LACLxS Work-In-Progress Seminar | Rio de Janeiro: A Player's Manual

Description

Alessandro Angelini, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, presents a draft chapter from his forthcoming book Model Favela: Miniature Life in Rio de Janeiro, hosted by the Program in Latin America, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. The book explores the social ordering of creativity to ask what it means to play in a world of deep social inequality and material excesses. Through his engagement with a cohort of Afro-Brazilian working-class male youths in their everyday lives as well as in a miniature game-world they have built and maintained since 1997, Angelini describes a rollicking role-playing game that represents a dynamic but uneven cityscape in a hand-built model of Rio, constructed with painted bricks and found scraps.

Taking play as integral to its form of description, Angelini experiments with genre by modeling the first chapter of Model Favela after board game instructions, with sections on setup, characters, and rules of play. The chapter contends that to study play ethnographically is to open the real world to its inherent fictionality. This approach draws attention to a key historical moment of the early 21st century when cartographic, legal, and cultural logics began to frame Rio's favelas wholesale as an external reality. Angelini shows that the continual "rediscovery" of the favela as a gritty uncharted territory—pervasive in media, touristic, official state, and social scientific tropes—upholds their residents' status as Brazil's most visible invisibles.