This is a case study based on the reconstitution of the life history of a homeless adult in the city of São Paulo. Ethnographic research and life history were the strategies in a 12-month long data collection. The analysis tried to reveal, in the process of identity construction, singularities able to re-signify and grant historicity to the homelessness experience. To discuss Pedro's path, religiosity analysis is a crucial element for re-assessing his homelessness history. Allied to other nets, religiosity showed different possibilities of constructing interdependence nets, thus characterizing re-signification and sense reconstruction movements, and eluding disaffiliation processes so frequent in the case of people that experience rupture conducting to homelessness. In those processes, the socially negative identity linked to homelessness can be dislodged and widened, acquiring more elucidative delineations and dynamics. Nonetheless, there is always the need and the challenge of constructing collective alternatives to the precarious homelessness experience.
Life history; Disaffiliation; Social nets; Homeless adults; Cultural antropology