This article discusses a Brazilian scenario known as briga. The prototypical briga is a fatal bar or street fight, an escalating confrontation between two men culminating in murder. I shall argue that like Geertz's Balinese cockfight (1973a), briga exposes the hostility concealed beneath the smooth veneer of everyday sociability. But in briga disruptive sentiments burst through the veneer, dramatizing the troubling message that face-to-face encounters are unstable, emotional control is unreliable, and life itself is precarious. In short, briga proclaims that integrity at every level-social, moral, and physical-is at risk from forces barely submerged beneath the mundane surface of day-to-day existence. The spectacle of briga, at once riveting and repugnant, focuses Brazilians' attention repeatedly on a locus of sociocultural failure: a place where chaos issues from a crack in the world they inhabit. What Brazilians call a briga is, observed through a camera's lens, an exchange of aggressions that sometimes escalates to mayhem or murder. But the Brazilian's view is richer; he or she experiences the interaction through the prism of a complex cultural model charged with meaning and emotion. That is, mediating between event and experience is a model of and for briga (cf. Geertz 1973b): a model that is built on, and builds, behavior and motivations that tend simultaneously to shape and to conform with its predictions. This essay focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on briga as experience-as filtered through the cultural prism. Its perspective is that of the observer rather than the participant. The observer's stance is familiar to all those, both men and women, with whom I talked, whereas not everyone provokes, or tends to get enmeshed in, brigas. Nevertheless, there seems to be an element of vicarious participation in simply watching a briga: the antagonists' dilemmas and actions become, in the imagination, one's own. My discussion relies on fieldwork I conducted in the northeastern Brazilian city of Sao Luis during my residence there, from March 1984 to March 1986.1 I collected accounts of brigas and explanations of the concepts upon which those accounts rested. Interviews with the most articulate and patient persons, such as Tito (whom I quote in this essay), totaled many hours: I tried to elicit from them as complete a cognitive scheme as possible. I also consulted archival materials,