The Sensation of Security

The Sensation of Security explores how private security guards are a permanent, conspicuous fixture of everyday life in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with security laborers, managers, company owners, and elite global consultants, Erika Robb Larkins examines the provision of security in Rio from the perspective of security personnel, providing an analysis of the racialized logics that underpin the ongoing work of securing the city. Larkins shows how guards communicate a sensação de segurança (a sensation of security) to clients and customers who have the capital to pay for it. Cultivated through performances by security laborers, the sensation of security is a set of culturally shaped racialized and gendered impressions related to safety, order, well-being, and cleanliness. While the sensação de segurança indexes an outward-facing task of allaying fears of crime and maintaining order in elite spaces, it also refers to the emotional labor and embodied worlds that security workers navigate.

Erika Robb Larkins is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Behner Stiefel Chair of Brazilian Studies, and Director of the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University.

In this engaging and provocative book, Erika Larkins expertly illustrates how private security works in conjunction with violent policing to uphold Brazil's social order of racial and socioeconomic inequality. Readers will be convinced that security is central to how urban Brazilians experience, shape, and justify their world.

Rosana Pinheiro Machado, University College Dublin, author of Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South :

Grounded in rigorous, innovative, and impressive ethnographic fieldwork, The Sensation of Security sheds new light on the field of private security studies, privatization of life, race, neoliberalism, and policing. It gives readers unique access to a world that is otherwise inaccessible.