By Manuela I. Cunha.

Published in 2013, in Ethnographies of Social Support.

Abstract :

Considered in its comparative potential, the concept of support is especially suited to analyze recent Portuguese historical processes that are changing the way the State, moral orders, and social ties intersect, thereby reconfiguring contemporary frameworks of protection, assistance, and solidarity. Bearing both on the personal and the impersonal, on informal networks and institutions, on entitlement and moral obligations, as well as on sentiments and emotions, it allows ground for examining not only the ambiguities at stake, but also the constituting relationship between these frameworks without losing track of their different local meanings, or without diluting the distinct connotations they respectively convey in local ideologies.