The Sensation of Security explores how private security guards are a permanent, conspicuous fixture of everyday life in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with security laborers, managers, company owners, and elite global consultants, Erika Robb Larkins examines the provision of security in Rio from the perspective of security personnel, providing an analysis of the racialized logics that underpin the ongoing work of securing the city. Larkins shows how guards communicate a sensação de segurança (a sensation of security) to clients and customers who have the capital to pay for it. Cultivated through performances by security laborers, the sensation of security is a set of culturally shaped racialized and gendered impressions related to safety, order, well-being, and cleanliness. While the sensação de segurança indexes an outward-facing task of allaying fears of crime and maintaining order in elite spaces, it also refers to the emotional labor and embodied worlds that security workers navigate.
Erika Robb Larkins is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Behner Stiefel Chair of Brazilian Studies, and Director of the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University.
Introduction: Private Guards and Social OrderInterlude 1: The 12 por 361. The Carreira das ArmasInterlude 2: The Anger of Other Men2. Hospitality SecurityInterlude 3: Small Thefts3. Securing Affective Landscapes of Leisure and ConsumptionInterlude 4: Routine Suffering4. Emotional Labor in the Security Command CenterInterlude 5: Securing LifeEpilogue: Selling the Sensation of SecurityInterlude 6: The Post of the Future
