The discomfort of co-presence: a goffmanian and kouryan analysis of daily interactions in the neighborhood of Varjão/Rangel

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss some aspects of the goffmanian and kouryanian conceptual schemes while theoretical and methodological tools for the discussion of ethnographic experience accumulated in a suburb of the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil. In this sense, the everyday interactions of neighbors, friends and relatives in the neighborhood of Varjão/Rangel, which is characterized by intense co-presence, by the ambiguous and ambivalent identity of the neighborhood resident, and by a stigmatizing and moralizing pressure from the excluding and hierarchical sociability city of João Pessoa, are analyzed, among others, based on the concepts of footing, embedding, frames of experience, but also on the concepts of trust, everyday fears, daily shame and resentment. It is thus an analytical effort situated within the Anthropology of Emotions in a symbolic-interactionist perspective, whose theoretical and methodological proposal aims to be understood, based on the emotions as a central analytical category for the questioning of the individual – society tension, of relevant issues of sociability, and of the emotional culture and morals codes from an specific interactional space.