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ОглавлениеIntroduction
We waited. In La Pincoya, the lights were cut to the sector and bonfires crackled on the main street, Recoleta. On September 11, poblaciones (poor urban neighborhoods) commemorate the golpe del estado (the coup d'état) that in 1973 brought down the government of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and ushered in a seventeen-year dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet. It was 2005, and there was euphoria and expectation in the air, the atmosphere both celebratory and tense. Women helped children put garbage—wood, an old armchair, plastic bins—in a bonfire pile to be ignited with paraffin. Neighbors stood outside closed storefronts, greeting one another with a mixture of festivity and fear. People knew what to expect, as one woman said precisely: “At around midnight, the municipality will cut the lights to the sector. An hour later, the police will come up Recoleta [La Pincoya's main street], and then we will protest. And then the police will go up Recoleta [starting from the beginning of the población and moving farther into it], and then we will chase them down, and then they will come up again, and then we will chase them down again.”
A choreographed dance of bullets, tear gas, Molotov cocktails, stones, and water canons was to pass through the stage of Recoleta that night. In anticipation, some young men with covered faces were preparing Molotov cocktails to throw at the police. I was in the street with my comadre Ruby,1 who lived in the sector with her husband, Héctor, a former militant, and their three children. Ruby handed me a cut lemon with salt, a homemade antidote for tear gas. The police were supposed to come up Recoleta, as they usually do, in their armored vehicles with water canons and busloads of special forces. They were supposed to start firing tear gas bombs. Special forces were supposed to get out of the olive green buses and chase adolescents through the narrow passageways and lift the struggling teens into trucks. Women were supposed to throw stones at the police and then run through the passageways, laughing at and fearing the expected violent police response.
That is what happened the year before. In 2004, Ruby and I followed a march led by youths in the Grupos Acción Popular, a popular youth movement that surged during the democratic transition after Pinochet's 1990 handover of power. They held a banner reading, MENOS REPRE, + SALUD Y EDUCACIÓN (Less repression, more health and education). The leaders of the march, faces masked, stopped before the municipal police station and read a speech condemning the government in its perpetuation of the “neoliberal model.” A moment later, headlights from police buses flashed on. The protestors scattered, opening their backpacks to pull out and light Molotov cocktails. Ruby and I ran down a passageway off the main street. An unknown neighbor saw us running and grabbed my arm from the door of a wooden shed.
Through the shed's wooden slats, we watched special forces carry a young man to the green truck. “Los llevan presos sólo para llevarlos no más” (They take them prisoner just to take them, nothing more), a woman whispered to me. Another whispered, “But we are used to it. It has happened for the past thirty years.” Fear was mixed with a sense of the formulaic. Taking leave of the shed, Ruby and I ran farther up the main street to the point where we could observe the fighting between the police and the youths below. The police came up the street, extinguishing the bonfires. Molotov cocktails rained down on the police vehicles, and the vehicles retreated, at which point people returned to the street and threw more garbage, wood—whatever would burn—into piles for new bonfires.
But in 2005, a presidential election year that culminated in the December election of President Michelle Bachelet, the police never came. The flames from the bonfires flickered and drizzled smoke as people ran out of garbage, wood, and old broken furniture to burn. “Ya no vienen” (They're not coming), people repeated over and over again in tones of disappointment. It was as if the commemoration of the golpe could not be realized without the state's show of force. The back-and-forth between the forces of the state and the población provided a structure through which history was to be enacted and remembered.
With that structure altered by the absence of the police, a generalized sense of anxiety spread. The undertones of fear shifted from a thrilling, if predictable, confrontation with the police as commemorative practice to a sense of impending chaos when a few youths began to laugh and fire pistols in the air. Tired people nervously started to make their way to the safety of their homes, leaving the fires to burn out on their own.
As we returned to Ruby's house, an elderly man stopped me. “Madame, madame,” he said. He was noticeably drunk. “Allende is present! Those assassins must die! Because they have the monopoly!” The young men around him started whistling and jeering. He continued, “Here, our compañero is present. Assassins, those evil Pinochet supporters! Because they are evil. And what is here? The pueblo—”
A teenage boy interrupted him, yelling, “United!” both ridiculing and predicting the man's next words. While the youth laughed, other men and women turned to walk away. The man continued, “The pueblo united will never be defeated! But, well. Excuse me, madame. Excuse me that we do not have so much education. But well, our Chile!” He turned to look angrily at the high and drunk youths encircling him, Ruby, and me. He turned back to us, saying quietly, as if addressing the nation, “Chile, they killed me…” A young man yelled, “Shut up, crazy idiot!” The man turned around, raising his fist. “They say that I am crazy, but you know, I, thirty-five years working! I am old, ah! And you know, you know…ah, you know madame, we are equal. Equal to what? For each other. Thank you, madame.” He shook my hand. The young men continued to ridicule him. Ruby intervened, saying to the man, “You are the only one talking sense here. You are not the one that is crazy.” The young men grumbled as the man thanked Ruby, holding both her hands.
