Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown

by Donna M. Goldstein
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003
378 pp. Trade, 60.00; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-520-23596-7; ISBN: 0-520-23597-5.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA

mosher@svsu.edu

During cold months, many artists in the northern United States or northern Europe think how nice it would be to run away to Brazil. There, in the land whose motto is "Sexo e Bom" (Sex is Good), we could live on rum, fresh shellfish, and a nonstop carnival ethic. In her powerful anthropological study Laughter Out of Place, Donna M. Goldstein of the University of Colorado reveals how far away that idyllic myth is for Brazil’s urban poor.

In detailing the life of Gloria, a domestic worker living in one of Rio’s favelas (shantytowns), Goldstein studies the world of Gloria’s many children, boyfriends, friends and neighbors, employers, local gangsters, police and civic authorities. The author’s fieldwork uncovers attitudes about gender relations, class, and racial prejudices at various levels of Brazilian society. The scope of the book is thorough and impressive.

In trying to preserve Gloria’s anonymity, the author has blackened the faces in photographs of her world. This gives a strange effect, though illustrative details of clothing, furnishings, and skin colors remain. The book’s maps of Rio de Janeiro only show an approximate area where Gloria’s neighborhood might be located——a painfully far commute from the elegant Zona Sul’s apartments where she labors.

Goldstein frames Gloria’s life in laughter, the often bitter humor with which the urban poor deal in daily life with issues of poverty, murder and violence, sexual abuse, pregnancy, and the nebulous and untouchable status of "police-gangsters" who prey on them. The author leads us to an understanding of these jokes’ contexts, helps us "get" them and helps us understand the joke-tellers’ resiliency, but joins us in finding their situations less funny than sad.