What do you think?
Rate this book
Violence at the Urban Margins
In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety--from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America--are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at the margins of urban societies.
The inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs to, is manufactured and manipulated by, others--others who are prone to view violence at the urban margins as evidence of a cultural, or racial, defect, rather than question violence's relationship to economic and political marginalization. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied.
This edited volume seeks to counteract this pernicious tendency by putting under the ethnographic microscope--and making public--the way in which violence is lived and acted upon in the urban peripheries. It features cutting-edge ethnographic research on the role of violence in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America, and sheds light on the suffering that violence produces and perpetuates, as well as the individual and collective responses that violence generates, among those living at the urban margins of the Americas.
The inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs to, is manufactured and manipulated by, others--others who are prone to view violence at the urban margins as evidence of a cultural, or racial, defect, rather than question violence's relationship to economic and political marginalization. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied.
This edited volume seeks to counteract this pernicious tendency by putting under the ethnographic microscope--and making public--the way in which violence is lived and acted upon in the urban peripheries. It features cutting-edge ethnographic research on the role of violence in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America, and sheds light on the suffering that violence produces and perpetuates, as well as the individual and collective responses that violence generates, among those living at the urban margins of the Americas.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2013
2 people are currently reading
70 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 11, 2015
Este es un libro honesto. Como uno de sus modelos (In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio), Auyero y Berti reflexionan sobre qué hacer cuando encuentran tanta violencia y sufrimiento; concluyen que publicar un libro es parte de la respuesta.
Se trata de una descripción minuciosa y sin concesiones de la violencia urbana en pleno kirchnerismo. Los que hablan de la década ganada, que la miren por TV. Auyero mantiene su fineza teórica (por ejemplo al destacar que nunca nadie se acostumbra a la violencia, es siempre algo llamativo aunque se vuelva cotidiano). Aún así, se nota que está apuntado a un público más amplio, lo cual no está mal, pero extrañé las largas digresiones de Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. La noción de cadena de violencia y un par más que aparecen son contribuciones teóricas pequeñas, pero precisas y fundamentadas.
Se trata de una descripción minuciosa y sin concesiones de la violencia urbana en pleno kirchnerismo. Los que hablan de la década ganada, que la miren por TV. Auyero mantiene su fineza teórica (por ejemplo al destacar que nunca nadie se acostumbra a la violencia, es siempre algo llamativo aunque se vuelva cotidiano). Aún así, se nota que está apuntado a un público más amplio, lo cual no está mal, pero extrañé las largas digresiones de Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. La noción de cadena de violencia y un par más que aparecen son contribuciones teóricas pequeñas, pero precisas y fundamentadas.
May 12, 2020
Movilizante. Muy necesario que se escriba sobre esto. Seguiré leyendo el segundo libro.
October 26, 2025
I really enjoyed this edited book about violence in the Americas. Each chapter is about a different location and they were all interesting and good reads.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews