Between Life and Death: Regulations, Negotiations and Violence in a Belo Horizonte Slum

Abstract

This paper broaches social processes involving morality, normativity, violence, life, and death. I base my argument on an ethnographic research conducted in a slum in Belo Horizonte, which is the triangulation between three primordial normative regimes—that of the “crime world”, that of the state, and that of the church—that will produce what the theoretical Judith Butler calls a framework, that is, the frame that separates who is on the inside from who is on the outside from what is intelligible. I conclude that, since this is a territory marked by violence, it is this triangulation that will separate who is “human” from who is “killable”.