September 11, 1973, is a critical event in the lives of the people in this book and for the Chilean population generally (Das 1995). Marking the beginning of a dictatorship that disappeared thousands and subjected hundreds of thousands to torture, fear, and insecurity in tandem with a profound reorganization of the state and market, September 11 evokes a complex mixture of pain, mourning, resentment, defiance, and rage in La Pincoya. September 11 commemorations in La Pincoya, as in other poblaciones of Santiago, are more than a conflictive remembering of past violence. In street scenes, grief over the loss of a political project—an alternative vision of democracy and social justice—is both ridiculed and acknowledged, crystalizing frustrations and resentments that emerge from persistent inequalities and economic precariousness that shape the lives of the poor in the present.
Since 1990, the coalition of democratic parties cast the state's project of transitional justice in terms of debts to the population. The state owed a “social debt” to the poor through the inequalities generated by the regime's economic liberalization, while society owed a “moral debt” to the victims of human rights violations. Accounting for these debts would occur partly through the expansion of poverty programs, mental health programs dedicated to low-income populations, and the official acknowledgment of human rights violations under the Pinochet regime. Through such an accounting, a reconciliation over the past would be achieved, and the unified nation could look toward a prosperous future. In casting the past as debt that could be accounted for, however, the state performatively marked a break with the past while leaving intact the actual institutional arrangements of the state and market, as well as the kind of subject imagined within social policy and interventions.
Life in Debt attends to such debts in their concrete manifestations as poverty programs, reparations for torture, and treatments for depression in the lifeworld of one población, La Pincoya. It explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by these interventions are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries, as well as through the aspirations, pains, and disappointments that men and women embody in their daily lives. It traces the forces of kinship, friendship, and neighborliness—and the shoring up of the boundaries between them—in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. And it attends to how a world could be reinhabited by those who staked their existence on political commitments and aspirations for democracy, as well as by those who live today with bitter disappointment.
In this book, I attempt to bring into focus and into question this performative break with the past by considering how and when state violence is experienced as a past continuous that inhabits present life conditions. That is, rather than assume that the past of dictatorship has been sealed through a project of reconciliation, I consider the ways in which the state's “care” in the democratic transition is inhabited by that past. Therefore, this ethnography is an extended meditation on boundaries between past violence and present social arrangements of care. But it is also a meditation on care in everyday life, care that takes shape and is experienced through concrete relations inextricably woven into unequal social arrangements. This book asks: How are the claims of others experienced in the face of minimal state assistance and institutional failures, and how do obligations track along relational modes? How can anthropology attend to the ways in which individuals are both present to and failing to be present to one another? How are modes of care and living with dignity related to boundaries of speech and silence?
Although neoliberal reforms in Chile have displaced the responsibilities for care onto families and individuals, divesting the state of crucial responsibilities for the well-being of the population, an ethnographic exploration of “care” does not move smoothly across the registers of governmental discourse to lifeworlds.2 Discourses of “self-care” and “self-responsibility” that are advanced in health and social policy presume a self that is sovereign, morally autonomous, and transparent posed against social determinations of “the poor,” who must divest themselves of such determinations to be “free” (see Povinelli 2006). Simultaneously, the expansion of consumer credit and an expanded range of consumer goods impels public discourses on the disorganizing force of neoliberalism in its fragmentation of “nonmarket” regimes of value and social ties (Greenhouse 2010). How self, agency, and collectivity are conceived through these discourses, however, comes into awkward tension with relations as they are actually lived, embodied, and experimented with. Any stable or certain notion of care becomes unsettled when ethnography explores how individuals are always already woven into relationships and how they awaken to their relationships “thus becom[ing] aware of the way they are connected and disconnected” (Strathern 2005, 26).
This book is based on thirty-six months of fieldwork consisting of short two- to three-month trips between 1999 and 2003, eighteen months of continuous fieldwork between 2004 and 2005, and follow-up visits in 2007, 2008, and 2010. Throughout the chapters, I attend to life and the singularity of lives in La Pincoya, a poor urban neighborhood on the northern periphery of Santiago, while drawing on interviews with a range of institutional actors, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and human rights activists. I explore how social and health policies manifest as group therapy sessions, circulations of psychopharmaceuticals, and point scores for poverty programs. I examine how unstable work patterns and the expansion of consumer credit has shaped experiences of poverty, experiences that are manifested and lived in intimate relations. These experiences critically recast official narratives of state violence. Throughout this book, I consider this matrix of debt and state interventions within scenes of daily life to explore how political and economic forces are realized in people's lives.
