Growing up otherwise : Situated ethics and pathways to non‐violence in Southern Brazil

Abstract

This paper proposes a reframing of how young men become embroiled—or not—in the systemic violence that infuses their daily lives. Most frameworks in health and social policy tend to approach violence as rooted in psycho‐developmental problems and/or social and structural determinants. These approaches can underemphasize the relational specificities and institutional dynamics through which violence is reproduced and might otherwise be interrupted. Drawing on a 29‐year ethnographic study embedded in the 1982 Pelotas Birth Cohort (Southern Brazil), which followed participants from age 15 into their early 40s, this paper puts our interlocutors' ways of theorizing violence into dialogue with Judith Butler's work on an ethics of non‐violence. Examining how young people alternated between situated and categorical interpretations of violence, we demonstrate the conditions that enabled the former to chart new possibilities for non‐violence. We show how young people and their parents unsettled prevailing psychological and social explanations of youth violence by reframing growing up amid violence situationally , as an ethical and political challenge. Two composite case‐studies, Vicente and Raul, trace the contingent social and institutional conditions that nurtured a fragile but generative situated ethics and/or gave way to more categorical, discipline‐as‐care approaches. We close by considering what these insights can offer for more collectivist approaches in public health.