unique urban space. According to Valladares, all official agencies - architects, lawyers and researchers - either justify their approaches, recalling that the favela is irregular and illegal or enhance it for its unique aesthetics. Another characteristic or dogma is the favela being seen as locus of poverty, the urban territory of the poor. The theory of marginality is also used here to promote that vision. In the end, the favela as a unit: although everyone acknowledges it is a multiple reality, they all allow themselves to be carried away by the habit of reducing a plural universe to a single category.
"The certainly atypical trajectory of those individuals presents a new issue to Brazilian social sciences: the need to develop a sociology of social mobility, so far little present in the research. The development of this thematic area would precisely allow us to abandon the limitation of the category built by dogmas, showing clearly the complex process of social differentiation that is happening in Brazilian society, even in the favelas. It is possible to be poor and not live in a favela, or to live in the favela believing in the possibility of a social ascension. If we stop confusing the social processes observed in the favela with the social processes caused by it, it will be possible to understand phenomena that, despite manifested, in fact, in the favelas, it is also manifested in other places. Our proposal is that the favelas be no longer the field systematically used to study the most various issues related to poverty. Only then will we stop confusing favela and poverty.” {27}
During the three months we lived in Heliópolis and coexisted with the residents, it was possible to observe the undeniable movement of transformation that was happening with the representation of poverty in the favela. The study confirmed the existence of certain "culture of poverty" that transferred from one generation to another, incorporating values that put in check the concept of poor - seen under the perspective of economic and social aspects.
In Heliópolis, as well as in other Brazilian favelas, the culture of poverty holds itself in a vicious circle that is able to guarantee to the poor conditions of survival in the modern society{28}, a way of existence that seems to generate a kind of "syndrome", for its ability to transfer anxiety, specific to low income populations that show on one hand "a spirit of resignation and fatalism about the future", and for another, certain 'joy of living' and to create instances to "get high doses of human warmth and interaction, turning everyday difficulties more bearable".{29}
Behind this culture of poverty, there would be, in fact, a game of political interests. On the one hand, by reinforcing the situation of poverty in Heliópolis, the State maintains its political and economic influence over it. This can be verified mainly through urbanization plans, since in order to keep possession of the land it controls in some way the freedom the residents have to build their own home. That also interests the majority of residents whose objective is to maintain the social benefits.
Therefore, the favela as a representation of poverty is rather a circular vision perpetuated by the actions of political and social agents. Over time, the term "community" happens to be used in the space of the favela as a way of livening up that stigma. But the favela is not a community. Both in Heliópolis and in Rocinha, people have never been on equal terms. The word community derives from the Latin Communitas, and is associated with the idea of communion, of congregation and people in equality of requirements. For that reason, it was long used in the religious sense by Christian culture. More recently, socialist movements, especially the utopian, used the term to spread community ideals.
For anthropologist Patricia Birman, "the notion of community, based on Catholic values, does not need to be explicitly religious, as, moreover, often it is not: references to the community as a place of realization of the hierarchy and the complementarity between the different is anchored in a diffuse Catholicism that is confused, in some circumstances, with what would be as of one of national heritage. It won symbolic value as a place of 'traditional' values for certain governmental and non-governmental agencies. The image resulting from this conception of identity is positive and greatly powered by the residents of the favela as well as the larger society, in moments in which is sought to value the axes of the first with the latter.” {30}
The question is to know if the term 'community' is used as a form of changing the representation of the favelado or just another way to reinforce that stigma. In recent years, the Union of Nuclei, Associations and Societies of Residents of Heliópolis and São João Clímaco (UNAS), for example, has been building a political speech to represent itself as "an educational neighborhood".
