Interactions, trails and paths of a city in flux: ethnography of Cracolândia

ABSTRACT

An anthropology of Cracolândia ought to be able to link paths around the “flow” with the trajectories made possible through encounters of materials and people. Little has been said about what moves these people to form sui generis groups, and about what attracts them to the “flow.” It is this task that we aim to undertake in this article. To this end, we undertook an ethnographic research that brought us closer to the conceptual imagination and the actions of the people who inhabit these urban agglomerations. We were then able to inquire about what the “flow” category tells us, about the relationships established there that make that space habitable. We conclude that in the “flow”, and perhaps this makes it attractive, there is no consummate fact, as an object, but, events, fleeting interlacing of materials in motion, things that, as life goes on, demand unceasing effort to maintain themselves intact in the face of attacks from the middle.

KEYWORDS:
Cracolândia; ethnography; flow; materials; paths