When the Favela Becomes 'Comunidade': Designative Innovation and Social Control

Today in Brazil the norm is no longer to talk about favela but about comunidade (community), to the point that, if the two terms are still mutually and significantly substitutable, one can venture to predict that, in a near future, favela will appear as a non-designating word of the reality was responsible for representing until now. Why has such a change occurred? We advance the hypothesis that the favela's access to the linguistic status of comunidade, by identifying a set of people as a self-controlled domestic community, naturalizes the occupation of this community from outside(rs) in order to preserve this ideal status of community, since the expected self-control is not exercised. After pointing out the power of designation in the institution of a reality, we will shed light on the conditions and threshold effects of the discursive deployment of comunidade instead of favela, in collective representations. Finally, we will analyze how the discursive, social and media spread of the word comunidade introduced and sanctioned the formula - pacificacao da comunidade - which, paradoxically erasing the main meaning of community in favor of the secondary meaning of territory, represents potentially every community, regardless of its nature, as a territory which must be pacified.