Dangerous Encounters: Meanings of Violence in a Brazilian City
This book is about violence in the Brazilian city of Sao Luis. It describes how people think about and negotiate dangerous encounters - vital and disturbing experiences that, when they go wrong, yield moral failure, humiliation, and death. Brazilians, like people elsewhere, worry about the perils of coming face-to-face with the wrong person, at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances. The book discusses two conceptually linked forms of perilous face-to-face encounters: Carnival, a...
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“Linger’s book is a rare and exceptionally worthwhile treatment of the role played by violence in the lives of ordinary Brazilians. . . . Engagingly written, handsomely printed, with excellent photographs . . . and richly illustrated with several dozen interview statements that attain a life of their own, the book provides an indispensable analysis of the unwritten rules of Brazilian social intercourse. . . . A model study of use not only to specialists on Brazil.”—Choice“A fascinating and original study of violence in Brazilian popular culture. . . . It is difficult to do justice in a review of this length to the richness of Linger’s book—the high quality of his writing, the way he illuminates Brazilian history and historiography, the ‘thickness’ of his ethnographic descriptions, and the intelligence of his theoretical discussions.”—Bulletin of Latin American Research
IIntroduction1Fateful Encounters32The City18IICarnival3The Violence in Carnival434Anything Goes!745Playing to the Limit90IIIBriga6Preliminaries1017Exacerbations1298Disequilibrium1589Exits17410The Murder of Sergio191IVConclusion11The Cultural Cybernetics of Violence22512Brazilians and Their Discontents236App. A: Biographical Sketches251App. B: A Note on Methods255Glossary263Bibliography269Index281
