LP Hartley, "The Go-Betweens"

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." - L.P. Hartley, "The Go-Betweens," 1963

Claude Levi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques"

"Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at a cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind."
-Claude Levi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques," 1973.

Three Books on the Favelas of Rio de Janerio

     In 2010, the Brazilian GDP rose a staggering 7.5%, the fastest rate of growth the nation has seen in 25 years.  Indeed, Brazilian economic prospects have rarely appeared better, especially given recently discovered off-shore oil reserves.  A recent New York Times article "Foreigners Follow Money to Booming Brazil, Land of the $35 Martini" described the effect which this upturn has had upon one of Brazil’s most important cities, Rio De Janerio.  The currently bullish climate has encouraged highly skilled immigrants to make Rio their home, helping to make the city one of the world’s most expensive places in which to live.  Despite these economic gains and important future prospects, Brazil remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, with Rio again leading the way.  The three books under review in this article help to explain this disparity, and just as importantly point to possible ways in which to militate against the worst of the socio-political effects of Brazilian capitalism.

     The curious geography and particular history of Rio have created a city in which the disproportion in wealth can be quite jarring.  Foreigners with Ivy League degrees are merely the most recent group to arrive to this city famously situated by the beach; for decades, and in increasing numbers, poor Brazilians from the interior of the country have arrived in search of the work lacking in their origin communities.  Limited finances coupled with discrimination from Caricios (as the residents of Rio are called), led these intrepid peoples to form their new communities on the steep hillside overlooking the downtown and beach districts.  These residences often began illegally, as squatters built on vacant land.  After a great deal of struggle, many of these favelas have since gained varying degrees of official sanction and government services.  And yet they provide a striking demonstration of the inequality to be found in Brazilian society.  Indeed, the US$10,000 a month apartment mentioned in the above New York Times piece most likely offers its inhabitants amazing views of both the ocean and this grinding poverty.

     Few academics would seem to have a better understanding of Rio’s favelas than sociologist Janice Perlman, a thoroughgoing knowledge much evidenced by her 2010 book entitled Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro.  The forty years of the title refer to the period Perlman has spent studying and living in various favelas, work which has resulted in several publications.  The most important of these works, often described by specialists as a “landmark,” is her 1976 The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janiero.  Perlman argued in The Myth of Marginality that Rio’s slums were not inhabited by backwards, lazy, or pre-modern peoples, as was often the contemporary viewpoint. Rather, she wrote, these peoples were integral components of Caricao society.  The poor worked exceedingly hard for paltry rewards, while being subjected to state sponsored repression.  Without this labor, Perlman showed, the wealth of Rio society at large could never have been generated.  The stigmatized slum dweller was thus every bit a Caricao as the wealthy of the central portions of the city.

     Favela represents this sociologist’s recent work upon her return to Rio’s poor districts in an attempt to follow up her earlier research.  Perlman labors quite hard to meet with the people she had known from the 1960s and 1970s, while continuing discussions with the contacts she did not lose.  As such, her book represents a singular chance to see how poverty is and is not transmitted between generations.   This sociologist is also able to follow up her earlier hypotheses regarding the “myth” of marginality.  Finally, the reader is presented with the changes, both positive and negative, to be found from the time of the Brazilian dictatorship to the today’s democracy.  This is done through exhaustive research of actual individuals in various stages of life, a remarkable source of evidence.

     Perhaps most importantly, Perlman discovered just how effective community solidarity can be.  Many of the areas she returns to study in Favela have changed a good deal only after such activism, with such essentials as plumbing , electricity, street lighting, and so on to be found in areas in which in such things were previously absent.  Further, many children of her first subjects had been able to effectively use programs fought for by their forerunners to improve their economic positions.  The legality of property ownership in favelas had also been seen to have become somewhat more officially recognized.  Further, the unrelenting work by residents to improve their environs had led to more stable places of residence, with brick, mortar, and concrete replacing less stable materials.  Unfortunately, Perlman discovered just how persistent the prejudice against residents of favelas continues to be.  Favela outsiders still often see their impoverished neighbors as criminals, or potential criminals, to be refused the full rights of other Caricaos.

     The most dangerous change Perlman describes is the rise of the drug trade in Rio, a form of criminality which became increasingly evident as the 1980s progressed.  Sociologist Enrique Desmond Arias makes this shift the topic of his 2006 work Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security.  In many ways, Rio’s shanty towns represent an almost over-determined location of drug related violence.  Geographically, the city provides a site of international shipment quite close to Andean centers of cocaine production.  Further, Rio’s wealthy inhabitants and tourists make for ideal consumers.  Finally, the maze of unnamed streets and the easily defended steep avenues of the faveleas coupled with a lack of a local police force represent ideal conditions for the drug trade.

