XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The Favela’s Magic Circle: Porous Geographies of the Unreal and Real

• In Event: Kinesthetic Knowledges: Corporeal Conjurings of Brazil Otherwise

Abstract

Social scientific theories of play have tended to reify and bracket off the ludic as a discrete realm of sociality. Famously, Huizinga’s concept of the magic circle described a threshold across which the normal rules of the social world are suspended and replaced by the artifice of a game world. This paper revisits the relation between play and the real through an ethnographic exploration of a raucous role-playing game developed by a collective of Afro-Brazilian youths living in a Rio de Janeiro favela. In a miniature city they built with brightly colored terra-cotta bricks and other found materials on the edge of their self-built informal settlement, and maintained over the past 25 years with great care, the group drew on everyday practices of noticing to shape the rules of engagement for the inch-tall figurines they control in a complex game that hews close to urban reality. Contrary to theories of the ludic that insist on the ritual bracketing off of play as a distinct mode of engagement, the porosity between real world and this play world remained ever-present. Nevertheless, this form of play was neither a kind of homespun therapy nor a release from one’s own circumstances. Rather it became a space of improvised collective imagination in tension with the constraints and possibilities of the real, posing the miniature as if life-size, stepping into the breach between what-ifs and what is. The paper asks what counts as ‘urban reality’ from within an irreverent yet serious game played at the geographical and social edges of Rio de Janeiro.

Author

• Alessandro Angelini, Johns Hopkins University