"Fazer equipes": segmentaridade, vigilantismo e política entre motoristas por aplicativos em Manaus-AM

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how app-based drivers in Manaus (Brazil) “make teams”, analyzing how relational arrangements for self-protection are organized within a social field marked by a fundamental tension: the segmentarity that structures their bonds and the aspiration for political capillarity that attempts to unify them. Based on a situated ethnography (2022-2024), the research demonstrates that segmentarity—the proliferation of collectives, styles, and allegiances—is not a weakness but the very grammar of the field, one that privileges autonomy and differentiation. Vigilantism, as a moral performance and a pedagogy of violence, establishes itself as the primary language for producing authority; however, its efficacy and legitimacy are continuously negotiated by the logic of segmentarity, which limits cohesion and authority to local pacts. The political aspiration, in turn, appears as a non-segmentary project: leaders seek to convert everyday recognition into formal representation but collide with the same logic of dispersion that sustains their local authority. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that vigilantismo, segmentarity, and politics intertwine to shape a moral ecology that operates at the margins of the state, in which drivers redefine the meanings of protection and belonging, producing a politics that is realized more through the instability of relationships than through the consolidation of representation.