Estudos culturais

A regular tourist destination since the early 1990s, Rocinha - the paradigmatic touristic favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - has seen the number of foreigners visitors grow considerably after the successful international release of City of God in 2003. In dialogue with the new mobilities paradigm and based on a socio-ethnographic investigation which examines how poverty-stricken and segregated areas are turned into tourist attractions, the article sheds lights on the ways tourists who have watched Fernando Meirelles's film re-interpret their notion of 'the favela' after taking part in organized tours. The aim is to examine how far these reinterpretations, despite based on first-hand encounters, are related back to idealized notions that feed upon the cinematic favela of City of God while giving further legitimacy to it.

Focuses on the Rocinha Cooperative of Women's Artisans and Seamstresses, known as Cooparoca, in Rocinha, Brazil, and the conditions for the seamstresses who work there.

What does it take to recognise “confusion” as a particular form in itself? This text explores how different types of knowledge inflect the way that some Brazilian favela (shantytown) dwellers experience and deal with confusion in their daily lives. I contend that religious grammars of confusion may enable the recognition and understanding of a wide variety of other (ontological) forms of confusion in the daily life of different groups living in Favela da Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. The method used for my investigation is an ethnographic and recursive one. Part of the confusion manifested in the capacity of recognising “a confusion” derives exactly from the condition that there is no fixed or neutral epistemological position to serve as a basis from which to arbitrate with precision the existence of confusion as a form. In an attempt to better understand the way under which confusion exists in people’s everyday lives, I describe and analyse particular events that I experienced during an Afro-Brazilian (Umbanda) religious celebration and other more quotidian episodes with a different group, my Evangelical friends. What are the struggles and conflicts of power that warrant the existence of certain confusions? What confusions would normative sexual, religious and class-based orders rather avoid? The historical presence of Eshu in the Afro-Brazilian pantheon as the god of all agreements and disagreements, lord of all paths and crossroads and the master of all order and confusion has been deeply valued in Afro-Brazilian religious cosmologies – among other reasons, for the power of disruption that it offers against an oppressive social order. I suggest that part of the political dimension that informs acts of recognition of confusion as a form is revealed when we interrogate and confuse the context of order against which “a confusion” may emerge.

This article draws upon theories of performance, everyday life, social space, and community to explore an ethnographic vignette juxtaposing two scenes: in one, neighbors form an improvised huddle around a young gang member dying of a gunshot wound in the streets of the favela, or squatter town, of Rocinha, in Rio de Janeiro; in the other, a Palm Sunday procession passes through the same spot later that night. Contextualizing this illustration with detailed information on Rocinha (including police and gang activities there and changing trends in favela activism in recent decades) and a framework for distinguishing the live, "organic" spaces of performances from the still-life, "inorganic" spaces of abstract settings, I argue that Rocinha residents use popular performances to create refuges from the desolation facing them in the poverty, violence, and injustice of their lives and to reposition themselves in spaces of abundance, peace, and community.

Sneed's first contact with Rocinha, Rio's biggest favela, occurred in 1990, a year after the first Brazilian funk record was released in Portuguese.3 At the time he was not interested in researching the music genre but more in the experiences of Rocinha residents and the drug gangs that ruled the favelas (17). Paul Sneed's book Machine Gun Voices: Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk is the first ethnography about this Afro-Atlantic electronic scene to be published in English. More than a mere outcome of a social context - Rio's favelas - Sneed sees gangster funk as a kind of mediator between drug traffickers and the favelas' inhabitants (214). The literature on Brazilian funk has expanded since Sneed's PhD dissertation in 2003 on gangster funk

This article presents episodes of gay sex in the daily lives of people from a Brazilian shantytown (favela). It does so through a writing genre I call ‘ethnographic striptease’, which offers a picture of sexuality that is less ‘clinical’ and more similar to the form of an ‘erotic art’. This is based on the Foucauldian proposed distinction between two forms of knowledge discussed in History of Sexuality, Volume I: ‘scientia sexualis’ and ‘ars erotica’. I ask what an understanding of sexuality based more on the latter would look like. The result is presented in six concrete examples of this ethnographic form, which are provided in the article. These are followed by some personal commentaries, rather than by a ‘scientific analysis’ of them. By disrupting the boundaries of established narrative genres, the article offers a contribution towards the expansion of the ways in which human sexuality can be addressed and communicated. In a game of hiding and revealing, an ethnographic striptease offers a different look at queer sex life emerging from a large favela in Rio de Janeiro.

