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Reviewed by:
  • Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life by R. Ben Penglase
  • John Burdick
Penglase, R. Ben. Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2014. xi + 210 pp. Notes. References. Index.

R. Ben Penglase's Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela is a worthy addition to an ever-expanding ethnographic literature on life and death in Rio de Janeiro's famous shantytowns. That literature, beginning with Janice Perlman's The Myth of Marginality (1973), and including works by Elizabeth Leeds, Alba Zaluar, Donna Goldstein, and (more recently) Otávio Raposo, Paul Sneed, and (once again), Janice Perlman, have for over forty years sought to portray the complex landscape of everyday life in the favelas, a landscape that has been reshaped repeatedly by power struggles between and among the state, police, drug traffickers, and residents. There are now over a thousand favelas in Rio, each with its own history, ecology and politics. Thus, any ethnography of a favela (with the possible exception of Perlman's highly unusual recent book) is inevitably something of a snapshot, a frame in time, a soil sample from a forest filled with immense variety. All that being said, Penglase has offered, in this finely detailed ethnography of Caxambu, a pseudonymous mid-sized favela located near downtown Rio, a way into the everyday world of favelas that may at the end of the day have considerable staying power. Penglase chooses to focus on the perceptions, values and experiences of residents as they cope with the tension between traffickers' much-vaunted promises of stability, predictability and safety, and the reality that their presence creates the constant threat of police invasions, and that their own modus operandus is marked by personalism, arbitrariness, and brutality.

While Penglase has much to say on these topics, I take his more interesting contribution to be his effort to get inside the black box of residents' periodic consent to trafficker rule. It has long been pointed out that while the power of traffickers in the favelas resides in part on coercion, that coercion has always coexisted with a complex set of positive inducements, including traffickers' claim that they can "defend" the favela against the indiscriminate violence of the police; their provision through patron-clientage of various goods and services; their prevention of everyday interpersonal crime; their settlement of disputes over land, houses, and family matters; and their more intangible provision to a population hungry for fantasies of the fantasy of pride, power, and "success." These are important inducements, and Penglase touches on all of them; but he also goes behind, or beneath them, to what I consider to be a deeper set of values that may help us understand not only residents' consent to trafficker rule, but also the limits of that consent.

This set of values are those of locality itself. The favela, Penglase shows us, is associated in local memory with narratives, constantly circulating, about local people, places, history, and sacrifice. The favela is dense with shared memories of escape, struggle, and sacrifice: older people narrate their parents' and grandparents' arrival from droughts, armed attacks, and fiery evictions; others recall stories of origin that include having to climb impossibly steep mud-choked paths, [End Page E11] carrying water on their heads from the few available spigots. Residents know streets not by their municipally-assigned names, but by the names of the notable residents who once dwelt in them; other places are defined by memorable episodes of violence, such as the spot where a girl fell nearly thirty years ago, robbed of her young life at a street corner amid the crossfire, now memorialized by a mural announcing "Paz" ("Peace"). Still other places connect the favela to the Brazilian nation itself, such as the bust of Getúlio Vargas perched regally and improbably atop of Caxambu hill, commemorating an imagined visit by the immortal president, confirming a grandeur of place that transcends gangs and politics and even impure water. No wonder that people who have spent their lives growing up in this place are set apart with the honorific title of "cria." This cluster of meanings...

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