When Family Lives Nearby:
Kinship, Poverty and Domestic Economies in Santiago, Chile
Abstract
The study of residential proximity within close kinship in Chilean urban context has focused particularly on family coresidence, a phenomenon that Chileans refers to as allegamiento. This emphasis on allegamiento has contributed to frame residential proximity as a "matter of poverty", as a popular class habitus or a familial economic strategy of survival. In this paper, I discuss this perspective as a "self-accomplished prophecy", caused by two sources of reductionism. Firstly, because household has been taken as the unity of analysis for both qualitative and quantitative research on residential proximity. Secondly, because empirical research has been conducted just in poor-family contexts. Carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago de Chile, I propose to overcome this reductionism by two ways. First, by enlarging the space-time scale of residential proximity definition through an appropriation of Marcelin's concept of “configuration of houses”. Second, by widening the scope of socioeconomic life-conditions of families through a comparison of life histories of “residential family configurations” from very heterogeneous socioeconomic contexts of Santiago. In doing so, I show that coresidence stricto sensu is often a partial aspect of the residential proximity phenomena that ignores a variety of morphologies of quasi-coresidence practices within kinship. Afterward, I point out that quest for residential proximity within close kinship is not exclusive to poor families, constituting rather a crosswise family-making style. Finally, I describe how this residential proximity takes place on different spatial morphologies, unfolding trajectories and relational patterns according to economic possibilities and constraints.
Key words: residential proximity, family coresidence, kinship, Chile
Bio
Consuelo Araos is assistant professor in the Sociology Institute at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica of Chili. She is PhD candidate in Sociology at the École Normale Superieure of Paris under supervision of Florence Weber (ENS Paris). Her research subject is residential family morphologies and urban kinship practices in Santiago de Chile and she conducted fieldwork about it since 2007.
[email protected]
The study of residential proximity within close kinship in Chilean urban context has focused particularly on family coresidence, a phenomenon that Chileans refers to as allegamiento. This emphasis on allegamiento has contributed to frame residential proximity as a "matter of poverty", as a popular class habitus or a familial economic strategy of survival. In this paper, I discuss this perspective as a "self-accomplished prophecy", caused by two sources of reductionism. Firstly, because household has been taken as the unity of analysis for both qualitative and quantitative research on residential proximity. Secondly, because empirical research has been conducted just in poor-family contexts. Carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago de Chile, I propose to overcome this reductionism by two ways. First, by enlarging the space-time scale of residential proximity definition through an appropriation of Marcelin's concept of “configuration of houses”. Second, by widening the scope of socioeconomic life-conditions of families through a comparison of life histories of “residential family configurations” from very heterogeneous socioeconomic contexts of Santiago. In doing so, I show that coresidence stricto sensu is often a partial aspect of the residential proximity phenomena that ignores a variety of morphologies of quasi-coresidence practices within kinship. Afterward, I point out that quest for residential proximity within close kinship is not exclusive to poor families, constituting rather a crosswise family-making style. Finally, I describe how this residential proximity takes place on different spatial morphologies, unfolding trajectories and relational patterns according to economic possibilities and constraints.
Key words: residential proximity, family coresidence, kinship, Chile
Bio
Consuelo Araos is assistant professor in the Sociology Institute at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica of Chili. She is PhD candidate in Sociology at the École Normale Superieure of Paris under supervision of Florence Weber (ENS Paris). Her research subject is residential family morphologies and urban kinship practices in Santiago de Chile and she conducted fieldwork about it since 2007.
[email protected]