In Attention to Pain: Governance and Bodies in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Ethnographies of bodies have become entry points for understanding the sensorially rich ways that worlds are generated and lived. Here, I adduce a slow-paced ethnographic mode that centers how bodily pain and touch orient attention, with a focus on gendered and racialized violence in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. In doing so, I make explicit the expectation in Rio’s urban governance that resilience means toughening through pain. In turn, I detail how Pentecostal practices of ‘healing touch’ link pain and hope together, demonstrating the religious work, care, and governance involved in producing and maintaining hope under conditions of violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Bodies
• pain
• touch
• suburbs
• race
• Rio de Janeiro

Acknowledgments

So many people in Rio’s western suburbs shared their lives with me throughout this research; I owe them significant thanks and still more. As a new mother myself while this research unfolded, the people who move through this article treated me with a gentleness and openness that I can never sufficiently repay. This article has benefited from mentorship and friendship – often both at the same time. I’ve tried not to forget anyone, but sincere thanks are owed to multiple thinkers, including Lisa Stevenson, Kevin O’Neill, Lys Alcayna-Stevens, Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Namita Daria, Lauren Coyle Rosen, Marina Andrea Welker, Graham Denyer Willis, and Liz Cooper. The editorial team at Medical Anthropology, Lenore Manderson, and Victoria Team, provided critical insights that have pushed this article forward. Thank you to them, and as well to the four anonymous reviewers who committed their time and energies so thoughtfully to my work. A special thank you, of course, belongs to Sandra Teresa Hyde, my friend, collaborator, and mentor, who shepherded this piece to completion.

Notes

1.  Batan is not a pseudonym. Given the dramatic events that preempted the policing strategy of pacification in this community, it is impossible to disguise it. The names of people in this article, however, have been changed.

2.  Here, my work in Brazil is based on understanding the insidious practices of racial discrimination and the forms of terror that accompany it. This happens both via the institutions of the state charged with maintaining the racial status quo, and through techniques of governmentality. As elsewhere, in Brazil legally circumscribed patterns of racial and spatial domination have shifted over time, being made more assumed and “color blind” by those with power, subsuming racial violence within techniques of governance. This is often idealized in the Brazilian idea of “racial democracy,” a dominant discourse of national identity that allows for power to deny its racial buttresses and excoriations (Cardoso 2017; Chalhoub 1988; Da Costa 2014; Guimarães 2003; Oliveira 2007; Oliveira and Carla 2018; Vargas 2006). As the Brazilian anthropologist Jaime Alves puts it, life in Brazil is imbued with an “ordinary anti-Black terror” (2018), where blackness is read as a sickness of individual and space, named disorder, that authorizes the policing of a Black ‘blight.’ In this way, as Jennifer Roth-Gordon argues, the treatment of men and women who live in Rio’s favelas is an extension of the logics of slavery, “favela residents are not understood to be the same people from o asfalto (the asphalt, or the developed part of the city), which makes their suffering unfortunate but more tolerable” (Roth-Gordon 2017: 24).

3.  In 2018, the pacification force was removed from Batan. In the end, ‘pacification’ certainly was – as these women were explaining in various modes – a fleeting and undependable process.

4.  Others have told me still even more versions of that day, saying that there was a caveirão, but that the caveirão was just for show. A woman in her seventies, said “the caveirão was there just for fun: they were only ‘capturing territory’ from their own police friends” – implying that on-duty police were simply assisting off-duty police (the militia). She didn’t deny the caveirão, she just gave it yet another possible meaning. My neighbors, however, told yet another version: they said that a caveirão – labelled with the knife-through-a-skull insignia of BOPE – did drive into Batan, but that the men driving it and hanging off it of it were the militia members that BOPE was meant to be “rescuing” them from. These various narrations of what exactly happened, and whether that matters, and the so-called veracity of stories of violence, have been taken up in detail by others, including Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) and Alessandro Portelli (1991). What is important to note from these works is how silences, (un)certain narratives, and (un)certain details are often organized by trauma, and that we should direct our attention to how “official” accounts get made and entrenched alongside felt and lived experiences that differ.

5.  See Machado (2005) for further discussion of the gendered aspects of Pentecostalism.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; International Development Research Centre.

Notes on contributors

Laurie Denyer Willis

Laurie Denyer Willis is a post-doctoral fellow in medical anthropology at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Address for correspondence: Laurie Denyer Willis, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, 7 West Road, Cambridge, United Kingdom. E-Mail: [email protected]