Getting by in the street system: Street dwellers, concepts and practices

Abstract

This article seeks to reflect on the articulation between knowledge and practice in the life experience of homeless people. For this, I work with the individual narratives of Roberto, a homeless resident of the city of Fortaleza, Ceará, and interlocutor of field research conducted between December 2015 and October 2016. From the native categories of sistema da rua and of se virar, present in his explanations about his way of inhabiting the streets, I try to discuss how these concepts allow to understand actions, movements and values mobilized in everyday situations of the life in the streets, taking as an ethnographic basis situations experienced by Roberto involving issues of violence, mobility and modes of sustenance in the streets.