Antropologia

Urban Latin America has become synonymous with violence and insecurity. Whereas levels of violence since 2000, in terms of homicide rates, dropped everywhere else in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean were the exception. Often, efforts to explain this make a connection between poverty, crime, and violence that finds its typical representation in peripheral urban areas: shanty towns. This paper challenges such one-dimensional assumptions by critically examining the complex nexus between violence, insecurity and urban space in urban Latin America. We will define contemporary urban violence in the region and discuss its key characteristics and explanatory factors. Then, we will examine the socio-spatial dimensions of violence and insecurity in three domains: the linkages between criminal gangs, drugs, and violence in peripheral areas; the impact of violence and fear on the strategies of seclusion employed by specific social classes; state responses, especially policing, to show how regimes of public security are differentiated in socio-spatial terms. We will argue that these differences reflect differences in citizenship status and citizenship subjectivity, between the privileged and the excluded. This in turn generates bottom-up responses by urban residents that take matters of security and law enforcement in their own hands.

Studies of urban development, and specifically studies of urban inequality, have tended to neglect the role of young people. While development studies more broadly have begun to take young people's experiences, perceptions and practices into account, research on urban development and inequality has remained largely focused on adults. This lack of attention to young people is all the more surprising given the large percentage of urban residents in low-income countries that is under 25. Drawing on research in Rio de Janeiro's Zona Sul, this article argues for including young people in debates on urban development and urban inequality. It argues that a relational approach, juxtaposing the views and experiences of both rich and poor youth, is especially valuable in this regard, as those studies that have paid attention to youth, development and inequality tend to focus on low-income youth living in informal settlements. Based on mixed-method research with adolescents and youth (age 14e24) from both low-income and high-income areas, the article analyses young people's socio-spatial perceptions and practices. The research highlights that both groups experience urban inequality and insecurity as major and interrelated development problems, and that these issues affect their opportunities and quality of life, albeit in different ways.

Emerging from the global city literature of the 1980s and 1990s, a vast scholarship has developed that embraces the ‘dual city’ concept as a useful analytical tool for explaining how global transformations produce polarization within cities. However, less is known about how local policies shape uneven patterns of development. Through an examination of Rio de Janeiro's Favela Pacification Program, we argue that state-level public policies play a significant role in institutionalizing duality. The recent military occupation of the slums in Rio de Janeiro demonstrates how the historically and politically contextualized public policy of confrontation has exacerbated tensions between the city's elites and poor residents along a number of social, economic, and political dimensions. Local policymakers can influence the impact of globalization on social polarization by considering the effects of public policies on spatial justice.

Populism is a notoriously unstable phenomenon. This instability has been on full display in contemporary Latin America where the progressive gains of the Pink Tide have confronted a rightwing backlash. How do we understand the sudden shift of fortunes from left to right? What tilted the balance of power in the region? One familiar answer to these questions is the exploitation by rightwing actors of tough-on-crime or mano dura rhetoric, which scapegoats already vulnerable populations (minorities, the poor, the “deviant,” etc.) as the source of insecurity. In conversation with this collection of papers on revanchist populism in Brazil, I want to propose a subtle twist on the theme of security and its role in rightwing populist mobilization. It draws on my research in neighboring Venezuela. Specifically, it looks at the unraveling of the Bolivarian Revolution’s progressive promise to defend the urban popular sectors against death squads, torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive forms of policing. Comparing Venezuela, the vanguard of Latin America’s left turn, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil may seem scandalous at first blush, but doing so asks us to confront an inconvenient truth about what I call the will to security. Rather than imagining security as something imposed from above, the will to security reframes it as an articulation of demands that resonate, at least in part, with the popular sectors. Adding this perspective to our analysis of rightwing populism provides an alternative spatial paradigm to the conversations about security that lends it historical depth and policy relevant positioning.

Many cities around the world have been largely constructed by their residents, who build not only their own houses, but also frequently their neighborhoods. In this article, I use the notion of peripheral urbanization to analyze this way of producing cities that is quite pervasive in the global south. I argue that peripheral urbanization refers to modes of the production of space that (a) operate with a specific temporality and agency, (b) engage transversally with official logics, (c) generate new modes of politics, and (d) create highly unequal and heterogeneous cities. I also argue that peripheral urbanization not only produces heterogeneity within the city as it unfolds over time, but also varies considerably from one city to another. I build my arguments by juxtaposing dissimilar cases from a few cities in the global south. To focus on peripheral urbanization means simultaneously to de-center urban theory and to offer a bold characterization of modes of the production of space that are different from those that generated the cities of the North Atlantic.

Explorando a perspectiva proposta por Marcel Mauss, este artigo apresenta algumas reflexões sobre a coexistência entre as lógicas do dom e do mercado na sociedade brasileira, tomando por base uma pesquisa etnográfica realizada em Curitiba (PR) sobre conflitos decorrentes de relações de consumo. A etnografia indica que a premissa da equivalência entre os parceiros – que evoca a economia do dom, na qual as trocas vinculam sujeitos enquanto sujeitos por meio de objetos – não é, de modo algum, um componente secundário das relações entre consumidores e fornecedores no mercado, presidindo inclusive a reivindicação de direitos pelos consumidores junto a instituições estatais. O desenvolvimento da análise sugere que as transações bem sucedidas e os conflitos nascidos de relações de consumo podem ser compreendidas como elementos de um mesmo sistema de comunicação, em que a lógica mercantil é englobada pelo princípio da reciprocidade.

Resultado de uma pesquisa mais ampla que foi realizada no Setor de Cirurgias Reparadoras e Estética, obra social sobre a responsabilidade do doutor Ivo Pitanguy na Santa Casa de Misericórdia, situada na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A pesquisa tem como objetivo refletir sobre a representação da imagem e os significados que as classes populares fazem do corpo e da beleza.

This essay examines the urban atmospheres of terror in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from the perspective of women residents. Drawing on two ethnographic projects conducted in various favelas in 2016 and 2019, I argue that terror, as an urban atmosphere, is deeply rooted in a long history of racialized and gendered violence, and that its persistence in the contemporary urban landscape is a consequence of the coloniality of power. The analysis begins by exploring the layers, textures, and complexities of urban atmospheres of terror, providing a deeper understanding of their racialized and gendered nature. It further examines the transformative power of the body in reshaping these urban atmospheres, focusing on how favela women cultivate alternative affective atmospheres within their communities. Drawing on Afrodiasporic and decolonial feminist thinking, I show how Afrodescendant women in the favelas resist and transform these atmospheres, creating spaces that challenge the coloniality of power and its spatial manifestations, such as urban borders. I conclude that a key aspect of favela women's urban politics and resistance to coloniality is rooted in the body and the affective dimensions of urban life.