Brazilian brokers, boundaries and buildings : A material culture of politics

Samenvatting

This article contributes to understanding the material culture of contemporary political practice, particularly in a context of high sociopolitical inequality, by focusing on the spatiality and materiality of political brokerage. Its central question is where brokers mediate between different worlds and with what material artifacts. The author presents the case of community leaders in a favela in Recife, Brazil, who operate at the boundary between different worlds separated by class, race and place. Their offices, with their material artifacts, form brokerage spaces. He introduces these offices as boundary places: privileged spatial and material contexts in which worlds that would be incompatible in other circumstances become temporarily compatible. Simultaneously, in these boundary places, the differences between these worlds are reproduced. Through an in-depth analysis, he shows how brokers' practices 'take place' in the spatiality and materiality of their offices, which become a stage for both the convergence and divergence of different worlds.