Seawall on the sidewalk, police at the door: vicinal conflicts and transformation of fun in the outskirts of São Miguel dos Campos - Alagoas

Abstract

This work aims at understand changes in leisure and fun gatherings patterns of poor neighbourhood dwellers from São Miguel dos Campos in Alagoas State. We take the problem of social tensions emergence around “big sound walls” (paredões de som) in residential areas as conductor line of the analysis. The ethnographic immersion, connected to a figuracional perspective, made us perceive that the memory of a peaceful medium-sized city has been disturbed by these sound gadgets, increasing the social pressure to control the entertaining scenarios. We argument that pressures over fun gatherings social regulation evoke the destabilizing of old social-spatial solidarities, hit by rupture of communitarian ties and by progressive integration of the poorer to cultural trade relations. One of the consequences of this process has been the participation increase of poor people in cultural action spheres. They have been felt themselves as more autonomous in the sense of being “individuals” and this phenomena signals new figurations of socio-affective interdependencies in Brazilian mediumsized cities.