In Laughter Out of Place, Donna Goldstein provides a powerful ethnography of urban poverty in Brazil, contextualizing the hardships in the lives of a domestic worker named Gloria and her 14 dependents within the wider social class organization of Rio de Janeiro. Goldstein investigates the consequences of class segregation by unpacking the economic abuse of domestic workers, gang violence and drug warfare, child labor and neglect, and out-of-place coping strategies such as laughter in the face of misery and sensuality in the face of repression. A critical strength of her work is her inclusion of an edifying review of the history in which inter-class relationships have developed in Brazil and an analysis of how Brazil has been depicted in earlier scholarship.

Goldstein addresses many of the criticisms of ethnographies of poverty, recognizing the need to protect her informants from blame for the harsh circumstances of their lives by consistently emphasizing the historical and social circumstances of their actions. She gives the accounts of informants only after she has carefully constructed the wider picture of class, race, gender, sexuality, and violence in Brazil. Although the reader is given a true sense of the horror of the reality of her informants’ lives, this view is not voyeuristic. The ethnographic doorway opens only after one has been prepared to see the life of Gloria, her children, and her community situated within a history of local, national, and international inequalities.

One way that Goldstein succeeds in revealing the interactions between Brazil’s social classes is by illustrating how the high quality of middle-class life is dependent on undervaluing the domestic labor of poor women such as Gloria. Grossly underpaid female domestic workers free those in the middle class from chores that would otherwise interfere with their full social lives. Goldstein argues that to avoid doing their own laundry, cooking their own food, or cleaning their own homes, middle-class citizens uphold the status quo of a national minimum wage that amounts to less than US$100 a month. Female domestic workers who earn the minimum wage or less are often the sole providers for their children, and keeping them at the edge of survival ensures that the system will continue into the next generation. While the female heads of household are out struggling during very long and tiring days to bring home the minimum requirements for survival, their children are left to fend for themselves. Female children are often given the responsibility of caring for their younger siblings. Daughters of single, female domestic workers often carry on the patterns of undercompensated wage labor and high birth rates in their early teens.

Whereas adolescent females begin their journeys into cultural and biological motherhood at a young age, young males are often attracted to gangs. In the face of limited work opportunities, selling illegal drugs and gaining brotherhood in the gangs that control such business in the shantytown are attractive to young men. Regrettably, membership in these gangs can be fatal to both gang members and other community members caught in the crossfire when competition between gangs and revenge killings cause outbreaks of violence. This violence can eliminate productive adults in the community, further adding to the burden of those that survive. Considering the corruption and ineffectiveness of public law enforcement officers, a peaceful and conscientious local gang leader can actually ensure the safety of a community. By contrast, having a gang leader who offends other gangs or who does not regulate where drug sales take place can be disastrous.

Although laughter may not be as central a theme to the overall work as implied by the book’s title, Goldstein demonstrates how humor in the face of unfathomable horrors can serve as a means of empowering her informants. Laughter is a communicative release. It takes the edge off the misery of everyday life for the poor. Laughter in the face of death or rape shows how displays of emotion are not based solely on instincts and hormones but also on complex interactions between environment and behavior in which race, class, and gender are revealed by class-appropriate variations in affect. Within this milieu, laughing at a friend’s privation does not express lack of compassion but is a method of coping with the persistent brutality of Brazil’s class system. Unlike the popular Brazilian soap operas that dramatize middle-class life, tragedy for shantytown residents is debauched because suffering adversity with solemnity is inane.