Review of Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 9), University of California Press, 2013.
for Mondoglobe Media, March 12, 2019. Vol 2,
Within the first few pages of Laughter Out of Place it becomes apparent anthropologist Donna Goldstein is going to embark on an ethnographic analysis of a more personal vein. The introduction reads like a personal reflection of her time in a Brazilian favela, Felicidade Eterna, folding in memories of the people she met into a journal-styled ethnography of the kind introduced to us by Ruth Behar. Dr. Goldstein’s approach is refreshing: a reader knows where she stands on the issue in the favela, but she nonetheless provides a rich analysis referencing theory and other ethnographies that provide context and clarification.
Looking at the book’s format in an overall construction, Goldstein makes an interesting and deliberate choice in partitioning the book thematically around the phenomena of favela life. The overarching concept of irony—of laughter threaded through lives filled with tragedy—runs through the book, but other subjects like the aesthetics of domination, black Cinderellas, the shortening of childhood, gangs and violence, and the carnivalization of desire focuses the book into a deeper issue: the socioeconomic construct of Latin American poverty in a world rent with the deep social structural social inequalities perpetuated by globalization. The choice of these themes were organically synthesized from coded observations—a case study in how to write deep interpretive ethnography. The phenomena addressed were concrete and drew Goldstein’s discursive writing style along into relevant and engaging territory. She uses theory to bolster her arguments, but does not saddle the story with overwhelming treatises.
Unlike other cultural anthropological texts that advocate for cause and people, Goldstein does not ingratiate in pure cultural relativism to try to explain the internal logic of place and people at the psychological level: as she says, she is often shocked by the ironic attitudes of the people who seem to accept their fate much more humorously than Goldstein imagined prior to her experience in Felicidade. She takes issue with some theorists, including Foucault, presenting and then unraveling the famous theorist’s framing of pervasive all-permeating power. She also disparages the romanticized study of elite Brazilians in earlier culture studies of Brazil, of “cosmopolitan intellectuals, or transnational social movements” as a form of “ethnographic refusal,” and a condition “that would fail to provide density to our representations, sanitize politics,” or produce a “thin version of culture with a set of dissolving actors” (43).
In her review of Donna Goldstein’s book, Nancy Shepar-Hughes mentions that Goldstein’s book will not come without controversy because it may be painted in a “culture-of-poverty” conceptual framework. But Goldstein concentrates on the conditions of life and the subsequent actions of people mired in difficult situations in the fragile lived sustainabilities of the favela. Goldstein is also quick to point out that she herself does not understand—at all times—the social structures in place. For example, out of generosity Goldstein sets aside some money for a young woman in the story, Soneca, to attend a computer institute. The idea does not succeed and Gloria, the main informant of the book, is annoyed by the waste of valuable resources.
Goldstein also employs a modern a google search in a first, perhaps, novel way to capture widely held search generalizations, to bring the reader directly into androcentric attitudes and concerning Brazilian Mulatas. She enters a search engine with those exact two words and finds dozens of porn sites exemplifying popular viewpoints related to sexuality in Brazil. She points out many of the inconsistencies and ironic attitudes present in the favelas regarding sexuality and race. Gloria, for instance, views the white coroa taking on a dark-skinned lover as evidence for a “reluctance of Afro-Brazilian women to interpret certain kinds of interactions as racist” (124).
The discussions on violence and gangs are/were some of the most relevant of Laughter Out of Place in a changing second and third world. One can imagine the “trajectory into criminality by young men as a form of local knowledge (and as a vehicle for advancement)…” (203). Indeed, after the descriptions given of the lifestyle, poverty, abuse, and of course humor that saturate the favela, one can clearly see the seductive link of falling into gang violence and criminality. Goldstein also clearly demonstrates the functionality of bandit existence, quoting and borrowing from Hobsbawm the reasoning behind the formation of so-called primitive rebels: “Social banditry becomes a form of self-help in the context of economic crises and social tension” (209).
In Goldstein’s short but cogent conclusion she does not try to offer monumental solutions to the problems she sees, but nevertheless her astute observations and solutions are grounded in lived experience of place. She points to endemic problems in the favela such as the “differential application of the rule of law,” and the need to “reform policing forces” bringing an end to corruption and abuse” (273). She points out that in order for drug traffickers and gangs to be removed from the favela, “‘good faith’ social services need to be put in place to treat the everyday private injustices that are currently being handled by such organizations” (274). Like so many impoverished societies, an infrastructure or support girdle of municipal services needs to be put in place (or reformed) to aid all segments of the society of Rio. This remains a common need for societies battling poverty. A great ethnographic reading examining one of many micro-worlds mired in global inequality.
Carlos Torres, Ph.D.