CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp. 286-316, ISSN 0886-7356. DOI: 10.14506/ca37.2.09

PEDAGOGIES OF PROHIBITION: Time, Education, and the War on Drugs in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte

BENJAMIN FOGARTY-VALENZUELA

Leiden University

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1941-0547

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“Here’s the tragic part. André would be alive if he had been here practicing jujitsu with me.” Guerreiro, a police officer–cum–educator, was wearing a jujitsu kimono, army boots, and an oversized wristwatch. He represented the social arm of Rio de Janeiro’s policing strategy, the Social Police Pacification Unit (UPP Social). A complement to the hard side of the war on drugs—the military-grade street battles—this softer strategy consists in a battle over hearts and minds that takes place quietly in dojos, sports venues, and classrooms. Operating in the name of drug prevention education, Guerreiro’s after-school jujitsu program is one of dozens of its type—running on public and NGO funding—that intervenes in the daily lives of “at-risk” youth in Madeiros,¹ a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte (North Zone) among those most severely affected by police violence.

A thirteen-year-old resident of Madeiros, André had been shot during a police incursion at 4 p.m., after school hours. Guerreiro elaborated, stating that Brazil’s four-hour school day left André “abandoned” after school, and therefore likely envolvido (involved in drug trafficking), which in turn implied that he must have been firing on police when he was shot. While eyewitnesses said he was shot while playing soccer at a local field, Guerreiro rejected this claim, arguing that André’s particular geographic location was secondary to the fact that he was neither in school nor enrolled in an after-school program at that time of day. The problem was not André’s location, but the fact that he had too much free time. Guerreiro claimed that André was temporally delinquent: idling unsupervised when he should have attended an after-school program. And the stakes were life and death: “André would be alive if he had been here practicing jujitsu with me.”

Educators like Guerreiro work in tandem with school principals, NGO workers, police, and social workers. Private actors, for their part, also vie to provide services and activities that extend Brazil’s part-time day to full-time. This disparate array of actors finds itself united by the idea that free time is the enemy. Collectively, they aim to create a situation in which purportedly at risk youth like André, as they imagine, might choose packed schedules—full of arts and sports, vocational courses, work and test-prep—over packing cocaine or bongs. In an effort to find a legitimate use for the millions of Reais earmarked for at-risk youth prevention—for institutions such as UPP, the International Development Bank (BID), and the Secretariat of Youth, Sport, and Leisure—local prevention educators insist that the cause of deaths like André’s is “too much free time.” Talked about as if it were a gateway drug, free time both frames the problem in clear terms and prescribes an easy and intuitive solution: keep them busy. Recurrent throughout my fieldwork and interviews, this framing is best captured in the commonsense refrain, mente vazia, oficina do diabo (an empty mind is the Devil’s workshop). The solution, therefore, is not fewer bullets fired, but busier after-school schedules.

This article attempts to comprehend such solutions, paying particular attention to the way they marry pedagogy with efforts to enforce drug prohibition. I aim to make visible the effects these initiatives have on the life trajectories of Black and working-class youth in urban Brazil. To do so, I introduce the term pedagogies of prohibition, which names the intertwining of the war on drugs with educational interventions. Employing pedagogies of prohibition as an analytic renders visible the entanglement of youth, the drug war, and the moral formation of middle-class “good citizens” in the service of capitalist ends. Generative (as opposed to destructive), directive (as opposed to negative), and sensory and affective (as opposed to merely calculative or instrumental), pedagogies of prohibition set the foundation for the “making up” (Hacking 1987) of particular subjectivities.

Crucially, this article locates time as the primary coordinate for the governance of the everyday life of young people in urban Brazil. In this sense, it departs from a widespread consensus across much of the literature on youth governance and drug prohibition in urban Brazil and across the Americas that focuses, for good reason, on the spatial dimensions of governance. Literatures on the governance of youth have highlighted hard forms of state power—such as policing (Fassin 2013), segregation (Caldeira 2000), incarceration (Lessing 2017), and assassination (Feltran 2010)—with an emphasis on spatial control. Such an emphasis gives rise to a familiar urban story, one in which youth like André become constituted as subjects by virtue of the territory they occupy. Studies of the war on drugs in favelas likewise tend to focus on territorial dominance and spatial extension associated with policing and trafficking (Arias 2006). This emphasis in the literature on spectacular (Robb Larkins 2015) turf wars over territory between traffickers and police (Penglase 2014) has resulted in less attention paid to the soft side of prohibition—the side directed primarily toward youth, including many not involved in drug economies and not living in informal domains such as favelas. Pedagogies of prohibition, therefore, reveal how all such interventions are necessarily spatial and temporal, highlighting a neglected dimension of policing in pedagogy. Time complements prohibition’s spatial concerns by involving a subtle governance of habit, personhood, and aspiration. Forms of resistance to pedagogies of prohibition, in turn, take a range of forms, encompassing urban aesthetics and protest movements (Ralph 2008; Fogarty-Valenzuela 2020).

Temporality proves central to soft forms of prohibition because young people have long been understood through a temporal lens: as indicators of the present and forecasts of the future. In urban Brazil, youth are generally seen as having two possible future paths: the good path, or caminho do bem (the path to becoming a worker, consumer, and citizen), and the bad, or caminho do mal (ending up as a delinquent, drug dealer, or idler). As such, they are framed as “subjects of prevention” (K. L. O’Neill 2013). The spatial form of a path implies walking. So too, however, does it imply a deeply temporal preoccupation: the temporal form of a path, which orients those who walk it forward, toward the future. Those understood to be busy, punctual, and attuned to the rhythms of work (or to school, as preparation for work) are deemed on a path to the future—to upright consumer-citizenship (Lukose 2009). On the other hand, state, NGO, and media observers understand those out of joint with officially sanctioned time as temporally delinquent.

