House-ing Urban Kin

Abstract

In Brazil’s post-neoliberal government, social policies became the bedrock for a new political economy predicated on poverty alleviation via market inclusion. This article draws from long-term ethnographical research conducted among beneficiaries of Minha Casa Minha Vida—Brazil’s largest housing policy. I am interested in the myriad ways policy designs and its contentious operation symbiotically reshape sociability and kin among first-time homeowners. I take a closer look at how ideas and configurations of the family travel across intimate and public domains—from communitarian politics to household economies—and are anxiously negotiated, becoming the indexer of experiential moral systems of care. Transitioning across multi-scalar instances of everyday sociality, I interrogate how such economies conflate with the infrastructures and pervasive imaginaries of the house in the local machineries of the policy.