Abstract

The ethnographic survey that I conducted between 2006 and 2015 with family groups from various socioeconomic backgrounds in Santiago revealed the importance of relationships of residential kinship in urban areas, through the formation of “configuration of houses”. By criticizing the dominant approach centered on objective measures, I question the patterns of residential circulations within such configurations as they are interpreted and mean from the native point of view. By analyzing two ethnographic cases, I show that daily circulations between houses is not just “facts” resulting from practical problems or demo-graphic, economic or urban conditions. From a native point of view, the direction, frequency and modalities of residential movements are “gestures” that activate a language of intersubjective recognition, by configuring more symmetrical or more asymmetrical forms of interdependence between houses.