Valladares explains that "the use of this term [community] also legitimizes its own statute as representative vested by the collectivity, and hides all the differences and conflicts that exist between the various areas or between the residents themselves. The notion of community implies an idea of union - which has not always been a feature of these associations and their territories. And therefore masks the diversity of social situations and the multiplicity of interests present in an often more atomized than communitarian structure." {31}
The associations of residents take up the image of "lacking community" to secure support from the public authorities to residents. That way, the associations possess a mediating role, because "when reaffirming the specific nature of the areas they represent, they want both to sublimate the precarious state of its residents, the legal status of the occupation of the land and the urban infrastructure, in addition to citizenship".{32}
Valladares points out that often the residents reinforce the practices of community leaders at the time of defend their interests: "Proof of this is that they invest in the improvement of the exterior appearance of their homes, extending the perception of the precarious spaces, even though the comfort of the inside is considerably worn out ".{33}
In addition to public authorities, non-governmental organizations (ONG) operating in the favelas tend to cultivate the representation of lacking community in the collective imaginary. Closer to the "poor" than many other institutions, its branches or subsidiaries operate within the favela and reaffirm the speech of the associations of residents such as the notion of "community" and its connotations of unity, solidarity and cohesion.
"Many times, those organizations have very specific clienteles - women, children, young people, African-Americans, etc. – and particular domains of action, but they always highlight a more global vision that insists on outsiders, victims of violence, women heads of household, etc., as segments of poverty. A globalizing speech that, opposing the “poor” to all the rest, can only continue to produce uniformity", explains Lícia Valladares. {34}
According to the Brazilian researcher, the free rider model can be used to analyze the presence of hierarchical relations in the favela, because it emphasizes the personal interests and the advantages that can be obtained from a given situation - which contradicts an idea of community, so deeply rooted in the representations that are made of the "world of poverty".
The free rider concept was used by the American economist and social scientist Mancur Olson, in his book The logic of collective action, to explain the behavior of individuals that "do not have any common interest in regards of paying the cost of that collective benefit. Each member would prefer others to pay all costs, and by way of rule would enjoy any provided advantage that might or might not covered a portion of the cost.{35}”
According to Olson, the free rider is the individual who enjoys collective goods without having to pay anything for them and with that keeps the group from reaching their goals.
Valladares indicates that the practice of the 'jeitinho brasileiro' also contributes to the development of formal and informal means and mechanisms to obtain benefits. And, in a transposition to the Brazilian free rider concept model, she evaluates that "if the participation of the favelados was active and creative, it also recognizes itself more individual than collective, each trying to capture particular advantages, suggesting that the utilitarian ideology and individualistic ethics are stronger than the direction to act collectively." {36}
The favela is not a homogeneous whole composed of poor people, a "lacking community", but a locality in which the most varied expressions, experiences, dreams, markets and expectations coexist. Therefore, to avoid the concept of community and its representation still linked to stereotypes, another analytical line was adopted: the distinction between community/locality.
The American anthropologist Anthony Leeds (1925-1989) defined the issue of the relations between local authorities and supra local institutions as an important element of their problems. Leeds came to Brazil twice. The first time, in the 1950's, to study the economics of cocoa in Bahía, and later, at the end of the 1960s, accompanying a group of the Organization of American States (OAS) to research inside the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. During that period, Leeds analyzed the evictions of residents done by the housing programs and his conclusions differed from most of the anthropological thinking of the time, for which living in the favela was related to the inability to occupy other urban areas. For Leeds, the favelas had a complex organization form and disagreed on the existence of a 'culture of the favela'. Leeds criticized the concept of community as a synonym of favela, which to him was hardly a place of residence without the connotation of social stigma, consequently defending its heterogeneity.
