Making jokes about a rape committed at gunpoint or a poor child's horrific death would be met with outrage in most cultures, but a University of Colorado at Boulder anthropologist says what appears to be tasteless humor in the slums of Rio de Janiero, Brazil, is really just a means of coping with everyday life.
Associate Professor Donna Goldstein lived in a Brazilian shantytown several times in the early 1990s while collecting the often shocking observations shared in her new book, "Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown." Written for general audiences as well as academics, the book includes photos taken by the author during her stays and subsequent visits in 1995 and 1998.
Goldstein originally went to Brazil to study the AIDS epidemic among women in the shantytowns. "I wound up documenting their lives and their struggles in a much broader way," she said. "That brought me to a more profound understanding of why the AIDS epidemic was not going to be the first thing on their agenda, even while many well-intentioned outsiders, including myself, were focused on addressing that particular problem."
Her research instead became an analysis of the social landscape in the shantytowns, where drug trade gangs have flourished for decades. "Moreover, my book attempts to capture a perspective that is often missing from both Brazilian and North American depictions of these communities - the perspective of the women," Goldstein said.
The book portrays Rio as both a tropical paradise and a tropical hell on earth, especially for poor women. On a daily basis, women are left to cope with unbearable suffering, sickness, chaos, injustice, violence and social abandonment - common characteristics of communities on the edge of the developing world, according to Goldstein.
"The book brings the North American reader into this world and allows them a deep and thorough glimpse - and an analytically powerful perspective - on that world, so that the reader can grasp the complex history and daily practices that perpetuate the current system," she said.
The women of the shantytowns create stories filled with bitter humor and share them as a means to ease constant humiliation, anger and despair, according to Goldstein. "These bitter stories carry the reader through the book and enable us to understand and empathize with these tragicomic protagonists," she said.
In her book, Goldstein argues humor is key to understanding the lives of the Rio shantytown women. Black humor is found across the social classes in Brazil. But in Rio's segregated social structure, the humor of the women living in the shantytowns helps define their identity as well as their verbal resistance to the wealthy elite for whom they work, according to Goldstein.
"While humor is often the last thing anthropologists understand about another culture, it is also a key to knowing something beyond the surface-level material. When an anthropology graduate student tells me they were in a place long enough to understand what people were laughing about, I start to believe that they might have a handle on what is going on in that place," she said.
"Laughter Out of Place" was published in November by the University of California Press as part of its prestigious Public Anthropology Series. The series is an effort to promote works that can spark discussion and action on contemporary social issues. Goldstein's book also is a featured highlight of her spring semester 2004 class at CU-Boulder, "Latin American Politics and Culture Through Film and Text."
For more information or to order Goldstein's book, visit or call (800) 777-4726.