Investigar y deconstruir el estigma en barrios marginales. Un estudio de caso

Abstract

The present article is centred on social and anthropologic research on a neighborhood In Dos Hermanas (Seville), within which we analyse a process of stigmatisation of a space and its inhabitants, who are qualified as marginal. The article also includes the results after applying a model of intervention designed to dismantle such a stigma. The stigma, as a reading or interpretation of a reality that labels a group of people and their space by demoting it as abnormal, can be, orindeed must be, studied and combated. It must be studied and combated to clear out, as in the sample analysed here, one of the main obstacles that prevents the integration of communities that are marginated from ordinary every-day life. Or, at least, what we consider normalised, not so much, or not only, because of social and economic deficiencies, but by the burden of having a devaluating image that makes people different in the eyes of others.