Social disorganization and violent sociability: A case study in a brazilian city

Abstract

This article examines the relationships between social disorganization, sociability, and the symbolic construction of violence through an ethnographic case study of Benedito Bentes, the most populous neighborhood in Maceió (AL), Brazil. Drawing on interviews, direct observation, and document analysis, we explore how historical processes of unequal urbanization, internal migration, and state absence have shaped social networks, produced territorial stigmas, and fostered the entrenchment of para-state forms of regulation. Based on an analytical model that articulates the concepts of social disorganization, violent sociability, and territorial stigmatization, we demonstrate how the neighborhood’s internal symbolic boundaries (its “moral topography”) structure local trajectories, relationships, and perceptions of violence. We argue that violence, rather than being a rupture, functions as a social language and a routine mechanism of mediation in peripheral territories. The article seeks to contribute to a relational understanding of urban violence in Brazil, moving beyond interpretations that link it solely to the absence of norms or institutional collapse. By listening to residents, their memories, and strategies of belonging, we show that the urban peripheral experience is shaped by both stigma and resistance, precariousness and agency, fragmentation and solidarity. This analysis offers a deeper reading of the social effects of urban segregation and the symbolic production of marginality.