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Living in a Rio de Janeiro Favela 

Review by Lucas Carneiro de Carvalho 

 

Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life 

by R. Ben Penglase 

Rutgers University Press, 2014 

 

In the early 1900s, Rio de Janeiro had gone through a massive urban transformation that 
inspired the writer and politician Coelho Neto to coin the term Cidade 
Maravilhosa (Marvelous City) to describe the new urban space. A few years later, in 1934, 
André Filho composed a carnival song also entitled Cidade Maravilhosa, and the term 
became emblematic to describe the city of Rio. In the verses of his song, André Filho describes 
Rio de Janeiro as a “(…) birthplace of Samba and beautiful songs; that live within people’s 
soul; you are the altar of our hearts; which happily sing; (…) flower-filled garden with love 
and saudade [1]; land that seduces all; may God cover you with happiness; nest of dreams and 
light; (…) Marvelous City; filled with thousands of enchantments; Marvelous City; heart of my 
Brazil.” In Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life, by R. 
Ben Penglase, we are presented with the other side of the coin. We read about the Rio of the 
hillsides, the Rio deprived of urban planning and public services, a Rio that, although, on the 
social margins, has the best views of this Marvelous City. Penglase’s ethnographic description 
does not focus on the exotica and gore of drug traffickers’ violence, police brutality, 
institutionalized corruption, and the constant sense of insecurity, but rather on the lived 
experiences of those who make the favela of Caxambu their home. 

The book is based on 18 months of field research between the years 1998 and 1999, followed 
by a subsequent field visit in 2001. Violence is the theme that cuts through all the chapters, 
but it is framed by Michael Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategies, where 
“strategies are the schema used by the powerful: they seek to produce regularity and stability; 
(…) Tactics, on the other hand, are the ways of operating of the powerless: they are ruses or 
tricks that do not necessarily challenge or resist systems of power but function within them” 
(p. 6). It is within this framework that the book explores the saber viver (knowing how to live) 
of the families who make Caxambu their home. It is this particular local knowledge that is 
presented and problematized throughout the book, and each chapter focuses on different but 
complementary topics. 

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In Chapter 1, Penglase presents his theoretical framework and situates his work within the 
larger scholarship on violence. He also highlights the destructive and constructive aspects of 
violence, and explores examples in which violence generated practices and discourses, 
reshaping how Brazilians think and experience their own social universe. He also presents 
and problematizes some methodological challenges in the research: “First, how to depict both 
order and disorder in ways that do not reify one as the normal counterpart to the other; and 
second, how to depict a situation of uncertainty and unpredictable violence when I myself was 
part of the story” (p. 26). Chapter 2 presents a discussion of how Penglase gained rapport in 
the community (a la Geertz), and how his field strategy of deep hanging out [2] allowed him 
to also fall within the local male comportment. This chapter not only explores the position of 
the research in the field, but also some important oppositions that help us understand the 
reality of Rio’s favelas. Some of these are: inside/outside the favela, hillside/neighborhood, 
legality/illegality, and violence/nonviolence. Throughout the chapter, Penglase problematizes 
some of these oppositions and argues for a more nuanced analysis, which looks at a particular 
situation within a continuum rather than inferring diacritical values.  

Chapter 3 looks at the dangerous and familial dynamics residents have to assess and engage 
with in their daily affairs in Caxambu. The shared experiences in the favela, and “local social 
representations of the neighborhood created a moral map to guide and evaluate social 
interactions” (p. 71). The chapter also looks back in time to explore how favelas and their own 
distinct logic are not only a problem, but also a solution to specific social, political, and 
economic moments. 

In Chapter 4, the author explores why and how violence is deployed by drug traffickers to 
reshape local ideologies, ways of being, and knowing. The state of (in)security is partially due 
to the fact that drug traffickers often break their own rules. In such a way, they “pursued a 
strategy of abnormalization: although they claimed to provide safety and security, they 
alsooften deliberately disrupted daily life” (p. 107). In this environment and permanent state 
of emergency, residents have to perform the act of hiding what is common knowledge in order 
to keep at bay acts of violence from drug traffickers and policemen. This chapter also deals 
with some gender issues in Caxambu and how the presence of drug trafficking and its promise 
of quick wealth creates intergenerational conflicts and changes the values ascribed to 
masculinity among the residents. 