While scholarship on youth and neoliberalism has pointed out how entrepreneurial education (DeJaeghere 2017) prompts youth, largely left to their own devices, to self-govern (Besley 2009) amid moral panics over “idleness” and a “lost generation” (Sukarieh and Tannock 2014), it tends to place less emphasis on the centrality of temporal discipline in pedagogy—with educational spaces sequestering youth, and introducing them to highly regimented forms of busyness, punctuality, and rhythm. To better understand the interventions that target these young people, therefore, this article turns to the anthropology of youth and education, drugs, work, and time. The stakes become even clearer when considering the context.

THE AFTER-SCHOOL PROBLEM

Drug prevention programs like Guerreiro’s form part of the front line of the war on drugs in Brazil. But their emphasis on filling up empty time means that these soft security efforts occupy an especially important place in the everyday life of youth in Madeiros. Their origin can be traced to three historical factors.

First, Brazil’s official school day is only four hours long. Parents, NGO workers, policymakers, and educators have identified the period before and after Brazil’s four-hour school day as a key obstacle—what they call the problema do contratempo (the after-school problem). An eclectic mix of after-school services (funded publicly and privately, by foundations, development banks, and NGOs) are proffered and advertised in the name of securing youth by extending the school day.

Second is the ongoing war between police and tráfico (drug-trafficking organizations) for territorial control over favela neighborhoods, which has raged for a quarter century and unleashed a furor of violence, leading locals to nickname particularly war-torn areas after infamous failed military operations: Vietnam, Syria, Korea. Unpredictable gun violence has meant rising numbers of young, predominantly Black victims of balas perdidas (stray bullets) and police assassinations.² It has also made the imperative to keep youth safely off the streets more urgent.

The third factor finds expression in a category repeated in media and public discourse: the geração nem nem (literally, “generation neither nor”), or the generation of youth considered to be neither working nor studying.³ The demographic term indexes a specifically temporal fear: young people neither present nor future workers (students: workers in training) put the nation’s future well-being at risk. Public anxiety around this geração nem nem has spread across Brazil and Latin America, combining middle-class moral panics about unemployed urban youth with fear stemming from the country’s economic woes and drug war. The political discourse surrounding desocupado (idle) youth getting involved in crime and drugs not only helped propel Jair Bolsonaro into the presidency, but it also bolstered interventions aimed at eliminating free time. Much media analysis has painted the rise of Bolsonaro as an unexpected, sudden lurch into fascism and militarism (Fogel 2018). Yet other commentators have observed that Bolsonaro in fact draws on longer histories of right-wing racist, classist, and sexist moralizing about drug use and idleness (Pinheiro-Machado 2019). This article builds on these attempts to historicize Bolsonaro’s rise.

MAKING THE WAR ON DRUGS PRODUCTIVE

Pedagogies of prohibition keep young people busy—on paths to become entrepreneurial cidadãos do bem (good citizens)—rather than allowing them to become desocupados.⁴ This means to say that the war on drugs, and its pedagogies, undergirds a large-scale regime of citizen-subject formation, one that profoundly affects the life trajectories of millions of young people who have no direct connection to drug markets. These principles, as we will see, have a range of real-world impacts—from shaping forms of personhood and practices of self-fashioning to engineering daily routines and particular forms of capitalist consumption.

Pedagogies of prohibition value busyness. They operate through an improvised patchwork of after-school programs, services, and activities that generate and reinforce the demand for busy lifestyles. Here, busier is better—and safer. Parents’ desires for their kids to have easier, shorter everyday routines give way, under pedagogies of prohibition, to an urgent sense that staying occupied is the only way to achieve security and futurity.⁵ This view construes youth as temporally delinquent: empty-minded and empty-handed, either in delay or precocious. Avoiding accusations of desocupação and engaging in the correria do dia a dia (the everyday rush) emerges as a marker of distinction, connoting middle-class ambition and success. Meanwhile, youth cultures’ self-generated collective temporal practices and routines come into tension with, and are often foreclosed by, efforts to enact temporal discipline by way of occupation.⁶ Pedagogies of prohibition therefore shape the conditions of possibility for socializing, aspiring, resisting, and being.

In this sense, pedagogies of prohibition form part of a long history of educational anti-drug interventions that aim to make the war on drugs productive. Like Nancy Reagan’s infamous “Just Say No” campaign, draconian regimes of prohibition have long garnered legitimacy through educational campaigns. Underappreciated, however, is the pedagogy that stems from prohibitionist premises. Crucially, pedagogies of prohibition extend far beyond negation (the “don’t do”: don’t be lazy and unoccupied, don’t use drugs). They are, rather, squarely directive—they teach learners a particular way of fashioning themselves and their daily habits. In short, they prescribe a corresponding normativity (the “must do”: do become a good citizen, do consume the right goods). This is because moral evaluations about drug use concern prescription as much as they do negation. And pedagogy has consistently served as the vehicle through which such moral evaluations are smuggled. Drug war contexts, then, constitute the ideal sites from which to understand and critique the entanglement of pedagogy and prohibitionist regimes. Of crucial importance to this essay, pedagogies of prohibition enact what Elizabeth Freeman (2010) calls “chrononormativity”: a set of norms that operate on the temporal axis, with an emphasis on filling time.

For good reason, the anthropology of drugs has largely focused on the spatial dimensions of prohibition. This body of scholarship documents drug prohibition’s impact on a wide range of populations around the world and demonstrates how prohibition functions to expand the territory of global capitalism (Paley 2014). Anthropologists interested in global systems and commodity chains have tracked how drugs are imbricated in global “drug war situations” (Zigon 2015) and addiction trajectories (Raikhel and Garriott 2013). By instrumentalizing illicit drugs, business and state actors have created scapegoats for various social and systemic ills and inequalities (Bourgois 2009), authorized prevention interventions (K. L. O’Neill 2015), and marginalized populations deemed dangerous and exterminable (Penglase 2014). Jason Pine (2007), bridging the temporal and the spatial, has noted what he calls the “economy of speed” associated with capitalist consumption, expansion, and acceleration that extends into the state’s margins (Das and Poole 2004), where “vibrant, violent enterprise flourishes” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2007). Nevertheless, the dominant frame with which the war on drugs has been apprehended is a spatial one. A war over “trafficking” keeps the focus on the hard, spatial and territorial policing side of the drug war.

