Violence as a language of construction and deconstruction in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil

Abstract

The following chapter is written by Luiz Eduardo Soares, an academic notable for a professional biography that has moved back and forth between the ivory tower and city government. Soares has served as Professor of Anthropology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and was the National Secretary of Public Security under the mandate of Lula’s presidency in Brazil. Soares’s chapter starts with the appalling statistic that between 1980 and 2010 over one million Brazilians were murdered. It is in the face of such data that violence is increasingly defined as a public health crisis in several parts of the world similarly scarred, as well as in Brazil itself. More pointedly, Soares suggests that if we are not careful such data is dehumanised. He appeals to the need to put a face to the figures. And the faces are clearly identified by the history of the city and the racialisation of the country. The faces of those who have died are massively disproportionately concentrated on one fraction of the demos of Brazil and configuration of its urban geography. As he puts it in the chapter, the victims of murder have ‘a colour, a class and an address’. And in making the victims visible, in humanising the data, he argues that Rio de Janeiro can be seen as a microcosm of the country at large. Soares has described his own paradoxical love–hate relationship with the city in the extraordinary book Rio de Janeiro: Extreme city (2016). The book is part autobiography of his own attempts to challenge the pandemic of violent death, and part an interdisciplinary mixture of a sociology of the city’s favelas, an anthropology of the regimes of metropolitan governance and a political science of the institutional architecture of Violence as a language