When I first picked up this book, I asked myself, ‘Do we really need another ethnography of life in Rio's favelas?’ I mean what about favelas in Campo Grande or Uberaba? Or better still, ethnographies of public housing projects, or the sprawling subúrbios? Luckily, in this case, the answer is yes, as there is much to like about Ben Penglase's short but eminently readable book about coping with violence or, more to the point, the threat of violence in everyday life.
The book is based on 18 months of research in a Zona Norte favela that the author calls ‘Caxambu’ between 1998 and 1999, followed by a return to the field in 2001. It is what I would call a fairly standard anthropological text in that it is told through the eyes and voice of the ethnographer who calls upon specific events and conversations to connect to and converse with broader theoretical themes and perspectives. Hence there are the usual references to and discussions of race, gender, gangs, factions, police violence and public policy that you will come across in other places.
The primary focus of the book, however, is the way that the residents of Caxambu deal with the insecurity that is a constant factor in their lives. Specifically, how do they navigate between two violent and potentially lethal forces? The first of these forces are the gangs that, as the author details, occupied and came to dominate Rio's favelas following their initial involvement with the drug trade in the early 1980s. In Caxambu the drug gang operates much like gangs in other places in that it, forcibly, exchanges silence for protection. In other words, gangs establish order, of a sort, in a world where public authority barely exists and, in exchange, the residents of the favela refuse to give information about their identity or whereabouts to rival gangs or the police.
At the best of times, when a consolidated, locally-based gang is in place, life can be calm in the favela. As the author points out, however, this state of calm can be extremely fragile and short lived, and is regularly and routinely punctuated by acts of violence that are as unpredictable as they are hard to understand. And it is within this context that the residents of Caxambu use strategies, such as calling upon kinship ties that they share with drug traffickers, to manage the insecurity of the situation.
The second of these violent and potentially lethal forces is, of course, the police. The police in Rio, as everyone knows, are killers. And their ability to kill, with impunity, is greatly enhanced by societal attitudes towards the favelas that characterise them as ‘criminalised spaces’. Unlike drug dealers, who are at least known, the police treat the residents of Caxambu with brutality and disrespect and, as a consequence, end up being universally feared and despised which, in turn, strengthens the hand of traffickers.
Of course, the relations between the police and the residents of Caxambu are, or were, very much a product of the time. As the author suggests, state policy towards the favelas has swung violently from one of outright repression to one of tolerance and neglect. And that is the one problem I have with the book, the fact that the bulk of the field research relates to relations between drug gangs, the police and the residents of Rio's favelas at the turn of the past century. Of course, none of this is the author's fault, given the difficulties of turning dissertations and, in particular, ethnographic monographs into books these days. Nor does it mean that what the author describes is no longer relevant. According to recent estimates, approximately 50 per cent of the 1,000 or so favelas in Rio are still controlled by drug gangs that continue to be assaulted by the police. What it does mean, however, is that, although the author tries, it is hard to assess the significance of the author's findings in the light of the recent changes in state policy and, in particular, the establishment of the UPPs (which, my guess will be the focus of the next round of books on the favelas!). And then, of course, there is the issue of the militias, which the author mentions only in passing.
Other than that, the book is also silent, or at least fairly quiet on the internal structure of drug gangs, the nature of the drug trade, how drugs get in and out, the relationship between gangs in different areas and between gang leaders and those who are in prison. Because if the late 1990s to early 2000s was a period of police brutality and oppression, it was also a period when rivalries between criminal factions broke out into open warfare on the street.
All in all, however, this is a very good and, as I said before, very readable monograph, made possible by the author's strong relationship with all sorts of members of the community, including drug dealers, and his keen sense of observation. I particularly like that fact that he chooses to examine everyday manifestations of police violence as opposed to the occasional massacres that grab the headlines, his focus on the interplay between discrimination, residence and race, his discussion of the relationship between residents and drug dealers who he describes as ‘dangerous intimates’ and, finally, his insight that ‘rather than seeing the police and drug traffickers as opposites’ they act together ‘to produce (in)security, which they can attempt to manipulate for their own interests’ (pp. 155–6).
