Vital borders on the border: Monterrey, body and fear of inhabiting

Abstract

An ethnographic analysis is presented, framed in anthropology of emotions, from a socio-structural perspective, that links territorial, corporal and emotional spatiality, as reciprocally constructed spaces in relation to specific social processes, located in the city of Monterrey, where the violence derived from the war against drug traffic placed fear at the center of daily living, transforming the life experience of its inhabitants into a restrictive triple border of action: emotional, physical and territorial. It starts from the conceptualization of the human body as a portion of space with its own borders, defenses and weaknesses, and from the understanding of emotional expression (where the human body is the vehicle) as affective cultures. The bodily and emotional experiences share a relational character, since they always respond to external stimuli, such as the territory that human bodies occupy, in this case study, characterized by increased of violence.