The historian and anthropologist from Rio de Janeiro Marcos Alvito in "A Century of Favela" exposes the beliefs of Leeds. According to Alvito, to Leeds the so called community studies used the same methods of the studies of tribes, of different realities:
"Criticizing the widespread use of the notion of community, he proposed to replace this notion by the one of 'locality'. According to him, "the use of the term 'locality' does not force us to postulate a minimum or maximum notion of organization such as 'community' (...) or to discuss its ontological status (...). It does not force us to assume that the locality we live in is also a community. Usually it is not (...). The localities as nodal points of interaction, are characterized by a highly complex network of diverse relationships. The family ties of the nuclear family, and often, those with close relatives, will be widely found in localities, especially in the small ones. Close friendships also tend to exist in the locality. Neighbors exist, by definition, in the locality. What contributes to portray a locality is the fact that it only serves as identification of the place of residence of individuals; the fact of living in a locality does not necessarily mean to be part of a local community (...). This view is supported by a vision of urban society as complex system, not being possible to understand an element alone without considering its relationships with others." {37}
What is important of this concept is that it is linked to the notion of Node and Composite Commercial Microcenter (CCM) used for analysis of urban spaces in regards to micro-insurance, as it will be seen later:
"The main characteristic of localities would be the fact of them constituting 'nodal points of interaction, where there is a highly complex network of diverse relations'. They would be, above all, very close family ties, more meaningful friendships, ritual kinship and neighborhood. In short... localities are, indeed, highly organized segments of the total population." {38}
That vision makes it possible to use the Composite Commercial Microcenter (CCM) concept, because it places its activity within what precisely is a locality. Therefore, from an economic point of view, a locality can also be characterized by the presence of CCMs.
To the concept of locality we may add the contribution of French anthropologist Marc Augé, with his definition of the spaces of interaction of the type place/no place - being the place an area similar to the locality of Leeds, but with a strong emphasis on personal recognition and identification of the uniqueness of the other; and the no place, the opposite, i.e., public areas of fast transit, such as airports, stations and subway trains.
The CCMs are in "places" or spaces of interaction in which the relationship is personal; the locality will be a kind of place, "an area characterized by things such as a mass of people more or less permanent or an group of houses, usually including and surrounded by relatively empty, but not necessarily unused, areas".{39}
At the same time the Node, which would be the spatial opposite of the CCM, would be closer to the concept of Augé’s no-place. In the Node, the relationships are transitory, impersonal, and highly functional. Augé gives as an example of no-place the Metro in Paris, where millions of people transit without recognition to their individual condition. At the Nodes as well as at the no places there is no “transit” beyond the mandatory. And this can be corroborated in Heliópolis, at the Estrada das Lágrimas that borders the locality.
Marcos Alvito, when studying the favela of Acari, in the northern area of Rio de Janeiro, notices a similar process:
"What I understand by transit, of course, excludes mandatory trips such as going to work, the market or to school. I noticed that it was always the same people in the same places. After some time, I already knew some women's groups, always chatting, always close to their homes, sometimes sitting in the slabs of their doors. As for men, each birosca (small business) has a good number of "frequent" customers, the vast majority of them, very close neighbors. Most of the time, they do not consume anything: the"barraca", as they call it, is just a meeting place." {40}
For the methodological effects produced by a prospective study on the way micro-insurance transforms commercial interactions inside a favela, the concept of micro-area, exposed by Marcos Alvito in his already mentioned analysis of the Acari favela, it is widely possible. According to Alvito, micro-areas would be small pieces of the favela serving as support to representations about the differences that exist in the interior of a single favela: " there are micro-areas considered poorer...where improvised wooden shacks are still predominant", as there are also some where better quality houses are many, covered in ceramic tiles, taking life then in a center/periphery relationship [but within the auto poetic enclosure of the favela]. A basic distinction can be made between micro-areas "in the outskirts" and "deeper in" favela. The interior areas, far from the "asphalt", possibly less accessible, would be the less valued. {41}
What is relevant for insurance circulating inside Composite Commercial Microcenters, is that the view of Alvito recognizes that each small piece of favela is part of a network of relationships that have the neighborhood as a starting point:
"The micro-area is that middle area between private (home) and public, in which a basic, wider sociability than the established in family ties, therefore more dense, meaningful and stable than formal and individualistic relations imposed by society develops." {42}
If daily life of the immediate neighborhood, with exchanges and personal relationships where affection and permanent celebration of life in mutirões, develops in the small pieces of the favela, on micro areas the ties of friendship and neighborliness, already greatly active, are reinforced by family ties, including, too, the ritual kinship established by the existence of "godmothers" and "godfathers", as it happens in any part of Latin America.
