New ways to overcome social marginality in Brazil

Abstract

Marginality is generally regarded as a social waste of “systems”, but today this view seems limiting. We propose a distinction of action systems into two types: 1) the “time-space distanciation”, which physically separates people from each other but allows a distanced communication; 2) the “logical distanciation”, which does not separate individuals physically but interrupts communicative interaction between them. We argue that marginalization is a structural consequence only for the second type of action system. According to field research, the second type of action system is opening new possibilities in Brazil for marginalized people to interact with society.