Beach crime in popular culture: Confining the carnivalesque in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

Purpose – Focusing on popular culture as unstructured, emergent talk, rather than encapsulated genre or text, this chapter dramatizes a slice of life riven by constant fear of violent assault. Approach – I access accusatory discourse as the victim of the robbery that precipitates it. The chapter creates an impromptu alternative arena for reflexive ethnographic analysis of crime. Findings – Most Brazilians live in South Atlantic coastal cities where beaches are loci of social and symbolic action carried out in a carnivalesque mode. The beach symbolizes the myth of national identity, or brasilidade. Culturally specific, yet transnational, beaches are sexually pleasurable spaces of race and class mixing. Armed robbery is the painful shadow-twin of celebration, as much a part of popular culture as bikinis, drink, and dance, but so, too, are the informal community mechanisms attempting to exclude less desirable carnival propensities from spaces marked safe and respectable. A whirlpool of rumor draws on an array of deviant images and acts. Originality/value – Crime and social control are part of popular culture not merely as engines of re-presentation but as elemental aspects of practical living.