Paper Short Abstract:

I explore the ethnographic challenges of following favela activists’ continuous making of the favela as we move together through Rio de Janeiro’s interstices to counter the routine enactment of these territories as spaces of death.

Paper Abstract:

A true obsession in Brazilian scholarship, Rio de Janeiro’s favelas have been historically imagined as locations somehow apart even when uncomfortably close, places anthropologists must visit and live in if they want to depict this persistently unknown, despite overly researched, dangerous, yet seductive paradigm for outer urban spaces. Departing from an ethnography built alongside favela activist networks, a social movement weaved between different favelas and the asfalto, or asphalt (i.e., non-favela neighbourhoods), I describe how the favela cannot only be researched on the move but as a result of this movement, which, nonetheless, reacts against the socio-territorial confinement favela residents endure as privileged targets of a war on drugs—one which treats them, if not criminals, at the very least complicit with them. This paper, thus, explores the intricacies of an ethnography of the favela emerging from the city’s interstices as it moves along the territorialities of the favela activists struggle. It focuses on how bodies, T-shirts, banners, pamphlets, and slogans, the living and the dead reassemble in various interrelated but essentially unequal locations, linking favelas and the city centre to unbury and counter the routine enactment of the favelas as spaces of death and illegible suffering.