Living (Il)legalities in Brazil by Sara Brandellero Derek Pardue Georg Wink

Author:Sara Brandellero, Derek Pardue, Georg Wink [Sara Brandellero, Derek Pardue, Georg Wink]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032236407
Google: YvS0zgEACAAJ
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Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Illegalities

The story Brazilians tell themselves and outsiders about their permissiveness is considerably more complex than “flexibility.” The very question of the relationship between legality and illegality in Brazil is more accurately specified as a question of the situational appropriateness of the application of a law, policy, or procedure. Precisely where the line gets drawn has political and even material consequences. Another way of saying this is that the Brazilian state and its affiliates have detailed laws on the books. Saying what the law is is rarely the problem; enforcing it is another matter. These laws are sometimes culled from European and North American models, and are sometimes the result of creative self-generative projects (along these lines, see the relatively new set of laws governing the Internet; Omari 2018). But in Brazil, the sorts of laws that might divide the legal from the illegal are almost categorically applied unevenly by those called upon to do so. This is enacted at both explicit and implicit levels: the college-educated go to different prisons, and are even entitled to private cells. But the truth is that the importance of the fluidity of the illegal manifests mostly in quotidian circumstances. This is elicited in part by DaMatta’s notion of the authoritarian micro-ritual “do you know who you’re talking to?” – sabe com quêm está falando? (DaMatta 1979, 138). This is a statement that is uttered when an authority figure (a clerk at a bank, a traffic cop, a door-man) has attempted to enforce a rule. When this statement comes into play, the applicability of a particular law is being negotiated in the context of the encounter according to aspects of the personal relationships of the participants.7 Along similar lines, a common expression: “for my friends – anything. For my enemies, the law!” In this context, the very applicability of the law becomes not something that applies in all places and all times, but rather, a kind of mobile standard of recruitment to broader projects – either the reinforcement of certain kinds of kinship (fictive or otherwise – “I know your aunt!” or “we are from the same town”) or the reinforcement of affiliations to institutional or state power (“I had dinner with your boss last night,” or “I’m very close with a federal judge”).

DaMatta’s discussion gets us only part of the way there; it has been problematized by some scholars for its simplistic structuralism (see Wink, this volume). Another problem with the model is that it focuses largely on discursive contexts in which the application of power impacts a parking ticket or a bank clerk’s attentiveness; whereas the application of power is often lethal in Brazil. In the context of this important frame, Daniel Linger’s exploration of what he calls “wild power” offers further perspective on the question of the importance of the relationship between legality and illegality in Brazil. Linger investigates the decidedly capricious and always potentially murderous application of state power. The combination of unevenness with mortality is crucial. You may, or may not, be in violation of the law, and you may, or may not die for it.

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