Les temporalités multiples de la vie dans la rue

Abstract

Living in the streets of Tahiti’s urban areas is a peripheral point for observing social exclusion. Homeless people and those resorting to street prostitution in Papeete (French Polynesia) have varied and specific lifestyles, from sharing the precariousness of everyday life, and more or less structured life plans, to strong normative constraints. We study here the plurality of their daily situations with regard to concrete temporality, which raise several issues, between biographic and social modes of appropriation, and factual and institutional modes of construction. Their relations with desired and implemented temporalities driven by institutional actors are studied, focusing on normative gaps compared with the wishes of institutional and public actors in charge of social policies. The multiple character of these peripheral temporalities are highlighted, and the question of how individual and chosen temporality relates to the imposition of normative and compulsory temporality asked.

Keywords

• social temporalities
• Sociology
• social exclusion
• peripherality
• prostitution
• homelessness