The temporal disciplining of young people marks the soft, pedagogical side of the war on drugs, with temporality emerging as an object of political control and a site of resistance. Building on E. P. Thompson’s (1967) analysis of “clock time” as a disciplinary technology, authors have noted how “social time” (Evans-Pritchard 1969; Gell 1992) is far from an empty, homogeneous containment grid, but rather a fungible object that can communicate (Tawil-Souri 2017), be tricked (Ringel 2016), be manipulated (Fleming 2016), be punctuated (Ahmann 2018), and be sped up (Duclos, Sánchez Criado, and Ngyuen 2017) by both state representatives and their subjects. In this light, rather than constituting a stable metric, time is a social object—one deeply contested and crisscrossed by relations of power. Pedagogies of prohibition, therefore, entail orientations to the future (Stambach and Hall 2017; Bryant and Knight 2019; B. O’Neill 2017) that hinge on a logic of preemption operating at the everyday level of affective sensibility and embodiment (Ghertner, McFann, and Goldstein 2020), as well as at the level of state power and security (Masco 2014). It comes as no surprise, then, that time as an object of intervention proves central to processes of racialization—in Brazil, of learning how to be, or how not to be Black (Thomas 2016; Rifkin 2017; Almeida 2019). Moreover, just as time can be wielded to police bodily and political imagination along racialized lines, so too can alternative temporalities form the basis for resistance (Ahmann 2018; Samuels and Freeman 2021; Bailey 2021; Fogarty-Valenzuela 2020).

Building on literature on the war on drugs that foregrounds the spatial politics of prohibition, this article centers the pedagogy emerging from prohibition: forms that operate along distinctly temporal coordinates. Considering pedagogies of prohibition as having a temporal as well as a spatial dimension opens up new analytical terrain. In this light, a focus on pedagogy—long understood as a pillar of disciplinary regimes (Foucault 1982; Rancière 1991)—can expand our understanding of prohibition in the war on drugs. This is because the global war on drugs has long expanded beyond mere prohibition to encompass pedagogy. Building on the spatial control associated with prohibition, pedagogies of prohibition are distinctively temporal, hinged on the rhythms, patterns, and pacing that structure daily habits and routines. Tending to time through the lens of pedagogies of prohibition, then, as much concerns understanding the emancipatory potential of pedagogy as it does illuminating forms of control. The following, in fact, presents three particular modalities of temporal control and contestation: busyness, punctuality, and rhythm.

BUSYNESS

Rodrigo is a man of discipline. Coming of age in the military during the dictatorship, he does not hesitate to bar students from entering the 800-student Madeiros public high school if they are late, or to punish them if they speak back. He is a man of two poles: His military background prompted him to station eight armed police officers in his school. Yet his background as an educator also led him to create after-school programs with an altruistic feel, such as the jujitsu class led by Guerreiro.

We walk out of his office at Dom Hélder Câmara School (subsequently, Câmara) into the open-air atrium, after a long conversation about the dangers faced by his students. As we gaze at the building, he criticizes its architectural modifications. These alterations were made when the building, formerly a military barrack, was transformed into a school. As a symbolic staging of Brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to liberal democracy, the school was inaugurated in 2010. In Rodrigo’s view, the low, porous, easy-to-hop perimeter fences encourage tardiness, while the school’s proximity to a park encourages idleness before and after school. He found this dangerous. To compensate for these deficiencies, he has installed a deafening school buzzer that echoes off the walls of buildings across the park and stationed police in the school halls.

Rodrigo and I stand in the schoolyard (divided from the adjacent park by a mesh fence). Spotting a group of youths hanging out in the park, he stops and points, lowering his voice, as if sharing a secret:

R: Look over there in the corner, look over there. It’s the traffickers.

B: You think so?

R: I don’t think, I know.

B: Doing what?

R: Selling drugs, doing drugs.

B: You think so?

R: Yes, sir. From inside the park, man. Over there in the corner, it’s full of people selling drugs.

…

R: They have nothing to do, they’re idle …

B: They don’t work?

R: Nothing, they don’t work at all.

B: How many hours a day do they spend there?

R: Ah, they spend over eight hours hanging out [de bobeira] there.

“Você acha? [You think so?],” I ask him again: in my understanding, these youths led, in fact, quite busy lives. In a defeated tone of voice, he continues, lamenting to himself, “sim, essa desocupação toda aí na praça [yes, all that idleness in the park].” By his calculations, Brazilian students (including his own) have eight to twelve hours of free time per day, during which they are unsupervised by either parents (who work) or educational authorities (who only sequester youth for four hours). This is why the most urgent security flaw of all, for Rodrigo, was to be found in the temporal architecture of Brazilian education: the length of the school day. This is the problema do contratempo, or the “after-school problem”: the challenge of occupying the hours in the day during which students are out of school, and therefore have—or are imagined to have—too much free time. This section observes how Rodrigo, like countless other educators, fights the war on drugs by fighting against desocupação. Eradicating free time by keeping students busy, to Rodrigo, not only prevents youth from becoming vulnerable to the temptations of drugs and violence; it also increases their chances of becoming “cultured,” hardworking members of the middle class.