Similarities with other large cities in Latin America are seen everywhere. Also at Heliópolis the area is heterogeneous because different economic elements coexist, and in each micro area that space requires equal behavior from its residents, where excessive generosity, as well as greed, are demonstrated to be out of an environment where the horizontality of social relations primes:
"The title for those who know how to balance that relationship is parceiro (partner), among men, and girlfriend, among women; "although there is no actual ritual kinship between them".{43}
Another feature of these small pieces of favela, according to Alvito, is the fairly restricted limit imposed by the relationship between genders:
"Mainly in the case of married women, the network of reciprocity that is allowed for them to build is much more restricted and normally settles in the family organization: sisters-in-law and nieces, preferably under the watchful supervision of the mother-in-law. At most, a very close neighbor, from next door or across the street, can be incorporated into that circle. The locus of such female relations of reciprocity is the domestic space or the border thereof ('the doors'). The exception are outside activities justified by the dynamics of the 'home' and the family, like grocery shopping, taking the kids to school or go to Church (normally, in groups composed of other women or accompanied by their children) ".{44}
Men, on the contrary, rarely visit each other, although the places in which they meet are occasionally banned to women, noting some flexibility in this and other behaviors between Heliópolis and Rocinha.
To Alvito, the favela is a world of amazing diversity; each small piece carries marks and seals which the residents evoke, and keep and treasure in their affective memory over the years. Micro areas are the locus of that collective memory. Sometimes tragic ("here in this place she was murdered by her boyfriend"), also cheerful and friendly, like remembering between laughs their mischiefs or fights from when they were children. It is a space with marks of family relationships, of loved ones – absent today.
Social Representation
The concept of collective representation was proposed by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), for the construction of a theory of religion and magic. According to him, those collective phenomena were different from individual events. Human individuality would develop from society, since the knowledge of the group would have origins in social life. Religion, for example, would be a product of a community or a town, with the existence of a clear distinction between individual representations, which would lead the life of every person, and the collective representations that would govern social life. {45}
Collective representations, as defined by Durkheim, would be static and immutable phenomena with the purpose to transmit the collective heritage of the ancestors, such as the law, moral, customs, political institutions, pedagogical practices, among others, that would form a 'collective consciousness'.
The main criticism that was made to this thought is not taking into account the increasing complexity of modern society. Instead, new elements were introduced by the Romanian Serge Moscovici, in 1961, who by rescuing the concept of collective representation of Durkheim, created the concept of social representation ("set of concepts, phrases and explanations originated in daily life during the course of interpersonal communications"{46}), indicating that this type of projection [for us, mental drawing] would sit between the borders separating sociology and psychology. To this vision, the individual takes an active role in the process of building society thanks to social representations.
French anthropologist and linguist Dan Sperber would later make an analogy with medicine to differentiate collective and social representations. According to him, the human mind is susceptible to cultural representations, in the same way that the human body is susceptible to diseases{47}:
According to Marcos Alexandre{48}, social representations are a particular modality because "not all 'knowledge' can be considered social representation, but only one that is part of the daily life of the people, by common sense, which is developed socially and works in the sense of interpret, think and act about reality. It is a practical knowledge, opposed to scientific thinking, therefore similar to it, as well as to the myths in what it says regarding the development of such knowledge from a symbolic and practical content. {49}
Under this perspective, the social representation theory would allow to accompany the daily life of individuals, considering their values and cultural identities, seeking their true roots and origins, providing discovery of old and new aspects of their identity.
An important point that stands out is that the representations of the social world are always determined by group interests. In addition, "the struggles of the representations are as important as the economic ones, to understand the mechanisms by which a group imposes or attempts to impose, their conception of the social world, its values, or its domain".{50}
This idea is very present when analyzing social representations that were formed around the favela.