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Reviewed by:
  • Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life
  • Hendrik Kraay
Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life. By Amy Chazkel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xvii, 368. Illustrations. Tables. Epilogue. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

Carefully crafted and theoretically informed, Chazkel’s thought-provoking book joins recent works by Brodwyn Fischer and Janice Perlman to deepen our understanding of lower-class life in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro and the important, if often misinterpreted, relationship between state and society. Laws of Chance focuses on the development and repression of the informal gambling criminalized as the jogo do bicho (animal game) during Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930).

Still ubiquitous in the city, the jogo involves wagering small amounts of money on one of 25 animals, each of which represents four numbers (the last two digits of the national lottery). The winning animal pays out a modest prize. Originating as a fund-raiser for a private zoo in the early 1890s, the parallel lottery quickly escaped those confines and absorbed the many other informal lotteries already existing in the city. In 1895, Rio de Janeiro’s municipal government defined such unlicensed gambling as illegal, thereby setting up a century-long interaction between police, bookmakers, and gamblers. Repression ebbed and flowed, and often appeared singularly ineffective; less than four per cent of those arrested were actually convicted. The jogo entered popular and elite culture, and bookmakers’ legendary honesty—they reputedly always pay the winners—remains part of Brazilian lore and a telling critique of state agents who are far less known for this virtue.

Making sense of this contradictory story is Chazkel’s main purpose in this book. Stressing the “contingency of criminality” (p. 15), she argues that “the official perception of its problematic nature was what called it [the jogo] into existence” (p. 12). In the 1890s, republican governments criminalized many commonplace lower-class “livelihoods and avocations . . . that threatened neither life, limb, nor private property” (p. 17) in a process that she sees as the closure of “a metaphorical common,” part of “the [End Page 462] privatization and monetization of public life” (p. 10). The story of the jogo’s criminalization and repression cannot be attributed to the “too-convenient explanation” that stresses elite fears of a threatening rabble (p. 46). Instead, “the state’s real goal was to control consumer capitalism itself” through concession contracts to powerful capitalists and the repression of the “renegade petty commercial sector,” which included unlicensed street vendors and the thousands who hawked jogo tickets (p. 57).

No consensus about the jogo existed, however, and elite commentary varied from mild amusement at the popular practice and its ubiquity (well documented in cartoons and folklorists’ writings) to welcoming repression when energetic chiefs of police cracked down on it (this was particularly the case in 1917, when the city faced a wave of labor unrest). Judges routinely acquitted the (almost always) men hauled into court, despite the ample evidence of bettors’ lists on slips of paper appended to trial records (judges were far less indulgent to those charged with the much more subjective crime of vagrancy). A disproportionate number of Portuguese shopkeepers faced jogo charges, which Chazkel suspects resulted from their failure to pay off the police (p. 135). Given that the police and criminal law were “the main interface between state and society,” such cycles of repression mitigated by corruption taught the populace what “citizenship really entailed” (p. 210).

Much more could be said about this fine book. Chazkel has culled a remarkable amount of information from disparate sources ranging from criminal and police records to popular poetry, newspapers, and the writings of folklorists and jurists to write a social and cultural history of the jogo. Her account of the complex interaction between state and society moves us far beyond superficial understandings based on models of repression and resistance and deepens our understanding of Latin America’s urban modernity. The brief epilogue on the jogo’s evolution after 1930 lays out an agenda for future research. My only complaint is that some of the images are too small to make out important...

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