Laws of Chance

Laws of Chance traces the trajectory of the Brazilian jogo do bicho (the animal game) from its 1892 birth in Rio de Janeiro’s zoo to its development in the city’s underworld and public life during the early twentieth century. Originally a raffle, the animal game “escaped from the zoo” to spread throughout the nation’s capital, thriving in the spaces between the city’s formal and informal economic and political systems (p. 29). Amy Chazkel innovatively conceptualizes the jogo do bicho as a practice of unlicensed petty commerce in the dynamic urban vending landscape of postabolition Rio. The illegality of the animal game, the author argues, developed out of a wider process of criminalization of popular practices rather than a mere antivice campaign to curtail popular gambling. A legal and social history, Laws of Chance ingeniously illustrates how the “enclosure of the commons,” or the privatization of the shared spaces that the working poor used to strategize survival, imposed a new public order in which “multitudes of urban Brazilians thus entered the wrong side of the law while moving barely an inch” (p. 28).The jogo do bicho did not grow parallel to the law or in its complete shadow but in an intimate yet extralegal relationship with state agents such as the police. Crucial to the game’s role in the making of urban public life was participants’ acceptance of the judicial system and capitalist exchange. Shedding new light on the dynamics of modern state-society relations, the early history of the jogo do bicho engages contemporary debates about the links between informal and formal economies, extralegal normativity, the uneven process of legal marginalization, and the claiming of citizenship to reoccupy the commons. The book’s chapters reflect the many aspects of the game in Rio’s urban society, from its place in street commerce to urban folklore and to its influence on the judicial system and profitable enterprises. In particular, chapter 4 on monetization and Rio’s growth into a financial capital puts forth an accomplished and original discussion that connects the cultures of petty gambling and high finance in an era shaped by financial speculation. The author discusses how widespread monetization in Rio enabled the anonymity that was necessary for the illegal expansion of the game. People’s fluid monetary literacy, despite extensive print illiteracy, helped establish the game throughout the city.The literacy skills of working-class participants of the game encompassed another important dimension: the judicial system. Using legal evidence from detention and court records that mostly dealt with the arrests of bicheiros (sellers of the animal game), the author introduces to the historiography of the First Republic the notion that civic learning occurred as criminal law and persecution of the game “educated a generation of Rio’s petty entrepreneurs, police, judges, and citizen-bystanders in the promise and obligations that citizenship really entailed” (p. 210; original emphasis). The animal game’s persistence on these grounds may remind the reader of José Murilo de Carvalho’s paradigmatic question: bestializados ou bilontras (savages or rogues)? Participation in the animal game was not symptomatic of a “bestialized” people (povo) but rather another manifestation of the extensive associative and civic life that Carvalho identifies in turn-of-the-century Rio. Experiences of popular citizenship revealed skepticism rather than ignorance of or apathy toward formal politics.The game maintained a reputation of honesty and reliability at a time when non-elites viewed the state with suspicion. However, as the author demonstrates, the animal game’s persistence was not the result of plain resistance that “presumed the jogo do bicho’s criminality as a given” (p. 264). The high rates of court acquittals, which freed most bicheiros due to inadequate evidence, reveal the mutual involvement of legal and extralegal systems in the construction of spaces of legitimacy that “not only reasserted expectations of public behavior, but also taught a lesson in the uses of the public realm” (p. 240). The book’s concluding remarks on the game as a mechanism of consent (versus resistance) conceptualizes the informal sector in an important way as “people obeyed individual laws under compulsion and duress. But they actively acceded to the rule of law as an overarching principle” (p. 265).Laws of Chance is well-written and free of jargon, effectively weaving description and analysis with great historical imagination and theoretical relevance. The book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on urban studies, modern Latin American state-society relations, postabolition citizenship, and the development of informal economies. Its importance to all these fields reflects how the book, by historicizing the jogo do bicho and the ambiguous, informal world it inhabited, advances important disciplinary and interdisciplinary arguments about extralegality, citizenship, and urban development

Economics · Lottery · Political science · Public life · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

• “Ese Derrame Extraordinario”

  Open Access•Diego Galeano•Diálogo andino•2019

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