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.

Introduction: Private Guards and Social Order
Interlude 1: The 12 por 36
1. The Carreira das Armas
Interlude 2: The Anger of Other Men
2. Hospitality Security
Interlude 3: Small Thefts
3. Securing Affective Landscapes of Leisure and Consumption
Interlude 4: Routine Suffering
4. Emotional Labor in the Security Command Center
Interlude 5: Securing Life
Epilogue: Selling the Sensation of Security
Interlude 6: The Post of the Future

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.