Rhythms of individuation: time, stratification and youth trajectories at the periphery

Abstract

The formation of subjects’ temporal frames of thought and action has long been central to the study of social stratification. However, theorisation of these processes has tended to focus on highly institutionalised environments in the global North. By contrast, the peripheries of Brazilian cities constitute “heterogeneous fields” of subjectivity formation, in which state institutions act in highly uneven ways and coexist with other actors and processes. To account for these contextual differences, this article proposes we reimagine linear processes of social reproduction, characteristic of structuralist models, as processes of “individuation”, whereby subjects emerge through interaction with heterogeneous pre-individual fields. As they individuate, subjects encounter diverse “rhythms”, generating experiences of “eurhythmia” and “arrythmia” that influence individual decisions and shape life trajectories. To illustrate the approach, these analytical tools are applied to case studies of three young people drawn from ethnographic research conducted in the periphery of São Paulo.