4 - Acceptance vs. discernment: the morals of family, kinship and neighbourhood as resource options

Summary

Except in the moral and affective core areas of family and close friendship, relations of kinship and neighbourhood in the quarter are symbolically, normatively and practically flexible and become resource options in terms of the same entrepreneurial rationale that informs the relationship between action, morality and thought in other important domains. I shall argue that it is this rationale – not the given or, alternatively, the extremely vague nature of normative rules – that generates a graded series of positions between the poles of acceptance (acquiescence in crime, indiscriminate familism and gender oppression) and discernment (the calculation of risks and the management of value and position) and, to a certain extent, between the poles of sentiment (female, emotional, volatile) and structure (male, stable, solid). It is according to this gradation of positions that family, kinship and neighbourhood relations become part of broader universes of resources.

Good, problematic and useful neighbours

Neighbourhood relations are diverse, following the main lines of the entrepreneurial action that contributes to the pursuit of fulfilment and a sense of worthiness. It is basically in terms of the strong interaction between morality and action that neighbours are included in or excluded from an individual's universe of resources. The exchanges analysed in Chapters 2 and 3 have shown that not only is a relationship between good neighbours (here often childhood friends) morally rewarding, it may also produce contacts that are instrumental in gaining formal employment, thus making neighbourhood relations part of political and economic ones.