Lazer (leisure) is inscribed as a “fundamental right” in the 1988 Brazilian constitution and central to the mission to the Department of Youth Leisure and Sports. Rodrigo imagined lazer as occurring in the art museums and theaters of the Zona Sul (South Zone) among light-skinned members of the middle class. By contrast, what students enjoyed in Madeiros’s parks did not amount to lazer: for Rodrigo, these students were engaging in desocupação. The free time of particular bodies—namely, racialized, gendered, geographically marked bodies—is not the exercise of a fundamental right, but a problem. Lazer becomes desocupação when particular subjects engage in it, especially beyond the purview of particular figures of authority and institutions. Recall Rodrigo’s lament, “Yes, all that desocupação in the park.” The youth we observed in the park were such subjects.

Rodrigo discussed desocupação as if an epidemic. A widespread and ingrained state of being, the charge of desocupação marked youth as simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous: vulnerable to their dangerous desires (young men’s desire for consumption, young women’s desire for sexual pleasure, as he explained). In neighborhoods like Madeiros, desocupação is understood to lead to the desire for doing and dealing drugs. Free time thus constitutes a sort of gateway drug, clouding judgment and opening young bodies up to the dangers of the street. This may be why Rodrigo was jovial around his school’s stationed cops: he saw himself as working hand in-hand with them in the war on drugs. While police prohibit behaviors and lock people up (as a doctor would intern an addict), Rodrigo inculcates behaviors and keeps young people busy—all in the name of prevention. Busyness, in his logic, is the solution to desocupação. Rodrigo fights the war on drugs by striving to keep young people fully occupied. This is how pedagogies of prohibition operate: they entail not only prohibition’s negation (“don’t be desocupado”) but also education’s prescriptive function (“keep busy”). Pedagogies of prohibition extend far beyond an abordagem (stop-and-frisk) or a passagem pela policia (arrest) in the park. Rather, they seek to occupy the terrain of the entire waking life of young people by way of busyness.

In searching for a solution to his problem during an interview at his desk, Rodrigo took a pen and paper and sketched the architecture of a utopian school. He dreamed up its seamless orchestration of students’ movements through time within the school space. Rodrigo’s solution, his dream school, would shuffle students from vocational course to vocational course, spending lunch in a courtyard with classical music playing in the background: an orchestrated kind of lazer a world apart from desocupação. Most importantly, it would be full-time. Rather than simply prohibiting desocupação, such a routine would nip free time in the bud by sending students home exhausted. Once home, Rodrigo told me, they would only have the energy to say hello to their parents before collapsing on their beds.

His attempts to recreate his dream institution at Câmara are evinced in his authoritarian tact and reliance on police. Yet fully aware that such a school was utopian, he settled for something within arm’s reach: after-school arts, sports, and martial arts programs (choir, theater, and the aforementioned jujitsu classes). He funded these interventions with money from the Ministry of Education, but also through international organizations, NGOs, public-private partnerships, and foundations. These included partnerships such as the social program arm of the Pacifying Police (the UPP Social), which brought Guerreiro to teach at the school. These programs kept youth shuffling from room to room well after the buzzer rang and gave them, in Rodrigo’s words, the skills deemed necessary in the labor market. While after-school education programs didn’t quite constitute his full-time dream vocational school, both models held one thing in common: they were designed to mitigate desocupação.

Unsurprisingly, Câmara students harshly critiqued Rodrigo’s framing of the supposed problem, and disliked being seen as desocupados. Welington, a student of Câmara who frequented the park, traced the association between desocupado and other derogatory terms for the state of having free time, such as vadio (idle) and vagabundo (lazy, idle). An antithesis to President Bolsonaro’s moralist framing of the cidadão do bem (good citizen), to be seen as desocupado implied laziness and a lack of a work ethic, as well as indulgence in easy pleasure, he explained. Welington regarded his time with friends in the park as anything but “empty.” Rather, it was filled with brincadeira (play/jokes), bate papo (chatting), namoro (dating), and arts like poetry and music (Caldeira 2012; Almeida and Eugenio 2006). Above all, he highlighted a concept that Brazilian youth refer to as zueira. Translated loosely to “lighthearted messing around,” zueira takes place on the margins of official, institutional time—providing the basis for modes of play (Harney and Moten 2013), political practices, and urban aesthetic value (Ralph 2008). Zueira, as opposed to desocupação, describes a way of spending free time that leads to novel and self-generated forms of personhood, experimentation, and creativity, as vital as they are emancipatory. Moreover, zueira punctuated and extended into intervals of formal and informal work, domestic care, and social activities that—unrecognized by authorities like Rodrigo—kept them feeling quite busy. Such alternative temporal rhythms—disciplined in their own right—can generate modes of value and personhood with different meanings and potentials (Freire 2000, Sales and Paraíso 2013, Perry 2004).

Rodrigo didn’t see zueira as a pedagogically valuable form of busyness: instead, he valued sanctioned rhythms of work, study, consumption, and rest centered on constant busyness. In his imaginary, these rhythms aligned with the needs of the Brazilian private sector, and with the global temporalities of capital (Chu 2019; T. Harris 2021). In practice, though, his effort to churn out temporally disciplined students smuggled specific middle-class mores into a seemingly objective performance of the rhythms of global capital (Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 2012; Bear 2016). Oblivious of his students’ local modes of passing time, he projected his own Brazilian middle-class ideology, which provided an idealized one-size-fits-all solution for the ills of the drug war. In this respect, Rodrigo was not alone.

PUNCTUALITY

It was 9:04 a.m., and the young woman was underslept, hungry, and on the verge of an emotional breakdown. The sign-in clerk reluctantly explained to her that she was four minutes late, and that, due to the punctuality policy, she could not be allowed into her curso profissionalizante (vocational course). The woman, Andreia, began crying inconsolably. She was wearing a green polo shirt that read “Jovem Aprendiz” (Young Apprentice): the same shirt that could be seen across the city, worn by young people on their way to internships in corporations four days a week. The fifth day was dedicated to a vocational training workshop, run by the Center for School-Company Integration (CSCI). Like many other organizations of its type, CSCI’s mission is to insert working-class public high school students into the service-sector job market. Operating in the name of social inclusion, CSCI is the charitable arm of the foundation of one of the wealthiest and most influential media corporations in Brazil.