NEOLIBERAL EXPERIMENT
The aspirations, disappointments, and daily struggles that make up this book reveal how a past continuous inhabits actual life conditions, specifically through continuities in economic and social policies between the dictatorship and the democratic governments. During the dictatorship, life conditions underwent a profound reorganization through Chile's experiment in neoliberal economics. Led by Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago's school of economics, who were known as the Chicago Boys, this experiment in free market reforms drew from a history of unequal north-south relations that took place in the cold war context.
In 1955, the University of Chicago and the Catholic University in Santiago signed an agreement for academic exchange, allowing for the training of more than a hundred Chilean graduate students at the University of Chicago (Valdés 1995). As is well known, the Chicago school proposed that economic theory was premised on “natural laws,” much like physics, biology, or chemistry. These natural laws were based on the rational behavior of “man,” homo economicus, and the autoregulation of the market. The elaboration of these natural laws was based on the empirical testing of economic theory and the coherence of economic models to “reality.” Economics, from this perspective, was not a domain apart from the social. Rather, economics encompassed all of human action and sociality, and economic science was the analysis of and intervention into this reality (Burchell 1991; Lemke 2001).
As Milton Friedman states, “In discussions of economic science, ‘Chicago’ stands for an approach that takes seriously the use of economic theory as a tool for analyzing a startlingly wide range of concrete problems, rather than as an abstract mathematical structure of great beauty but little power; for an approach that insists on empirical testing of theoretical generalizations and rejects alike facts without theory and theory without facts” (quoted in Valdés 1995, 65). According to Friedman, more than a description of reality, economic models had explanatory power if they were predictive and could model a reality construed as what should be natural. As political scientist Juan Valdés remarks, “As a consequence, one of the central functions of theoretical analysis was in their [the Chicago school's] view the formulation of normative rules” (Valdés 1995, 65). Thus, the Chicago school's approach to neoliberalism was based not on predetermined human nature, but on the construction of the “natural” rational-economic being through normative rules that were defined through economic science.
With the golpe del estado in 1973, Chile became a testing ground for this normative economic approach. Scientific expertise, embodied in the Chicago Boys, combined with authoritarianism informed a new experimental and technified reality for state actors and institutions. The market, according to Minister of Economic Affairs Pablo Baraona, was the “economic manifestation of freedom and the impersonality of authority.” As such, it combined freedom's normative principles with the neutral and objective practice of economic science (Valdés 1995, 31).
Viewed as the structuring principle for life itself, the market became the primary mode of governance, and the social became a terrain in which economic rational actors made choices in their own self-interest.3 “Nature,” in terms of homo economicus, was not an a priori given, but instead needed specific technical conditions under which it could emerge. As Baraona remarked, “The new democracy, imbued with true nationalism, will have to be authoritarian, in the sense that the rules needed for the system's stability cannot be subject to political processes, and that compliance with these measures can be guaranteed by our armed forces; impersonal, in the sense that the regulations apply equally to everyone; libertarian, in the sense that subsidiarity is an essential principle for achieving the common good; technified, in the sense that political bodies should not decide technical issues but restrict themselves to evaluating results, leaving to the technocracy the responsibility of using logical procedures for resolving problems or offering alternative solutions” (quoted in Valdés 1995, 33).
The Chicago Boys and the Pinochet regime contrasted this “new democracy” to the Allende government, which they diagnosed as causing an “immoral” and “sick” state of the economy. According to the military regime, the previous epoch of state intervention and centralization had produced a situation in which the economy, and by extension individual rational actors, had become obstructed from their “normal” or “natural” functioning. These obstructions were, in the words of Undersecretary of Economic Affairs Alvaro Bardón, “perverse” (quoted in Silva 1996, 29) and had led to a balance-of-payments crisis and soaring inflation. As the words of Minister of Economy Sergio de Castro suggest, this perversity was attributable to “the result of the years of demagogy and erroneous economic policies, the consequence of an exaggerated statism, the result of exaggerated protectionism that guaranteed monopoly profits” (quoted in Loveman 1988). The military regime therefore called for a “normalization” and “saneamiento” (healing) of the economy. Such normalization would be brought about through the “shock treatment” of structural adjustment.
