This article contends that Brazil's evangelical Christian networks increasingly function as penal infrastructure. Since the 1990s, the scale and scope of evangelical involvement in the criminal justice system have grown significantly. One clear result is that the capillary relationships that constitute Christian community now mobilise resources to support or even substitute the basic functions of punishment. I draw on fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro to understand this shift and its broader implications for the Brazilian project of incarceration. I also make a general claim for thinking with and through infrastructure as a pathway to understand penal governance.

From the last years of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth, the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro witnessed a new social phenomenon: the proliferation, in every neighbourhood, of small dance clubs formed by workers. Noteworthy among them was the Flor do Abacate, a recreational society founded in 1906 by a group of men and women of African descent. Far from making any claim to ‘being African’, this association promoted balls and parades in which African cultural heritage was shown in conjunction with other cultural logics valued as modern and cosmopolitan. As a consequence, it constituted a model of recreational society, black and modern at the same time, which its members tried to associate to a national profile. The objective of this article is to analyse both the logic that explains the organisation of this dance society and the challenges that its members faced in consolidating it.

This article examines the ways in which the perception of Rio de Janeiro's drinking water contributed to shaping the city's hydric management in colonial and imperial times. Even though the general assessment of climate and vegetation changed from paradisiacal to noxious in the second half of the eighteenth century in accordance with Enlightenment ideas, this had no effect on the locals’ appreciation of the city's drinking water. The criteria for evaluating the quality and quantity of available water were based on works from classical antiquity and remained essentially unchanged from early colonial times to the end of the empire. Not even population growth and increasing susceptibility to epidemics in the nineteenth century induced the authorities to reform the water supply system, as they were confident that the city was provided with good and abundant water by virtue of its natural predisposition.

This paper examines the meat supply system in Rio de Janeiro from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. For a period of time the city's monopoly over meat processing and retailing guaranteed a steady supply at predictable prices. However, at the turn of the century, ‘interlopers’, as municipal officials labelled those who attempted to introduce their product into Rio's market, began to question this century-old monopoly. Hence, for a relatively short period, Rio de Janeiro implemented a number of measures: curtailing the long-standing custom of clandestine slaughtering; establishing a centralised and somewhat regulated public abattoir system; and, finally, introducing meat-packing companies. This study considers these developments by undertaking a broader inquiry into how they affected per capita meat availability in Rio de Janeiro from the 1890s to the 1920s.

This article treats Tio Faustino, a little-known samba musician and Afro-Brazilian religious leader living in Rio de Janeiro, as an entry point for exploring larger questions about Brazil and the African Diaspora. The inquiry expands outward from Tio Faustino to Rio's early twentieth-century markets in ‘African’ commodities, the city's nascent music industry and the growing call to defend intellectual property rights in Brazil. In order to advance their careers, Tio Faustino and other artists accessed nationalist sentiment in ways that highlighted differences rather than commonalities with African-descended peoples elsewhere. In this way, Brazil's global standing and its colonial history and post-colonial trajectory functioned as a counterweight to transnational and diasporic connections. These findings deepen, rather than completely unseat, recent trends in diaspora and transnational studies.