“It’s neighborhood, not buildings”: spatial anchors to morals and persons in a Portuguese housing project

Abstract

Personhood can provide “ontological cement” (Hickman 2014) for imagining moral objects since persons are cognitively “more concrete entities” than morals. I examine this proposal in a Portuguese migrant housing project where contrasting moral codes and personhood models coexisted. Local residents (Portuguese and African migrant families formerly living in slums) were involved daily in discrepant discourses and behaviors: strongly defending neighbor sharing while privately condemning it as unfair; monitoring and gossiping about neighbors’ possessions to enforce sharing while concealing their own; reinforcing proximity through relatedness idioms while undermining it through distancing rhetoric; seeking mutual assistance while regretting evil and duplicity in proximate relations. I examine this ambivalence in morals and persons in light of an economic and ethical shift in postindustrial capitalist societies and show how the duality was locally reimagined through theories about housing space. Amid moral uncertainty, space became cognitively “more concrete” than persons.