Between help and “unbinding”: daily practices and regulations regarding families and childcare in low-income neighborhoods of the Greater Buenos Aires – ethnographic contributions

Abstract

This article examines daily practices and regulations that are put into effect in both state and community-run initiatives directed at families in low-income neighborhoods of the Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. We aim to document the specificities of management and administration of family life, focusing on interventions that occur in the settings closest to people’s lives. Consequently, we address forms of behavior modeling that take place through proximity, neighborhood and mutual knowledge relationships. Through ethnographic accounts we explore how interventions among families – interwoven mainly through affability, advice and teaching – shift to more interstitial interactions between subjects, where social and state regulations are effected by means of unconventional routines and modalities.