trafficker does not; he is central to these markets, even if he lives in a favela in São Paulo, Fortaleza, or Bogotá. Machado da Silva has argued since the 1960s that urban violence is a public representation that, in the public Brazilian debate, involves very different empirical processes: drug trafficking, domestic violence, the implementation of security policies, guns, poverty, blackness, masculinity, etc. He has stated that despite its intuitive familiarity, we should avoid taking the “urban violence” concept for granted. On the contrary, we should empirically disentangle the black box of the concrete routines of urban life to unmask urban violence, or contemporary capitalism, not as a concept but as an object to be understood (Machado Da Silva 2008, 2016). In this book, we develop his clues.
Methods: About Journeys, Tacking, and Our Collaborative Research Team
Studying the social life of objects is a methodological tradition well established in the Social Sciences (Appadurai 1986; Freire-Medeiros and Menezes 2016; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Knowles 2014; Kopytoff 2014; Latour 2005; Miller 2001; Mintz 2003). But these methods are used outside academia as well: “follow the money,” for example, is one of the most well-established methods in police investigations studying the operation of complex “organized crime” networks.11 Recently, seminal works such as those by Knowles (2014) and Tsing (2015) have taken this tradition to a transnational scale and have innovated theoretically by focusing not only on trajectories or journeys as fundamental connectors for the understanding of a globalized social world but also on the theoretical effects of such a methodological operation. Beyond the idea of flows, assemblages, and revealed lines of force, these authors propose a theory embedded in concrete empirical situations. Such a theory would perforce be very plural.
In the debate on mobility (Freire-Medeiros, Telles, and Allis 2018; Martins Jr. 2015; Urry 2002, 2004, 2010), the contribution of Amit and Knowles (2017) proposes the notion of “tacking” as a framework to understand the importance of the daily improvisation of actors, be they dominant or subordinate, in the construction of their own possibilities for acting in society. This improvisation includes inventiveness, timing, and the unexpected, and describes the recurrent, though little discussed, way in which contemporary subjects navigate their daily lives.12 Opportunities for survival and business, income generation, mobility, and production of life forms would, to a large extent, also result from situational improvisation in the face of very different barriers and everyday problems, because the world has been changing rapidly.
The notion of tacking is even more useful when it comes to studying crime rings, as we do in this book. Unlike other markets, in which advertising and marketing are essential, in the illegal world, to keep operating in secrecy is “the soul of the business.” As repression is always possible, it is also necessary to diversify routes, hide warehouses, modify paths, and change passwords (but also cell phone chips and devices, addresses and clothes, hair and looks, and sometimes one’s very physiognomy). Circumstances change even faster in illegal markets and any action may be under surveillance by the police, rivals, or enemies.
In the criminal sphere, there is no stability guaranteed by bureaucracy or reliable information available to operators. For this reason, horizontal organization is encouraged. Criminal factions, mafias, cartels, and gangs are a way to produce trustworthy and essential internal environments, functioning as institutions under the logic of honor. As Amit and Knowles (2017) propose, the skills of inventiveness, timing, and dealing with the unexpected are at the base of the operations of stimuli and obstacles to the contemporary global circulation of goods, services, and people.
As instability expands in the contemporary world – viz. the effects of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 – the circumstances and the definitions of situations are, almost always, contingent. The ability to improvise and adapt is one of the virtues most cherished by contemporary institutions and labor markets; it is no different in (il)legal markets. Methodologically, considering daily tacking as a means of structuring the actions of operators is more realistic than starting from any rationalist or structuralist theories. At the same time, the effects of these improvisations produce very rigid structures of inequality and a lot of specificity in the disposition of violence (Feltran 2012).
The actors improvise, but always very awkwardly; by improvising, they create solutions and innovations, breaking patterns but not freely. A long-term examination sees the reproduction of the same capitalist urban conflict that is well known from classical theories but being reproduced among an enormous plurality of ways of living and contemporary urban government orders. Actors move around and produce their unequal stories but within plausible, possible goals offered by each historical moment, each space, each situation, understood as a situated parameter of social structuring. Without a doubt, the trend of this construction points to an increasingly unequal and increasingly violent social world.
Likewise, there is a long tradition of sociological studies based on life stories (Arendt 1994; Bertaux 1981; Foucault and Barbin 1980; Lewis 1961) and trajectories (Bourdieu 1986; 2004; Cabanes 2004; Telles 2010). The situational encounter in ethnographic research has also yielded fruitful narratives in anthropology, especially those that relate the life stories of researchers and their interlocutors (Das 2007a; Feltran 2017). In this sense, autobiographies and biographies become generators of the analytical unit to be worked on in this book – the journeys of stolen cars and those of their owners and their thieves (Bourdieu 1986, 2004, 2011).
The methodological construction of our typical journeys follows the tradition of contemporary ethnographies of objects (Knowles 2014; Tsing 2015) but also that of narrative analysis (Alleyne 2014). In this method, the formal construction of the narratives is part of the methodological-analytical work. In this book, the journey of our five stolen cars is a composition, by aggregation, of situations and characters that we got to know in the field. The journeys must be typical, that is, we must reconstruct the chain of profile events of subject who were usually, frequently, found in the field. We did not, therefore, opt for exceptional scenes or liminal situations, even when we observed these in the field, but for repeated scenes and situations.
Analytically, we started out with the scene of the crime of the theft of a vehicle, we then looked at typical immediate destinations, then typical forms of attempted recovery in São Paulo (insurance, police, or actors from the criminal world), the standard forms of repression, the appearance of the stolen cars on the markets, and so on. Table I.2 summarizes the five car’s journeys we follow through the chapters.
TABLE I.2 The Cars’ Journeys
| Vehicle, owner, situation | Time and location of theft or armed robbery | Where does it go immediately | What is it used for | Where do the car or its parts go | Markets, purchases and sales | Other developments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toyota Hilux 2016 Family from Campos Verdes Insured Tracker | 7 a.m. – Robbery with kidnapping of family; ordered in São Paulo, stolen in Campos Verdes (MT, 1,700 km) | Vehicle crosses the border with Bolivia, 80 km away, by back roads. Spends months in San Matias, Bolivia, circulating without plates. | Exchanged for 6 kg of cocaine (base paste + hydrochloride). | Truck driver brings cocaine to Ermelino Matarazzo (border with Guarulhos, where the mules are). |
Part of base paste resold in the SP East Zone; hydrochloride exported through the Port of Santos
|