It wasn’t clear what made Andreia break: the physical exhaustion, the lost salary for the day and report to her boss, the prospect of facing the grueling two-hour commute back home to the Zona Norte by bus, or the worry that she was failing as an aspiring profissional. But what was clear was that for her parents, for CSCI administrators, and for education policymakers, her day went according to plan. More than being just another rule, the punctuality policy proved central to CSCI’s pedagogy of prohibition. It inscribed within her memory and body the importance of being on time, bringing her one step closer to corporate postura (disposition or attitude). The previous section shed light on how pedagogies of prohibition hinge to a regime of time management predicated on keeping youth constantly busy. This section extends that analysis to CSCI’s punctuality policy, analyzing pedagogies of prohibition as part of a broader project of subject formation that aims to instill rigid time discipline. Punctuality here functions as a means to keep youth—forced to leave home early enough to beat the bottleneck—even busier, and, most important, to produce well-behaved employees. Yet this section observes how students’ failure to arrive early derives less from character flaws than from the physical limitations on urban mobility they face. Put another way, it is a spatial dimension of temporal discipline.

“Why?” Andreia asked the sign-in clerk repeatedly. She didn’t understand the point of the punctuality policy. To the administrators, though, the quantity of time did not matter; a quality did. From their perspective, the inability to be punctual signaled a character flaw, a weak spot through which any number of other negative qualities associated with working-class youth from favelas could crowd in: indolence, indiscipline, insubordination, indifference, immaturity, substance abuse. The transnational corporate firms for which these interns were being trained could not be expected to tolerate such a lack of professionalism.

This is where CSCI came in. The objective, as voiced to me by the program’s superintendent, was the cultivation of profissionais out of cru (raw) favela youths. Demonstrating punctuality, he reasoned, provided the foundation for other qualities such as professional speech, attire, and postura. The superintendent saw this relation as a win-win: Brazilian corporate elites got well-behaved service workers, disciplined into performing the rhythms of the workday (Eräsaari 2017), while working-class youth got “social inclusion.” Beyond private interest, he emphasized, it was about social good. More than solving the problem of unemployed youth, he added, his program intentionally aimed to solve the after-school problem by keeping otherwise idle youth busy. Punctuality, here, was a precondition of busyness.

He cited the recent example of a student smoking a joint during a break. This prompted a mandatory “drug use” lesson, which I observed, only to witness a textbook rendition of “just say no” prohibition-based pedagogy, replete with before and after photos of meth users, as well as of the putrefied limbs caused by the newest ominous drug, “Krokodil.” According to the superintendent, though, these lessons were necessary but insufficient as ways of cultivating cru youth. Information about drug use was a first step, but the real goal was to teach a way of being (called comportamental, or “behavioral,” instruction)—hence the punctuality policy. This process of acculturation was initiated in Andreia after being barred at the sign-in desk, and then supplemented by workshops, including ones on accent reduction, time management, and workplace attire.

What CSCI administrators and likeminded educators failed to see was what Alexandre, the sign-in clerk, brought to my attention following Andreia’s late arrival. He opened WhatsApp on his phone and showed me an updated list of each neighborhood in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, followed by the name of a drug-trafficking faction or armed group: Commando Vermelho, Amigos dos Amigos, milicia, UPP, and so on. Next to some neighborhoods, an “emergency” emoji appeared: the red siren light signified an ongoing territorial dispute. Disputes were updated in real time, alerting commuters and residents to dangers, such as shoot-outs and police operations, as well as ensuing traffic jams, no-go zones, bus re-routings, and unofficial curfews that impeded students like Andreia from moving through the city (see also K. L. O’Neill 2021). A comprehensive list of the constantly shifting geography of territorial control, this WhatsApp list provided a resource that Alexandre—also from a distant favela—often marshaled to justify interns’ tardiness to the CSCI administration. In so doing, he helped students point out how the expectation of punctuality placed on interns was disconnected from the urban realities of the drug war.

Alexandre’s WhatsApp “tactics,” in the words of Michel de Certeau (1984), reveal the contradiction at the heart of draconian punctuality policies. What is key to understand here is that hard forms of drug prohibition generate more than just shoot-outs. They also generate lateness—by way of delays, curfews, no-go zones, and police operations at the scale of millions of commuters each day. These secondary phenomena of the war on drugs have two closely related effects. First, they generate a stigma for laborers like Andreia, devaluing their labor power as corporations seek workers who have access to urban mobility and are therefore consistently punctual. On the other hand, disruptions to urban mobility caused by prohibition legitimate the work of vocational, supposedly professionalizing interventions couched in the language of “social inclusion” for “raw” inner city youth. Put another way, the more intensely prohibition takes its toll on daily commuters, the more evidence available for proponents of pedagogies of prohibition to justify their interventions. The interlocking of urban mobility and punctuality at CSCI showcase an instance of the spatialization of time discipline.

To parents, policymakers, NGO workers, and CSCI leadership, the upshot of their draconian punctuality policy was a situation in which youth were required to keep even busier: “Leave early or never arrive,” one student put it. He, like many others I interviewed, began his commute from his suburbio (low-income suburb) at 4:30 a.m. to “beat the traffic” and arrive well before 9 a.m. Students devoted more and more time out of their day to the program and everything it required, even at the expense of sleep. I came to see how such vocational programs had outcomes in students’ lives that were, in fact, closely aligned not only with Guerreiro’s vision of mitigating the after-school problem but also with Rodrigo’s utopian vision for a full-time solution to desocupação. Far from the imagined figure of the unoccupied youth of the geração nem nem, many of my interlocutors are in fact over-occupied. They are members of what one interlocutor called geração tudo tudo: the generation who works, studies, and commutes all the time.

All this movement and labor left little room for sleep. When interns arrived for their vocational training at or before 8 a.m., Alexandre would allow them into an empty classroom. In spaces unlit except for the glow of dawn over Rio de Janeiro’s skyline, students would place their backpacks on their desks, lay their heads down on their backpacks, and sleep.

RHYTHM

“One! Two! Three!” A group of fifty high school–aged students dressed in camouflage uniforms assemble in the middle of a busy city avenue to do flexões. These flash mobs of students performing push-ups in public are a ritualistic practice at Tropa, a network of private test-prep schools in Rio de Janeiro. Flexões mark the start of each long period of practice for the standardized tests required for entrance into Brazil’s military and public universities. Rush-hour traffic comes to a halt. On their palms and feet, students chant loudly, counting from one to twenty, before disbanding and heading into the school to take simulados: the dozens of weekly practice tests they take in training for the real test.

This highly public display of the school’s military aesthetic provides Tropa with a significant marketing boost. Camouflage uniforms feature the slogan “Tropa de Elite” (Elite Troop), which is also the nickname of Rio’s Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE), popularized by the 2007 film Tropa de Elite and notorious for executions and the torture of youth accused of drug distribution who live in neighborhoods like Madeiros. Building its brand on this imagery, the Tropa school targets those who seek to distance themselves from drug imagery, encouraging them instead to align themselves with the police and the military. During these public bouts of deep-voiced, boisterous theatrics, the image of rigorous militaristic temporal discipline and rhythm—“One! Two! Three!”—is reinforced and projected outward. Tropa draws its ranks from youth like Andreia, Welington, and André, who, rather than enter the workforce with high school diplomas or entry-level service-sector experience as profissionais, instead aspire for social mobility by way of a university degree, becoming a profissional formado (a “formed” or graduated professional). The biggest obstacle to this ascension is learning the specific test-taking skills that Tropa, in all its militaristic trappings, claims to offer.

The rhythmic militarism of the flash mob constitutes a concrete instance of a pedagogy of prohibition in action: it’s a form of education that explicitly bases its aesthetic on the hard side of militarized drug prohibition. But whereas the BOPE concerns itself with territorial control, the prohibitionary side of this pedagogy manifests itself through the control of time, and it does so in two ways: first, by way of an aesthetic and performance of militaristic rhythmic discipline, and second, by enveloping the students in a school culture of constant studying. This section assesses the rise of test-prep schools like Tropa, analyzing how they appeal to families and youth from neighborhoods like Madeiros, and how they route these forms of pedagogy toward profit. If the busyness discussed earlier is designed to prevent youth from coming into contact with drugs, and punctuality is organized around subject formation, rhythm does something distinctive. If being busy is ongoing, a status, being punctual is an event, a moment. Rhythm, then, constitutes the bridge between the two: a string of punctuation along time’s arrow, ever busy, ever punctual. Tropa students study piously and rhythmically each day of the week, with practice tests on Saturdays, and pressure to study Sundays (otherwise known as “trash days”). This routine intensifies as the test date approaches, pushing non-test-related course content out of the study rhythm for weeks on end. That is why Tropa’s rhythm contrasts sharply with that of, for example, the park next to Câmara: it is standardized and constant, a tempo that straitjackets the present in the name of order and progress (the mantra on Brazil’s coat of arms) toward a successful test day. Such a rhythm ably undergirds fascist ideology, in which bodies that do not align with sanctioned rhythms are deemed deviant obstacles and targeted (Gershon 2021). But it also constitutes a capitalist temporality (Puar 2021), bent on endless acceleration in search of profit.

Test-prep schools like Tropa have come to rival both the NGO and state arts and sports programs and the vocational training programs as a prominent educational trajectory during the after-school period. Their rise, which has occurred in parallel with the that of Bolsonaro’s PSL party, can be traced to the promise of security they provide against the risks of drug-related violence. High on Bolsonaro’s agenda is expanding military public schools, an education reform policy that rests on the opposition between disciplined, upstanding soldiers and deviant, criminal desocupados. Also on his agenda is the privatization of public education. Tropa, in many ways, emblematizes this marriage of militarism and the market. It reflects the simultaneous shift in Brazilian politics toward militaristic fascist authoritarianism and the privatization of social services—including education—with Bolsonaro as a figurehead. While Brazil is not a fascist state, fascist politics (Stanley 2020) are widespread, including appeals for improved education and security (for specific groups) alongside the elimination of others (Graeber 2015). The appeal of Bolsonaro (and Tropa) among favela residents over the issue of public security can be attributed to his promise to eliminate drug traffickers, long positioned as the scapegoats for the violence caused by the war on drugs and the nation’s underdevelopment. Take, for example, the case of Thompson, a resident of Madeiros who took test-prep courses at Tropa.

For Thompson, Tropa was not the only “troop” in his neighborhood. Two others existed: the Military Police’s BOPE, and the meninos do movimento or tráfico (drug-trafficking organization). Though pitched against each other in a drawn-out war in Rio’s North Zone, each of these purported troops sought to win the youths’ hearts and minds, and each had been within Thompson’s social horizons at different points in his life. At the test-prep center, Thompson could envelop himself within the testing tropa. But he could also, via a performance of discipline and military aesthetics—wearing a camouflage school uniform, doing push-ups at school rituals, yelling war cry chants in unison, and performing an austere persona of constant studiousness—express his allegiance to the BOPE tropa over the tráfico. Yet, like the majority of my informants, Thompson belongs to the demographic most squarely in the crosshairs of BOPE: young, Black, male, and a resident of a favela. This fact perhaps drew him most to the testing tropa’s performance of BOPE militarism. Spending his days studying at Tropa was not merely about passing tests, economic mobility, or social distinction. It was about being on the right side of a semi-automatic barrel. Just as important, as he learned at Tropa, it also marked the difference between being socially recognized as a busy, disciplined profissional formado correndo atrás (running after) success, and being seen as desocupado, doing or dealing drugs.⁷ Tropa’s pedagogies of prohibition also appealed to Thompson’s parents who saw a packed schedule as increasing his odds at attaining social mobility while keeping his aspirational horizons focused squarely on the right kind of “troop.” And crucially, Tropa’s price tag would reflect a part-time school with a full-time workload, as opposed to a pricier full-time institution.