     Much like Perlman, Desmond Arias argues that the current climate of drug fueled violence to be found in so many faveleas is integrally related to the citizenry found in the rest of the city.  He meets with a variety of individuals, from community and political leaders to those plying the drug trade, to better portray the relationships which have contributed to the violent social landscape.  Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro describes, for instance, how one community leader uses his ties to drug gangs to augment his power in relation to outside politicians while also using those very same outside ties to try to control the dealers.  Desmond Arias further displays the problems created by a corrupt, prejudiced, and violent police force whose actions often are by turns counterproductive and murderous.  Unfortunately, the violence is an outcome of power-elite machinations, something which again seems to argue for community based activism as the only effective solution.

     The final book here under review is an autobiography authored by Benedita da Silva, a favelea resident turned community activist turned senator.  In An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love the reader is treated to a life story which should be recognizable after a reading of the two previously discussed books.  Da Silva was born into an extremely impoverished family, living in a house made of cardboard, going to bed hungry, seeing her sister forced into prostitution, having a botched abortion; all of it depressingly familiar.  However, she was able to attend classes and begin a political career with the help of a supportive husband and her obviously extremely high intelligence rate.  Interestingly, she was also an earlier member of the Worker’s Party, which would go on to become the recently successful party of former President Lula De Silva and current President Dilma Rousseff.

     An Afro-Brazialian Woman’s Story of Politics and Love is of course a political work, however, and it does speak to some rather particular scandals involving Senator Da Silva.  There is also a great deal of material on her work, from fighting for indigenous people’s rights to her vocalization of feminism in a sometimes quite misogynistic society.  Surprisingly for a political leader, or at least surprising to a US reader, there are some fairly intimate familial and sexual details included in this piece.  Overall, though, the book once again speaks to the effectiveness of political activism and solidarity on the part of favelea dwellers.  Da Silva herself has benefited from the effects of such political consciousness, with her own political work continuing this positive influence.  Indeed, it would seem that little would change in Rio’s faveleas if it were not for such involvement. 

     These studies of Rio’s impoverished areas demonstrate the interconnected relationship between poverty and wealth; there are no wealthy without many more poor supporting their lifestyles.  In Rio, so far the only relatively effective way of countering this has been for the poor themselves to collectively fight.  This need not be the case, however.  Allowing poverty and violence on the scale experienced by favelea residents ultimately endangers the stability of the entire socioeconomic system, an especially dangerous outcome for those wealthy few benefiting most from that system's continuance.  It should likewise be pointed out that the case of this Brazilian city is aberrant relative only to its recent economic boom.  As environmental historian Mike Davis has shown in Planet of Slums, the growth of impoverished urban areas is a global phenomenon as “cities will account for virtually all future population growth…”  Thus, the residents of shanty towns should not be left to demand their rights as human beings alone; we should join them in their struggle for the good of all, in Rio and the world generally.

David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World"

"The only uniquely significant thing about humans...is our ability to create new explanations."
-David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World," 2011.

Marcel Proust, "Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time Volume 6"

"Truth- and life too- can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor."
- Marcel Proust, "Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time Volume 6," 1951

Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands"

     "The local manager, a relation of Raoul's, was a friend of mine. 'It's wonderful stuff,' he said. 'The locals adore it. It keeps them off the rum.' It's true. An increasing number of the inhabitants of Fort-de-France circulate the capital in a permanent state of stone-cold sobriety, their insides awash with this strange brown liquid. The propaganda drive of this firm has been so intensive and so ruthlessly efficient in its execution, that never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight. It is on a scale that nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer. It becomes the air you breathe, a way of life, an entire civilization- the Coca-Cola age, yoke fellow of the age of the Atomic Bomb.
     The bottles, when they are emptied, are sent back to be refilled, but the tin can capsules that seal them are littered everywhere. They clatter against your shoes in the dust and pile up in rusty drifts in the gutters. Bit by bit they will form a metal humus all over the western hemisphere, so that centuries after the bomb has done its work and made way, perhaps for a nobler detritus, archaeologists will be able to put a date to our buried remains with the help of this stratum of small round lids."
-Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveler's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands," 1950

Jean Paul Sartre, "Nausea"

"I do not think, therefore I am a mustache." -Jean Paul Satre, "Nausea," 1938