In Rio de Janeiro’s
favelas, traffickers assert power through conspicuous displays of
wealth and force, brandishing high-powered guns, gold jewelry, and
piles of cash and narcotics. Police, for their part, conduct raids
reminiscent of action films or video games, wearing masks and riding
in enormous armored cars called “big skulls.” Images of these
spectacles circulate constantly in local, national, and global media,
masking everyday forms of violence, prejudice, and inequality. The
Spectacular Favela offers a rich ethnographic examination of the
political economy of spectacular violence in Rocinha, Rio’s largest
favela. Based on more than two years of residence in the community,
the book explores how entangled forms of violence shape everyday life
and how that violence is, in turn, connected to the market economy.
Erika Robb Larkins
shows how favela violence is produced as a marketable global brand.
While this violence is projected in disembodied form through media,
the favela is also sold as an embodied experience through the popular
practice of favela tourism. The commodification of the favela becomes
a form of violence itself; favela violence is transformed into a
commercially viable byproduct of a profit-driven war on drugs, which
serves to keep the poor marginalized. This book tells the story of
how traffickers, police, cameras, tourists, and even anthropologists
come together to create what the author calls the “spectacular
favela.”