This article draws on ethnographic research and theories of ideology to explore the cultural and rhetorical context of Brazilian proibidão funk, or prohibited rap music, and the usage of this music by the Comando Vermelho criminal faction to strengthen its hegemony in the favela of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Gangsters from this faction sponsor large-scale, outdoor street dances known as bailes de comunidade, and use them as platforms to stage their power. They also promote the production of clandestine rap songs such as "Bandidos de Cristo" ("Bandits of Christ"), which are recorded live at the dances by the drug traffickers and disseminated in the favela on bootleg CDs. Such clandestine songs are not played on the radio or available in stores. Through these dances and songs, drug traffickers in Rocinha represent themselves, with utopian and messianic overtones, as social bandits and the legitimate defenders of their community.

Rio de Janeiro's "bailes funk," or funk dance parties, with their often intensely violent and aggressively sexualized nature, are fundamental expressions of the culture of the city's favelas, or squatter towns, with tremendous significance for enormous crowds of poor, young people who attend them. This article draws on ethnographic research and participant observation, conducted by the author throughout years of living in the favela of Rocinha, and close readings of funk lyrics to explore the utopian impulse at the core of the baile funk experience, especially in community dances sponsored by gangsters held in the streets of favelas. Like some other cultural expressions of African diaspora communities, these bailes conjure up and sustain a morally and politically charged musical space that joins the young people together, emotionally elevating them above the harsh conditions of their lives into a spiritual state that makes available to them the feeling of living in a better world.
Resumo em português: Os bailes funk do Rio de Janeiro, muitas vezes caracterizados por intensa violência e sexualidade agressiva, são expressões fundamentais da cultura das favelas com um significado especial para o grande número de jovens pobres que os freqüenta. Este artigo está baseado em teoria cultural, pesquisa etnográfica (conduzida pelo autor ao longo de vários anos na favela da Rocinha), leitura minuciosa de letras de músicas e observação participante para explorar o impulso utópico subjacente à experiência do baile funk, sobretudo nos bailes de comunidade patrocinados nas favelas traficantes de drogas. Como é o caso de muitas outras expressões de práticas culturais da Diáspora Africana, a experiência do baile cria um espaço musical que une e eleva os participantes emocionalmente para além da escassez da pobreza para um estado de espírito em que possam sentir a sensação de como seria viver num mundo melhor.

I remember Rocinha twenty years ago. It was then the largest favela (shantytown) in Latin America, but its people had another reason to be proud: despite the power of drug lords and the government’s neglect, it was the only favela in Rio de Janeiro to develop as a “normal” neighborhood.
The settlers from Brazil’s northeastern region who came to live in Rocinha were known to be people who tried to improve their living conditions, even though they were in an unknown territory and had left their families behind.
Although I was born in Rio, both my parents come from the northeast of Brazil, like most friends my age who live here. We were brought up to start working at an early age and generate income as soon as possible. However, I have always wanted to do something in Rocinha, since I believe there are lots of people who want to turn this place into a benchmark for actions designed to improve the life of favela-dwellers. Even before I started college, I already planned to do something big in Rocinha but had no idea of what it could be. It was during my freshman year as a student of journalism that I had the idea to start a community communications class, and FavelaDaRocinha.com was born. After six months online, there were ten people working on the website. They undertook every activity of the mainstream, conventional media – photography, writing, editorial meetings, and contacts with politicians and other important people to produce material. At the beginning, our common goal was to gain experience, a normal thing for undergraduates, and over time these first collaborators used this experience to enter the professional world.
Today, fifteen people work on the website. Since Rocinha’s pacification, in November 2011, we have gained international recognition thanks to the live coverage of this operation on Twitter. We also became news ourselves in the media all over Brazil, and also internationally in outlets such as Al-Jazeera and BBC.