In addition to the push-ups on city avenues, the grito de guerra (war cry) plays a key role in performing and projecting militaristic temporal discipline. Screamed in unison by teenagers at the top of their lungs, these chants punctuated my interview audio files and echoed during recess in school halls and before tests:

These hypermasculine war cries held a performative force that lent tremendous service to Tropa’s social appeal and economic success. This chant centers on fantasies of execution: suspending common sense and the politically correct, this homage to control over life itself culminates in a celebration of murder, with the victim standing metaphorically for the entrance exam. Such chants provide a cathartic release of the pent-up energy stored up by relentless disciplining and isolation, and their rhythmic performances envelop the students in effervescent, if momentary, unity.

Yet Tropa’s projected appearance of rigorous militaristic rhythm—which leads parents to expect heavily regimented study routines and elaborate practice drills—belies the actual experience of students, who are largely left to their own devices to pass the test. Tropa’s is a militarism of form only. I speak to Thompson on a Sunday, at his branch of Tropa, located inside the Norte Shopping megamall. To make up time off on Sundays, some teachers deploy threatening comparisons (“over in Acre [Brazil’s westernmost state] they’re studying right now”) to remind Tropa students that others are studying even while they sleep. It’s no surprise, then, that Thompson’s days are organized around what Tropa’s administrators and the customer manual refer to as a “rhythm of continuous study.” To maintain “a focus on victory” (a Tropa slogan), Thompson spends hours on end after school studying in a sala de monitoria (tutoring room) full of other Tropa students and, occasionally, a Tropa tutor. Across countless interviews, I heard the same refrain: the school’s culture aims to motivate them to “study all the time”—bringing about temporal saturation in which leisure is ruled out as a valid way of spending time.

Despite the emphasis on a “rhythm of continuous study,” though, Tropa concerns itself more with appearance than with curricular content. In practice, how these parcels of time get filled is of secondary importance; the idea is not to micromanage every single hour of a student’s day, because doing so would require enormous amounts of supervision and resources on the part of Tropa (costs that would be passed on to the parents of students, who are already going into debt to afford the school’s fees). Students are mostly left to their own devices: they are told to study all the time, given a room in which to do so, and little more. The logic that governs Tropa’s pedagogy is ultimately not the micromanaged scheduling of military time but (in the words of the marketing director) the creation of a “herd mentality” that organizes the entirety of its students’ waking life around studying. Meanwhile, parents are happy to pay a part-time fee, comforted by the thought that their young are safely busied studying for a test.

Small wonder, then, that parents of youth like André and Thompson seeking to solve the after-school problem are drawn to schools like Tropa to an equal or greater degree as to after-school programming and vocational courses. These three instances of pedagogies of prohibition share the opposition between traffickers and good citizens, between desocupação and ocupação (busyness), and the emphasis on controlling youth’s time. What makes this instance unique is not only the particular valence of this form of temporal control—its focus on collective rhythmic endeavors (synchronized push-ups and war cries)—but also the presence of the aesthetic trappings of prohibition. Borrowing the symbolic potency of the hard, militarized drug prohibition of the BOPE, Tropa sells a softer form: pedagogical security. Such rhythmic hypermasculine bravado, it turns out, results from a pedagogical model as alluring as it is profitable. In this way, Tropa stands as a prime example of the way pedagogies of prohibition shape for-profit educational institutions and their expansion.

CONCLUSION

Thompson and I stood on an escalator one day after class at a Tropa school, located inside the Norte Shopping mall. Behind us lay the Lifestyle Plaza: a shopping and entertainment court with a giant fluorescent Mickey Mouse at its center. To our left was the bowling alley; to our right, a Starbucks. I read aloud a sign with the mall’s slogan—“vem viver aqui” (come live here)—and asked Thompson his thoughts. “There’s everything here, a supermarket, gym, cinema. You can even eat at Burger King,” he pointed out as we neared the restaurant. The restaurant (like the Starbucks) was dotted with groups of Thompson’s peers from Tropa, many students dressed in camouflage uniforms. He also knew the staff working behind the counter; they hailed from the same neighborhood. As I would later learn, CSCI provided young people with part-time jobs at Burger King and a range of other businesses in the mall. Indeed, many of my interlocutors from Madeiros sought work—through programs like CSCI—at Norte Shopping.

Norte Shopping had managed to position itself as a comprehensive solution to all these young people’s needs: it wasn’t just where they’d go to spend time but also where they’d go to earn their disposable income and where they’d go to prepare for the entrance exams that would allow them passage into a middle-class life in which disposable income would be plentiful. All roads away from the danger in Madeiros led to the prosperity and social mobility of Norte Shopping. This was no coincidence. The framing of the mall as an educational space propping up a drug-free, busy lifestyle serves as a prime instance of pedagogies of prohibition: The mall is the location of an entire educational apparatus that includes both test prep and vocational training. It’s an avatar of middle-class prosperity—an embodiment of dreams of social mobility. But it’s also a place that derives its appeal from racialized and classed images of its alternative: danger, desocupação, and drug use in places like the Madeiros park and favela. The mall—as a space for education—is therefore entangled with the racialized violence of drug prohibition. It is a site where the values of prohibition are put into practice (its ideology and infrastructure coming full circle), fundamentally shaping the personhood and trajectories of young people. It therefore makes for an ideal site for understanding how the violence of the drug war is rendered productive, aiding in the generation of a sort of closed circuit conducive to particular daily schedules and lifestyles that, ultimately, translate into the consolidation of power and profit in the Zona Norte.

