Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in población ‘La Victoria’, a working-class neighbourhood in the city of Santiago, this research describes the everyday lives of its inhabitants (pobladores) in the context of contemporary neoliberal Chile. Although the pobladores’ movement had animated Chilean politics since the 1950s, also becoming the main actor in the struggle against the dictatorship, after the return to democracy in 1990 pobladores disappeared from the political arena. Most researchers have proposed that the political absence of pobladores must be understood as an effect of neoliberal modernization – a set of policies implemented during dictatorship and maintained by successive democratic governments after 1990. Their main argument is that a major cultural transformation in Chile has degraded social ties producing a consumeristic, individualistic and depoliticized society. Instead, I propose that pobladores from La Victoria have, despite the transformations, preserved a form of conviviality based on strong affective bonds with kin, friends and neighbours – alongside equally sentimental separations and divisions from others. I argue that, due to their pervasiveness and importance in pobladores’ lives, social relationships are the main agents in the articulation of pobladores’ ethical frameworks guiding their decisions and actions in life. Pobladores’ affective social relationships have allowed them not only to mitigate the side effects of the current neoliberal model, but also to accept, adapt and contest specific aspects of it. In this sense, life in the población has a heterogeneous grammar, a way in which social relations are articulated and disarticulated, activated and de-activated, connecting personal lives to collective processes. This grammar of strong affective ties, terrible betrayals and deep but changing separations and divisions is what I call the ‘politics of the everyday life’. This politics of everyday life lies behind apparently very different historical processes, such as the pobladores’ struggle against dictatorship in the 1980s and their post-1990 absence from the political arena. I contend that what characterizes the current context is not a lack of politics or a ‘depoliticization’ but a particular way in which certain pobladores, known as ‘políticos’ – those interested in collective action in order to produce change in the world – are articulated with or disarticulated from other pobladores in the politics of everyday life in the población.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Como as ciências sociais contribuíram para produzir teoricamente o movimento de pobladores chileno e de favelados no Brasil durante o século XX? Mediante a revisão crítica das principais teorias e perspectivas que tentaram compreender a ação política dos pobres urbanos de Santiago do Chile e do Rio de Janeiro, se espera mostrar a relação de proximidade entre estes movimentos e a produção das ciências sociais, onde operaria uma dupla hermenêutica, ou seja, um processo de reflexividade mutuamente influente que terminaria por incidir na constituição e reconhecimento dos movimentos enquanto tais. Esta tese tem o intuito de analisar como as ciências sociais performam as lutas sociais que buscam descrever, em outras palavras, como determinadas conjunturas acadêmicas interatuam positiva ou negativamente com as disputas políticas e sociais produzidas a partir dos movimentos em questão. Para tanto, se revisaram as principais perspectivas que estudaram a questão social urbana: a teoria da marginalidade, a urbanização dependente, a teoria dos movimentos sociais urbanos, as leituras utilitárias e a teoria dos novos movimentos sociais; mostrando como estas interpretações flutuaram entre o réquiem, o redescobrimento e a negação de favelados e pobladores como movimentos sociais. / This thesis will make a critical reading of the most important theories of the urban poor action in Santiago of Chile and Rio de Janeiro during the XX century. I intend to answer the question: how the social sciences contribute for the favelados and pobladores Movements construction? First, I will analyse the Marginality Theory, that I understand as the first to consider (negatively) the political potential of the marginalized. Then, I will show how Santiago and Rio de Janeiro provide a series of urban popular experiences that elicited two opposing schools of thought: the urban social movements and the utilitarian perspective of participation. Finally, I will stress how the social sciences in these countries assimilated the reaction of these sectors to each countrys military dictatorship, showing how these interpretations oscillates between the requiem, the rediscovery and the denial of these movements. Urban popular struggle must be rethought in order to move beyond this theoretical ambivalence.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Como as ciências sociais contribuíram para produzir teoricamente o movimento de pobladores chileno e de favelados no Brasil durante o século XX? Mediante a revisão crítica das principais teorias e perspectivas que tentaram compreender a ação política dos pobres urbanos de Santiago do Chile e do Rio de Janeiro, se espera mostrar a relação de proximidade entre estes movimentos e a produção das ciências sociais, onde operaria uma dupla hermenêutica, ou seja, um processo de reflexividade mutuamente influente que terminaria por incidir na constituição e reconhecimento dos movimentos enquanto tais. Esta tese tem o intuito de analisar como as ciências sociais performam as lutas sociais que buscam descrever, em outras palavras, como determinadas conjunturas acadêmicas interatuam positiva ou negativamente com as disputas políticas e sociais produzidas a partir dos movimentos em questão. Para tanto, se revisaram as principais perspectivas que estudaram a questão social urbana: a teoria da marginalidade, a urbanização dependente, a teoria dos movimentos sociais urbanos, as leituras utilitárias e a teoria dos novos movimentos sociais; mostrando como estas interpretações flutuaram entre o réquiem, o redescobrimento e a negação de favelados e pobladores como movimentos sociais. / This thesis will make a critical reading of the most important theories of the urban poor action in Santiago of Chile and Rio de Janeiro during the XX century. I intend to answer the question: how the social sciences contribute for the favelados and pobladores Movements construction? First, I will analyse the Marginality Theory, that I understand as the first to consider (negatively) the political potential of the marginalized. Then, I will show how Santiago and Rio de Janeiro provide a series of urban popular experiences that elicited two opposing schools of thought: the urban social movements and the utilitarian perspective of participation. Finally, I will stress how the social sciences in these countries assimilated the reaction of these sectors to each countrys military dictatorship, showing how these interpretations oscillates between the requiem, the rediscovery and the denial of these movements. Urban popular struggle must be rethought in order to move beyond this theoretical ambivalence.