For over a century, countless Brazilians have bet money on the clandestine lottery called the jogo do bicho, or ‘animal game’. So named because of its origins in the Rio de Janeiro zoo, the game has operated since the 1890s by way of thousands of street-corner bookmakers who sell tickets to gamblers endeavouring to select the daily winning animal and corresponding number. Although illegal virtually since its inception, the animal game plays a part in the everyday lives of a broad swath of the country's population. It also occupies an undisputed, iconic place in Brazilians’ conception of their own, distinctive national culture. Eagles, Donkeys and Butterflies, an anthropological treatment of the animal game, thus seeks to read Brazilian character into the game's massive popularity.

Curiously, scholars both in Brazil and abroad have largely ignored the jogo do bicho. The original, Portuguese-language version of Eagles, Donkeys, and Butterflies (1999), a collaboration between Soárez, a Master's student at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and DaMatta, her thesis advisor, was one of a miniscule handful of scholarly works published in Brazil on the jogo do bicho. This translation is the first book-length study to appear in English.

Why do people choose to play the animal game rather than the legal lottery, and what has fuelled its staying power and singular importance in Brazilian culture, despite its illegality? The authors suggest that analyses of the animal game that emphasise its criminality ignore ‘that which permits and legimitises the social and political power of the undertaking: the bichos’ (p. 1). This book puts forth a daring argument: the animal game's significance lies not in the bicheiros (bookies) but in the bichos (animals). The authors assert that it is the game's system of numbers and corresponding animals on which players wager that provides the most powerful insights into the workings of Brazilian society. DaMatta's opening essays introduce the book's main ideas and place the animal game in the context of other Brazilian social institutions, such as Carnival, that he and others have studied. The animal game reveals again what DaMatta has referred to elsewhere as ‘the Brazilian dilemma’, which he locates ‘in our inability to conclude stages, break with styles, separate motives and feelings and, to the extreme, become conscious of hierarchy’ (pp. xii–xiii).

DaMatta and Soárez turn to a classical concept of structuralist anthropology as their analytical touchstone, interpreting the animal game as a new form of ‘totemism’ – seductive because it is ‘savage’, ‘paradoxical’ because it is modern (p. 95). For the authors, the engagement between the Brazilian people and the jogo do bicho's animals attests to a particularly Brazilian version of modernity that is ambivalent, heterodox and nonlinear. DaMatta explains in his prologue that his advisee's research project awakened his interest because it ‘opened up a dialogue with the assuredly most original and courageous part of Lévi-Strauss's work: that dedicated to the understanding of the “savage mind” of totemism’ (p. xiii). The animals used in this lottery are Brazilian modernity's primary ‘symbolic operators’; they serve to return enchantment to the modern world, and they not only allow but in fact necessitate the intermingling of nature and culture in players' minds. The game's symbolism rests on the difference between an ‘animal’ and a ‘bicho’, a common Portuguese term that roughly means ‘beast’ in English but whose nuances are untranslatable. The animal game, the authors note, is explicitly about the bichos, which are ‘endowed with divergent feelings and singular intentions that the players strive to translate and decipher’ (p. 22).

Soárez takes the helm in the four chapters that follow, which investigate the jogo do bicho's ‘expressive, symbolic, or dramatic dimension’ (p. 31). Drawing on folkloric and travel accounts and a few oral history interviews, Soárez attributes the game's rapid rise to its employment of animals and numbers, which predisposed the game to the system of predictive tips (‘hunches’) that fuelled its allure and generated its cultural meanings. Chapters 1–3 theorise about the importance of the animals themselves and reflect on the psychological experience of the players. Playful observations of everyday life and discontinuities in logic allow gamblers to translate dreams and other visions and occurrences into ‘hunches’. Soárez shows how each of the game's 25 animals acquire personified traits with social significance. The tiger and peacock as bichos are not the same as the tiger and peacock as ‘animals’, tout court. They are cartoon-like versions of the animal: personified, embellished and layered with cultural symbolism. Soárez's analysis impels the reader to consider rarely discussed aspects of the jogo do bicho, and Brazilian cultural life – the idea that risking money on gambling amounts to a sacrificial rite, for instance. Yet the authors fail to make an adequate case for the utility of the elaborate classificatory scheme that forms the bulk of this book; Soárez's own ethnographic fieldwork, which she only discusses in depth in the final chapter, does not confirm the singular importance of the animals, or the ‘totemic’ relationship between the animals and the people that the book's earlier theoretical chapters assert.

In Soárez's richly informative final chapter, she summarises her ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an animal game betting site in Rio's Copacabana neighbourhood in 1992. Her description affords insight into the network of social and material interactions that occur around the animal game, and the collective psychology of its players. Her stories from the field speak fascinatingly of players' ‘acts of faith’ in deciding to risk their money on a certain number, and the individual relationships that people have with the numbers that they play. Above all, Soárez's observations reveal the daily movement at this betting site, which serves as an informal ‘community bank’ and clearing house of local information. The myriad of informal exchanges of favours, protection and contraband show the multiple dimensions of the jogo do bicho as social phenomenon. The very richness and complexity of the social world of this ponto de bicho makes the reader yearn for an analysis that goes beyond the symbolic world of the animals, or at least that strives to understand how other elements of the game as a public, social phenomenon are folded back into its meaning.

The authors set out to counter elitist and simplistic views that characterise the animal game and other Brazilian popular institutions as ‘proof of ignorance and the expression of our perennial tendency toward corruption and crime … ’ (p. 1). Their point is well taken; to reduce the jogo do bicho to ‘a datum in the history of lawbreaking and crime in the city of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil’ (pp. 62–3) is to commit an injustice to the creativity and the complexity of the society that gained amusement, social communion and hope from playing it. But the book's emphasis on the animals themselves crowds out other, even more illuminating analyses. Above all, perhaps because of their desire to avoid an overly pathological view of the game, their analysis does not take sufficient stock of the game's criminalisation, leaving unanswered such crucial questions as the role that illegality plays in the calculus of hope and risk that Soárez's chapters describe. Further discussion of the game's legalities might also have enriched the book's treatment of both class and regional differences within Brazil, dimensions of the jogo do bicho's popularity that the book elides.

By making this book available to an Anglophone audience outside Brazil, DaMatta and Soárez have performed a valuable service to the field of Brazilian studies. Their project is all the more laudable because there remains something untranslatable about Brazil's animal game: not only in rendering their Portuguese text into English, but also in articulating the game's impulses, psychology and ‘hunches’ in the concrete language of scholarly prose. The book's essayistic sections make it a useful window on one dimension of the twentieth-century Brazilian anthropological imagination as it explores how the European anthropology of ‘savages’ can be applied to their own modern, urban society. Thus this book is a study of totemism as a concept in itself as much as it is a book about the elusive and omnipresent animal game.