Final Remarks
For centuries now, the privileged classes have oscillated, in their discourse about the poor, between compassion and condemnation. Too often the customs of our native poor are deemed worthy of interest solely for practical purposes—to plan educational intervention and to “help them reform their habits.” With rare exceptions (wherein we manage some “distance” thanks to ethnic or historical differences), we seldom recognize any distinctive cultural traits among the urban poor.
When such distinctiveness is detected, it is normally interpreted as a degenerate or pathological form of our own social organization. With relative facility, we manage to picture promiscuity, violence, and exotic family forms as elements of a cultural system well adapted to the ecological necessities of faraway tribes. People close to home are, on the other hand, threatening. To consider their “deviant” behavior as somehow logical, and even creative, is to endanger our own system of values. In past years, researchers have demystified the state's “disciplining” of the urban poor (Donzelot 1977, Meyer 1978), but seldom have they spelled out exactly what is being disciplined, that is, alternative cultural dynamics. The concept of honor forces us to think precisely about this—the symbolic exchange and internal coherence of a non-hegemonic code of values.The reader may be prompted to ask, “And so, after all, does it work or not? This system of auto-regulation—does it manage to spread power around and satisfy the needs of personal pride for everyone?” The answer is, “Of course not.” The majority of men feel more or less chronic frustration because they are unable to support their wives and children on what they earn. Most women have known moments of great distress as they go through temporary or permanent separation from their husbands. No social code could resolve the concrete problems of misery, nor soften the anguish that sends so many people to psychiatric hospitals.
Let us say simply that, in the Vila do Cachorro Sentado, the people have established norms which, theoretically, each and every one has the possibility of living up to; they share an “alternative” moral code which maintains some sort of order and manages to guarantee a minimum of personal satisfaction. By discrediting or eliminating the non-conformists, the code selects “integrated” individuals. If this “counternorm” is constantly menaced, invaded and even broken by dominant society, at least it exists.If now one inquires which direction the winds of change will take this population, the perspectives are even less reassuring. Little by little, as in nineteenth-century Europe (see Faure 1977), the city is being “hygienized.” (Poverty is not eradicated, it is simply sent to distant locals where it will not bother the middle classes). Obliged to leave their present cour des miracles, the residents of the Vila do Cachorro Sentado, will probably be propelled toward distant working-class suburbs. Far from their bourgeois clients (and victims), incapable of recreating a territorial group and rejected by the “worthy poor,” it may well be that these people see their system of regulation crumble and that physical violence, with no symbolic retainer walls, falls upon the handiest victims—the working poor.
References
Donzelot, Jacques. (1977). La police des families. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Faure, Arlette. (1977). Classes malpropres et classes dangereuses: quelques remarques a propos de chiffoniers parisiens au XIXe siecle et de leurs cites. In L 'Haleine des faubourgs. Recherches 29: 79-103.
Handman, M.E. (1983). La violence et le ruse. Paris: EDISUD. Hannerz, Ulf. (1969). Soulside. New York: Columbia University Press. Meyer, P. (1978). L'enfant et la raison d'etat. Paris: Editions de Seuil.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian Alfred. (1977). The Fate of Shechem: or, The politics of sex: Essays in the anthropology of the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.