I recalled the words of Norte Shopping’s director of marketing, Ana. Trained in lifestyle marketing, her team worked hard to create “not just a place, but a whole world.” “You sell a lot more than a product,” she told me. “You sell a lifestyle, and everything involved in that lifestyle.” That world, that lifestyle, proved a structuring fantasy in the lives of many of my interlocutors. The slogan “vem viver aqui” implies a fantasy not far removed from reality: a lifestyle that involves spending all of one’s time at the mall. In the space of the mall, the after-school period no longer constituted a problem. If Rodrigo’s dream exists anywhere, then it is here in the mall, where youth study, work, and consume (the right kind of goods). To “come live here” entails a funneling of all waking hours to a particular place: a spatial discipline herein becomes built on practices related to time.

Echoing the way Rodrigo framed his school, Ana explained how the mall served as an “island” surrounded by favelas that harbor drug traffickers and other dangers. On top of that, the lack of “culture” and “leisure” in their neighborhoods, she explained, positioned such shopping centers as “the big option that they have, the big one: that’s why we play such an important role.” The mall, and institutions within it such as Tropa, draw their appeal from claiming to offer what Madeiros lacks: security, culture, leisure, and full-time education.

Pedagogies of prohibition have a potent material impact: they lead youth from Madeiros to spend their time, money, and labor inside malls. And as these malls diversify and make money from broader aspects of the public’s life, they also concentrate wealth and power. It’s no surprise that, in this ethnography, merely two CEOs profit from this setup: the CEO of BR Malls (owner of Norte Shopping), and the Brazillian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann (owner of Tropa School Network and Burger King, with a net worth of US$22 billion at the time of writing). The latter also owns some of the largest consumer goods corporations in the world. It turns out that investors like Lemann are best positioned to profit from pedagogies of prohibition, from the work, study, and leisure of interlocutors like Thompson. The “lifestyle center” brought about a dramatic transformation in these young people’s daily routines and social horizons, subsuming my interlocutors’ metabolic energy, their playful lines of flight, their aesthetic sensibilities and forms of consumption, and eventually their personhood and aspirations. The means to achieve their sonhos (dreams), it seemed, were routed through Norte Shopping.

Investigating pedagogies of prohibition entails investigating the means through which the violence of the drug war is rendered productive, the way a war can generate power and profit. Pedagogies of prohibition are not limited to Brazil. They exist wherever there are drugs, and wars declared on them: wherever people—the true objects of drug wars—dream and breathe (de Abreu 2021). And in contexts where youth find themselves with more time on their hands—a global recession, combined with the growth of flexible labor and distance learning resulting from the COVID-19 global pandemic—the policing of habit, daily schedules, and aspirations has often grown more intense. Fueled by a pandemic that has accelerated processes of digitalization, teachers, parents, and social workers have worked to minimize free time, often by way of maximizing screen time (Benjamin 2019).

While we can draw parallels elsewhere in temporal discipline hinged on busyness, punctuality, and rhythm, the Brazilian moment specifically sheds light on the connection between accusations of desocupação and the epidemic of police violence targeting young, Black youth today (2019 saw more than 1,814 police killings in Rio de Janeiro alone). This is because the charge of desocupação is unevenly distributed among particular racialized bodies: it is not only a matter of leisure or idleness but one of life and death. Such accusations are as much about life and death in the shadow of police violence as they are about consumption practices, personhood, political imagination.

Madeiros offers an especially powerful example of the extent and stakes of these forms of temporal governance. The clocks that keep Burger King employees, Tropa students, and Norte Shopping shoppers in the right place at the right time are tied to the multiscalar rhythms of capitalism. The gradual entrance of Latin American nations into global markets and technocracy has entailed integration into the rhythms of capitalism—to work the right amount and consume the right goods (and substances) at the right intervals, and to enjoy leisure in the right ways. These rhythms are the heartbeat of pedagogies of prohibition, and of the production of the political horizons of consumer-citizens across the hemisphere today.

ABSTRACT

RESUMO

NOTES

Acknowledgments A special thanks to all the friends and collaborators who participated in this research project in Brazil. Thanks to students and faculty from the Museu Nacional/UFRJ (Federico Neiburg and Eugenia Motta, as well as Christina Vermelho) and Fiocruz (Maria Paula Bonatto, Francisco Inácio Bastos, and Maria Das Mercês Navarro) for welcoming me in the Rio de Janeiro scholarly community and for pushing my work in exciting directions. At home, João Biehl, Kathleen D. Hall, Kevin L. O’Neill, Carol Greenhouse, Rena Lederman, Didier Fassin, Julia Elyachar, Carolyn Rouse, Pedro Meira Monteiro, and the editorial eye of Phillip Sayers were instrumental in writing and thinking. Colleagues from my time at Princeton—Heath Pearson, Mauricio Acuña, Vinicius Furuie, Quincy Amoah, Jessica Cooper, Shinjung Nam, and Kessie Alexandre—provided thoughtful early engagement. A warm thank-you to fellows from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, as well as Lesley Bartlett, Frederick Erickson, Diana Rodriguez, and Thea Abu el Haj. Faculty from the University of Chicago Anthropology and Sociology departments, and the interlocution of Kimberly Hoang, Kristen Schilt, Kathryn Takabvirwa, Joseph Masco, and Eugene Raikhel—was invaluable. A wholehearted thanks to the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation team for supporting my postdoctoral work. Finally, thanks to members of the Cultural Anthropology editorial collective for their in-depth engagement.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp. 286-316, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. © American Anthropological Association 2022. Cultural Anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. Reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. Use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the American Anthropological Association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. DOI: 10.14506/ca37.2.09