Avoidance and Withdrawal as Moral Devices of the Grammar of Distrust: A Pragmatist Reading of Urban Mobility Through the Violent City of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article proposes an understanding of distrust as a grammar that provides moral devices, such as avoidance and withdraw. Supported by a pragmatist approach and through a fieldwork in bus lines, I analyze how paying passengers mobilize these devices when facing people, places and action procedures perceived by them as potentially harmful to their own physical and patrimonial integrity: these are instruments mobilized by individuals to make their daily activities endure.