Maria Gabriela Hita

New Actors, New Political Spaces, Same Divided City? Reflections on Poverty and the Politics of Urban Development in Salvador, Bahia

Critics of Lula’s administration argue that business has greatest weight in setting its priorities and that anti-poverty programmes based on conditional cash transfers have little long-term structural impact on social inequality. Yet the coherence and scope of these programmes is now an order of magnitude greater than under the previous administration, their impact on poverty has so far proved sustainable, and poor people themselves often express satisfaction with them. This paper argues that critics who see retreat from universal social benefits as undermining political commitment to reducing social inequality underestimate the countervailing force of the capacity of some poor communities to seize the opportunities that have emerged to oblige politicians to reengage with both poverty and the roots of social injustice. Analyses that focus solely on economic precariousness and the decline of sociability are ignoring the ways in which third sector activity and social change have produced new kinds of political actors and group identities, particularly amongst young people, that may be ambivalent in nature but indicate that levels of politicisation are not being reduced. Nevertheless, optimism about poverty reduction needs to be tempered by appreciation of how problems of violence and insecurity also shape state interventions in, and in some cases virtual withdrawal from, poor communities. The rationality of party politics may have a more negative effect on securing the longer-term patterns of public investment required to reduce social inequality than it has had on the administration of the Bolsa Familia programme. In the case of Salvador, Bahia, where urban real estate interests remain as politically influential as ever, change will depend on the strength of pressures from above and below on municipal and state governments, but although anti-poverty programmes help keep people invested in the political system, they can also increase aspirations for greater economic and racial equality.

Antropologia na análise de situações periféricas urbanas

Atraves da analise sobre a diferenciacao existente entre distintas areas pobres da cidade de Salvador, os caminhos que distintas redes sociais tracam entre distintos espacos da cidade, a importância de contextos e historias particulares em conformar a capacidade de moradores de favela de atuar coletivamente, e a emergencia de novos tipos de atores politicos e comunitarios, sugere-se que uma analise sociologicamente mais ampla, focada numa analise mais etnografi ca de como as pessoas vivem, pode oferecer tanto uma melhor compreensao de como e por que distintas “situacoes urbanas perifericas” diferem entre si, como oferecer melhores pistas para a reformulacao de politicas publicas, iluminando importantes mudancas espaciais, sociais, politicas e simbolicas de signifi cados de “situacoes urbanas perifericas” nessa metropole.

Anthropologies of the Urban Periphery: Salvador, Bahia

Brazilian slums and squatter settlements have acquired a generally unattractive public image that often obscures differences between peripheral urban situations. Based on research in a socially stigmatised neighbourhood of the city of Salvador, Bahia, this paper begins with a broad structural view of the processes that have shaped the situations of its poor residents, from the conservative modernisation led by the Bahian strongman and protege of the military, Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, to a multi-cultural present of anti-poverty and Afro-Brazilian empowerment initiatives, NGO interventions, and private-public partnerships. It then illustrates a range of variables that influence the ability of poor communities to counteract tendencies towards social and political fragmentation. It highlights the need to consider the particular histories of poor neighbourhoods, their differing relations with richer surrounding areas, their internal divisions and the way these reflect links with broader social, political and religious forces, and the social networks between different poor neighbourhoods that the poor themselves construct as they pursue strategies to maintain livelihoods and acquire assets. Consideration of the processes involved suggests a need to question conventional accounts of social segregation in Salvador and indicates ways in which more rounded ethnographic perspectives on how people live their lives help us to understand their greater or lesser capacity for collective action and why, in some cases but not others, residents are still trying to build ‘places’ that conform to their long-term aspirations to live better.