Disgust, humiliation and shame in the everyday life of homeless crack users

Abstract

Professor at the Anthropology Department at Unicamp, she has been dedicated to ethnographic research on precarious lives and borderline situations, producing cross-cutting investigations on poverty, vulnerability, and urban marginality, having among her empirical specialties the political interfaces of the association between the street, drugs, peripheries, and social welfare, public health, and punishment devices, such as prisons and Therapeutic Communities.From long empirical work with homeless crack users, I approach aspects related to the field of sensations and emotions, especially in situations and reports that involve disgust, humiliation and shame. Although of different sensitive and practical manifestations, these emotions address multiple demotion practices, central to comprehend how repudiation is practiced and felt and how it models, in dialogue with Judith Butler, policies of affect and recognition. Crack users. Emotion anthropology. Abjection and recognition.