Between Life and Death: Regulations, Negotiations and Violence in a Belo Horizonte Slum

ABSTRACT

Between Life and Death: Regulations, Negotiations and Violence in a Belo Horizonte Slum broaches social processes involving morality, normativity, violence, life, and death. I base my argument on an ethnographic research conducted in a slum in Belo Horizonte, which is the triangulation between three primordial normative regimes-that of the “crime world”, that of the state, and that of the church-that will produce what the theoretical Judith Butler calls a framework, that is, the frame that separates who is on the inside from who is on the outside from what is intelligible. I conclude that, since this is a territory marked by violence, it is this triangulation that will separate who is “human” from who is “killable”.

Keywords:
normative regimes; life; death; subject; urban periphery