Chapter 5 explores the interplay of police and drug traffickers in the production of (in)security 
in Caxambu. Penglase’s historical analysis of the role of policing during Brazil’s military 
dictatorship offers some insight into the ways in which the police force today deals with those 
“disrupting civic order.” Moreover, “it is clear that the police do not naturalize the power of 
the state, producing a docile population. Rather, they are widely seen as dangerous and 
unpredictable, to be avoided if possible” (p. 155). Chapter 5 also explores how the police tie 
together assumptions about criminality, race, and types of person, thus overlapping place, 
race, and people. And in the conclusion, the author points to a few ethnographic cases that 
show how residents are constantly forgetting and remembering certain spaces and histories of 
such spaces, which in the end empower the community to (re)write their own stories and 
histories of violence through their lived experiences. 

Although the book is an accessible read, I have a few minor critiques. The chapters present 
interesting arguments, but seem to be too isolated from one another, focusing on race, gender, 
police strategies, historiography, and the dichotomy between morro and bairro (hillside and 
neighborhood). I think the whole project would benefit if the text were more dialogic within 

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itself. In reading, I kept coming up with questions about race, gender, early social and 
economic strategies of urban development in Rio, the state of the local and international drug 
trade, etc. Many of these questions were answered in the text, but in subsequent chapters, so I 
think a mention of these should have come up earlier on in the text whenever pertinent. 
Another critique is with the discussion of the development of the drug trade in Latin America 
in the 1980s onward, and its status during the author’s field research. It is clear from the 
scope of the project, that this aspect is beyond the research that was conducted, since the goal 
is to look at the strategies of Caxambu residents in dealing with a state of (in)security. 
However, this leaves a whole set of questions unanswered. For example: who are the other 
national and international stakeholders at play? Do they influence the kind of violence 
experienced in Rio’s favelas? Where do drug traffickers acquire their armaments? Are any 
other aspects of the Brazilian state involved in this kind of corruption besides the police 
(Federal Police, Armed Forces, politicians, etc.)? If so, to what extent? A more nuanced 
description of relations of the drug trafficking violence in Caxambu with the drug trafficking 
in Rio, Brazil, and Latin America would fill a void in the book. Another observation is the 
timeframe of the research itself. The ethnography was conducted in 1998, 1999, and 2001, and 
since then significant changes have occurred in the way policing is conducted in Rio’s favelas, 
as well as in the configuration of Rio’s organized crime itself. Penglase himself points to this 
issue and how the Units of Police Pacification (UPP) and changes in the Comando 
Vermelho altered the dynamics in the state of (in)security. 

Notwithstanding these critiques, Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban 
Violence and Daily Life is a phenomenal book that presents a humanistic approach to 
violence in a Rio favela. Penglase puts police and drug traffickers at the same structural level 
as agents that contribute to the state of constant insecurity, rather than looking at them as 
diametrically opposed. Both have the potential for violence, but the drug trafficker is the one 
who residents know intimately. These are the people he calls “dangerous intimates” (p. 29). 
Penglase delivers in his promise of not writing a pornography of violence (p. 27), but a 
description that is based on traumatic events that leave lingering effects and scars in the social 
fabric of society. Although the book should be read by all those interested in violence and the 
representation of violence and danger in Brazil and Latin America, as I was reading I could 
not help but relate some aspects described by Penglase to current political and social events in 
Europe, the Middle East, and the US. This was especially the case when describing how police 
tend to conflate place, race, and qualities of people. It is frightening to see how recent political 
discourses draw from essentialist assumptions to push for policies that negatively affect large 
groups. Perhaps these peoples, not living in favelas, but in neighborhoods marked by cultural, 
religious, racial or ethnic specificities, are also living states of (in)security, where 
representatives of the state are also perceived as the agents of violence and terror. 

 Lucas de Carvalho is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland at College 
Park. He has a MA in Anthropology from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and 
a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia. He specializes in the ethnography of 
Indigenous peoples in Amazonia, and is currently working with indigenous theories of 
subjectivity, relatedness, violence, and everyday practice. 

 

[1] Roughly equates to feelings of longing and nostalgia. 

[2] Geertz, C., 1998. Deep hanging out. The New York review of books, 45 (16), 69. 

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© 2017 Lucas Carneiro de Carvalho  


