Introduction

At Jamba's stall in Alemanha market, the male sellers often played draughts to pass the time, with a home-made board and beer bottle tops for pieces. At a certain point the board was repainted by some of the younger men at the stall, who signed their names on it, and wrote the motto, ‘Win with Merit, Lose with Dignity’. In the same period, the elder men in Jamba's neighbourhood were setting up the football team for the national Girabairro tournament: a tournament for amateur neighbourhood teams sponsored by the Movimento Nacional Espontaneo. I was asked to attend the planning meetings, as the team's photographer.

The early meetings were optimistic, speaking of the need for ‘social and political development’ in the neighbourhood, and a need to ‘encourage’ the young people and to give them a constructive activity to do, so that they would not fall into drug and alcohol abuse. However, tensions were also obvious from the start. ‘We all know’, the chair of the first meeting said in his opening statement,‘that there are traitors and treacherous people in our neighbourhood’, who had gone to play for other neighbourhoods because they were being paid. These tensions grew, as some players and members of the club failed to make their regular donations to the team's running costs. They were denounced as selfish, and as endangering the collective effort to create something positive in the neighbourhood, forcing the coaches to put up their own money to compensate. At the sidelines of one of the games, I heard some young players making a loud counter-accusation to the older men running the team: coaches would pick players on the basis of the money they were able to contribute, and not solely on ability. They said that it was tough to ask people to contribute money every week, because sometimes you might fall on hard times and not be able to pay.

The potentially corrupting influence that money could have on social relations was a frequent theme of conversation amongst the men I worked with. The disturbing idea that the love of money threatened communal values and common enterprises, that people could not be counted on for their loyalty and that bonds of solidarity were therefore weakening, was common.