Brazilian Anthropologist
Discusses Survival Strategies of Street Children
Misha Klein, Department
of Anthropology
The CLAS conference room
was filled with scholars from UC Berkeley and Stanford and
members of the community on the afternoon of Thursday, November
29 for a presentation by Professor Maria Filomena Gregori.
Dr. Gregori, a visiting scholar at the Center for the past
nine months, has been developing a new line of research on
the relationship between eroticism, gender, and violence.
In her talk titled, "Street Children and Circulation: A Case
Study in São Paulo, Brazil," she drew from her book, Viração (Companhia
das Letras, 2000), based on her doctoral dissertation in
Social Anthropology.
Dr. Gregori dedicated
her presentation to Professor Vilmar Faria, whose sudden
death just two days before was cause for considerable sadness
in Brazil as well as at CLAS, where he spent the Spring of
1999 as a visiting professor occupying the Rio Branco chair.
Professor Faria was also a central force behind the enormously
successful "Challenges for Brazil" conference sponsored
by CLAS in February 2000. Gregori worked with Faria both
as a student and as a colleague at CEBRAP (Centro
Brasileiro de Analise e Planejamento, the Brazilian Center
for Analysis and Planning), and credited him with teaching
her to conduct social scientific research and analysis. Those
of us at the Center who had the privilege of working with
Dr. Faria are saddened by this terrible loss and will miss
him.
Gregori began by discussing
the development of the concept of "street children" in
Brazil and the assumptions that underlie it. A number of
inaccuracies have informed popular opinion, media representations,
institutional interventions, and juridical responses. The
term "street children," coined in the 1970s, refers
to several different kinds of experiences of children who
eke out a living on the street, ranging from children who
attend school and return home every day to those whose relationships
with their families have become weak. Gregori emphasized
that even in the most extreme cases the children do not completely
lose their family ties. Gregori cautioned scholars against
defining these children only in terms of the street--as has
been the case in recent research--since most of the children
not only maintain ties with their families, but they also
move in social worlds not defined exclusively by the street.
She made clear that the transition from family life to street
life is neither sudden nor easy, but instead is a process
that takes place over an extended period of time, sometimes
as long as a couple of years. It was her recognition of the
transition process of comings and goings that led Dr. Gregori
to understand the central importance of mobility in the survival
strategies that they develop in the process of becoming street
children.
Through extensive ethnographic
field research between 1989 and 1996, Gregori interviewed
and observed street children, following them as they moved
through the city and among the various locales where they
interact with other children and with institutions. According
to Gregori, one of the greatest difficulties in studying
street children stems from precisely that which best describes
their lives: they are constantly mobile, moving between their
family homes, various aid and disciplinary institutions,
and the places on the city streets that they frequent. As
they generally come from the poorest of Brazil's impoverished
families (though this does not explain their becoming street
children, she noted), they are quite familiar with this kind
of movement, which has long been a survival strategy for
marginalized people in the country. These families continually
break up and regroup in order to meet minimum, short-term
needs, sending a child to live with a relative or neighbor,
or seeking work wherever possible. Gregori terms this constant
movement "circulation," and says that the one constant
in these children's lives is instability.
Another difficulty in
understanding the experiences of street children is the contradictory
images of themselves that they must confront. Alternating
between presenting them as innocent and as sinister, as victims
and as perpetrators, as the most tragic of social victims
and as the cause of social ills, these dual images condition
their experiences. The children end up responding to these
images by adjusting their "performance" in a given
social situation according to the expectations that others
have of them. One of the most serious and far-reaching effects
of this dynamic relationship between these images and the
children's experiences occurs in their relationship with
the various institutions designed to help them. Since these
institutions are set up to help children, the entire infrastructure
of support disappears as soon as a child turns eighteen,
the age of majority. Gregori said that the children "learn
to live within a circuit delimited by the status of minority.
Little within this circuit prepares them for life outside
its boundaries." They learn to get by as street children,
but often do not acquire the skills nor have the support
to successfully transition to adulthood. Gregori concluded
that "the greatest tragedy of this kind of life is the
fact of their being locked within circularity."
In addition to Viração,
Dr. Gregori has authored several books, including another
about street children: Meninos de Rua e as Instituições (written
with Catia Aida da Silva, published by Editora Cortez and
UNESCO 2000). Her award-winning Master's thesis on violence
against women, Cenas e Queixas, was published jointly
by Paz e Terra and ANPOCS in 1993. She also edited
the volume, Desenhos Familiares (published by UNESCO
and Fundação BankBoston in 2000). Dr.
Gregori holds a Master's in Political Science (1988) and
a PhD in Social Anthropology (1997), both from the University
of São Paulo, and both under the supervision of Dr.
Ruth Cardoso, another former visiting scholar at CLAS (Spring
2000). Dr. Gregori is Professor of Anthropology at the State
University of Campinas (Unicamp), where she coordinates the
doctoral program in Family and Gender, and is a researcher
at Pagu, the Center for Gender Studies at Unicamp.
