Culture as an Alternative: An Approach from Militant Sociability in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The paper tackles cultural activism in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, in private militia regions. It broaches activists that claim culture as a safe place to operate in this region. Accordingly, such spaces would be adverse to this activists and the (imminence of) violence would help the understanding of the (virtual absence of) activism, but there are alternatives organized claiming culture as a battlefield, scarcely documented by the literature of social movements. Therefore, ethnographic-inspired fieldwork was conducted with twenty-four interviews with young activists in these neighborhoods.