Stolen Cars. Группа авторов

Stolen Cars - Группа авторов


Скачать книгу
2004]). In practical terms there is a relevant empirical distinction between people, territories, and goods considered to be legal or illegal (Misse 2005). This distinction is often a division between life and death: police lethality targeting “thieves” represented as much as 25 percent of the homicide rate in São Paulo state, and as much as 40 percent in Rio de Janeiro state in 2019.7

      Inequalities

      Our main reference when it comes to thinking about inequalities is Charles Tilly (1998). He clearly addresses the question of durable inequalities in terms of hoarding resources and opportunities, within long-lasting social processes that produce pairs of categorical boundaries informing ordinary action:

      Charles Tilly’s socio-historical studies suggest an analytical connection between illegal accumulation (looting, piracy, etc.), the use of violence (rather warlike), and the construction of plural political orders (the different types of state). Attempts by organized actors to monopolize violence are understood as a condition of possibility for the routinization of political and administrative activities, as well as for the normalization of the monetary economy and its form of life par excellence, urban life (Simmel 2004). More than that, Charles Tilly’s approach also allows us to move towards explanations, linked to historical processes and causal mechanisms. The sometimes excessive modeling that marks some of the author’s works does not prevent us from verifying the analytical potential that can result from his reflections on what we call here normative regimes, with a particular emphasis on the forms of governance of daily life.

      We were able to approach ethnographically the ordinary continuum of legal…illegal scrapyards through which pass the untracked parts of legal and stolen cars; but at the same time, we could talk to a lawyer who sees clearly the categorical distinction between legal and illegal auto-parts shops and can tell us how a police officer should differentiate between them. The same theoretical approach allows us to understand why São Paulo can pragmatically be both the city of walls (Caldeira 2000) and the city of flows (Rui 2014; Telles 2010a). Its internal frontiers allow both an ordinary continuum and categorical bipolar inequality, resulting in structural tension that affects every-day “cityness” (Feltran 2011) and the “accumulation of violence” (Misse 2018).

      Tilly’s influence on addressing long-lasting inequalities draws our attention to causal mechanisms: “durable inequality among categories arises because people who control access to value-producing resources solve pressing organizational problems by means of categorical distinctions” (Tilly 1998). In Stolen Cars, we consider criminalization as one of the main official mechanisms for producing a categorical difference or the aforementioned fracture within urban communities. Meanwhile, the world of crime and the PCC violently confront “the system” through robbery, plunder, and looting with divine and/or pragmatic internal justifications. The conflict between these internally coherent regimes of norms and practices, these different sets of assumed normativities, is the main source of urban violence in São Paulo. Its outcome is the categorical and tense internal boundaries of the city (Feltran 2011).

      Epistemic violent confrontations between State and criminal regimes, as well as multidimensional inequalities, can be understood by reference to this fracture. Following in Tilly’s footsteps, Arretche (2015) argues that economic standards are only one dimension for approaching inequalities and unequal reproduction. Unequal access to education, health services, social security, and urban infrastructure contributes to the shaping of unequal urban regimes and landscapes. Our team of ethnographers searched for instances of the reproduction of cross-generational urban inequalities and stressed the role of violent urban conflict in its reproduction. We decided to follow the journeys of stolen cars, and they have shown us that the young black person who steals a Toyota Hilux earns eight times less than the auctioneer who sells the same stolen car the following week. This young black person steals two or three cars a week, whereas the auctioneer sells up to 400 in the same period. The former has the standard profile of the São Paulo demographic most likely to be incarcerated or murdered; the latter has the standard profile of the successful businessman who decides to become a Senator and could pay for this. We will get in touch with them all in flesh and blood in this book.


Скачать книгу