Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Bahia, Brazil by Sarah J. Hautzinger (original) (raw)

2008, American Ethnologist

This is an insightful and timely book both methodologically and theoretically. It provides breadth and depth through the combination of deep ethnography and broad ethnological contextualization. This work is based on nearly 20 years of research in this community, including extensive periods when Sarah Hautzinger was immersed in a low-income neighborhood and the daily workings of a police station specializing in domestic abuse cases. This author takes every possible care to provide deep, multifaceted, and informed analyses. She is never satisfied with the easy answer and plumbs the data and her experience to question assumptions and shed light on the diverse and controversial cultural changes associated with domestic abuse, women's rights movements, and the penal system in the new Brazilian democracy. The book's title refers to Ruth Landes's 1947 monograph, The City of Women. Landes, a student of Franz Boas, conducted fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia in 1938 and 1939. Landes came to the conclusion that the women of Salvador, Bahia, enjoyed public power in religious affairs that contrasted with assumptions regarding the predominance of male dominance in Latin America. Hautzinger explains that Landes's study was not well-received at the time and was critiqued as a "tourist account" because it was ahead of its time. Landes and Hautzinger take historic approaches, situating Afro-Brazilian culture in relation to colonialism, slavery, and urbanization, and emphasize cultural plurality and fluidity. While Hautzinger somewhat agrees

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