Demografia da solidão na América Latina

uma agenda crítica

Abstract

This viewpoint argues that consolidating a demography of loneliness in Latin America requires more than simply incorporating loneliness scales into population surveys. It also requires revisiting the categories through which the field interprets relational life in societies marked by persistent inequalities, heterogeneous family regimes, rapid population aging, migration, violence, racism, and the privatization of care. The paper proposes four analytical shifts. First, it calls for replacing generic claims about a loneliness “epidemic” or generational increases in loneliness with a more cautious methodological stance, recognizing the absence of comparable historical series and harmonized longitudinal data in the region. Second, it recenters sex and gender in the analysis, not as universal and deracialized categories, but as dimensions intertwined with caregiving, widowhood, masculinities, violence, and territorial inequalities. Third, it moves race and territory from the margins of statistical control variables to the center of analytical models, recognizing that relational disconnection in Brazil and Latin America is both racialized and territorially situated. Fourth, it connects the demography of loneliness to the demography of care, replacing the simplifying assumption of protective familism with the concept of family ambivalence. The proposed agenda does not reject the international literature, but argues that Latin America can offer a conceptual corrective to a field still strongly shaped by experiences from the Global North.