It's Neighborhood, Not Buildings
Spatial Anchors to Morals and Persons in a Portuguese Housing Project
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2225586 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ana Mourão (0000-0002-3244-6838), Ana Luísa Mourão (Centre for Research in Anthropology, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 214-237 |
| Publication date | 2017-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Anthropological Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-7710 • E-ISSN: 2153-3806 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/692003 |
| OpenAlex | W2606655198 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
Personhood can provide “ontological cement” (Hickman 2014) for imagining moral objects since persons are cognitively “more concrete entities” than morals. I examine this proposal in a Portuguese migrant housing project where contrasting moral codes and personhood models coexisted. Local residents (Portuguese and African migrant families formerly living in slums) were involved daily in discrepant discourses and behaviors: strongly defending neighbor sharing while privately condemning it as unfair; monitoring and gossiping about neighbors’ possessions to enforce sharing while concealing their own; reinforcing proximity through relatedness idioms while undermining it through distancing rhetoric; seeking mutual assistance while regretting evil and duplicity in proximate relations. I examine this ambivalence in morals and persons in light of an economic and ethical shift in postindustrial capitalist societies and show how the duality was locally reimagined through theories about housing space. Amid moral uncertainty, space became cognitively “more concrete” than persons
Ambivalence · Distancing · Personhood · Political science · Portuguese · Post-industrial society · Rhetoric · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
Streetwise
All our kin
The fame of Gawa
Managing African Portugal
Beyond “Culture”
Boundary maintenance in support networks
The Social Optics of Space
Between gluckman and foucault
Gossip, networks and culture in a black American ghetto
Political power beyond the State
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia
Consumerism and the new poor
Money and the Morality of the Exchange
Ethnography After Globalism
The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth
Cultural Differences and Urban Spatial Forms
The Moral Economy of the Peasant
Partial Theories
Ancestral personhood and moral justification
Social Exchange
Declarations of dependence
Remittances and Relationships
The nostalgic construction of community
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |