Usos y costumbres

De la vida familiar

Abstract

In this essay, i try to sketch some of the more insistent topographies of the common sense about family and family life. Here, family is taken as a spatial and affective configuration, as a device that gathers a series of strength lines acting in a society in a given time. In this particular case, the thoughts and the analysis are based on a field work carried out over the last years in Mexico city with the aim of exploring the everyday practices of people living in the “outskirts” (“outskirts” of urban life, of the renowned assets of culture, of the society of waste, that is, most of the population). Based on the experience and the stories told by the characters of these somehow invisible zones, these comments (and side notes) try to establish some links between the specific practices of everyday life —it’s ritos and representations— and some of the theoretical (anthropological, psychological, social) elements regarding this entity so called family, as enigmatic as persistent in the reproduction task of collective systems.