In the Government Economic Recovery Program of 1975, Minister of Finance Jorge Cauas reiterates Friedman's emphasis on “normalization”: “The purpose of the recovery program which we are discussing in general terms today is to bring about the definitive normalization of the economy by means of a drastic reduction in inflation” (Cauas 1975, 159). The military government drastically reduced fiscal spending by 25 percent, devalued the currency, and removed price controls on almost all commodities. The regime also privatized almost all state-owned enterprises, except for copper mining, and deregulated the interest rates of banks so that they could charge their clients according to their own economic measurements. Public infrastructure such as health care and education were severely curtailed and semiprivatized. And the economy was opened up to the global market by reducing trade barriers and passing new foreign investment laws that gave equal treatment to both foreign and domestic investors (Loveman 1988, 159). Between 1975 and 1979, foreign loans flooded the Chilean economy. This expansion of credit from private international banks, amounting to more than USD 6,120.9 million, allowed the regime to service Chile's public debt, which at the time was the highest in the world on a per capita basis, representing 45–50 percent of all export earnings. The costs of such measures were felt throughout the population, but especially by the urban and rural poor, who saw the minimum wage drop by 50 percent during the first two years of the military regime and the loss of disposable income sharpened by the reduction in social expenditures by the state (Petras et al. 1994, 21).
By the end of 1982, in the wake of the debt crisis that swept across Latin America, the private financial system was on the verge of collapse. The state, via the Central Bank, stepped in to bail out the private sector. This bailout—on the order of USD 6 billion, representing 30 percent of GDP each year—ushered in a new round of structural adjustment, this time promoted by the World Bank. In 1985, Chile received a three-year structural adjustment loan from the World Bank and made a three-year agreement with the International Monetary Fund. By the end of the 1980s, the payments the Pinochet regime was making to service the foreign debt amounted to USD 800 million a year, representing 3–4 percent of GDP and 18 percent of exports (Meller 1996).
With banks and their debtor companies under the control of the Central Bank, the regime initiated a new wave of privatizations of these now public properties and companies—which it sold at much reduced prices to national and international conglomerates, turning public assets into private wealth. With these privatizations also came an influx of transnational corporations that entered into partnerships with several Chilean conglomerates, since these conglomerates could not absorb the heavy debts acquired with their new companies. Transnational corporations bought heavily into public utilities, such as telephone and electricity companies, and bought significant shares of pharmaceutical and nitrite-based chemical industries, steel, and coal mines (Fazio 1997).
With such measures, the regime managed to pay off USD 9 billion of the 19 billion that it owed to external creditors. The “fiscal responsibility” of the state—itself now heavily privatized—was celebrated by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Inter-American Development Bank, which together annually provided loans averaging USD 760 million between 1983 and 1987. With British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan supporting the regime, the “Chilean miracle” was advanced as an argument for structural adjustment across Latin America and for neoliberal reforms in both Europe and the United States. With these economic reforms, the state itself would transform from a welfare state to a subsidiary state that addressed the inevitable generation of “extreme poverty” produced by the market. This “extreme poverty” would be addressed by focalized programs aimed at sustaining minimum requirements for biological survival.
These reforms were advanced through state violence, by disarticulating labor unions and political movements through torture and disappearances. And they produced not only a structural adjustment of the economic system but also, as literary scholar Luis Cárcamo-Huechante suggests, a profound cultural adjustment of the Chilean population (Cárcamo-Huechante 2007). As the 1974 Declaration of Principles makes clear, the military regime viewed itself as installing new “healthy” norms and value systems in the Chilean population: “The government of the Armed Forces and of Order aspires to initiate a new stage in national destiny, opening the way to new generations of Chileans formed in a school of healthy civic habits” (Junta Militar quoted in Vergara 1984). The exercise of competition, individualism, and ownership were some of the “healthy civic habits” that the military regime sought to potentiate through the market and by establishing a subsidiary state.
For example, with respect to private property, the military regime stated, “Chile must become a land of property owners and not a country of proletariats.” Regarding morality, the regime stated, “National politics, lately characterized by low standards and mediocrity, has developed an outlook where personal success has frequently been considered as something negative, to be hidden, something for which an individual must ‘apologize.’ To lead the country towards national greatness, we must conceive a new outlook which will recognize the merit of public distinction and reward those who deserve it, be it for labor output, production, study, or intellectual creation” (Junta Militar 1974, 34). Women's duty was reproduction: “Finally, the present government feels the whole task it has outlined must rest solidly on the family as a school for moral upbringing, of self-sacrifice and generosity to others, and of untarnished love of country. Within the family, womanhood finds fulfillment in the greatness of her mission, and thus becomes the spiritual rock of the nation. It is from her that youth is born who, today more than ever, must contribute its generosity and idealism to Chile's task” (p. 43). In other words, these “healthy civic habits” drew from and magnified a genealogy of the liberal Chilean state that articulated sexuality with political community.
With the democratic transition, governments sought to maintain Chile's macroeconomic success in a global economy while trying to distance themselves from the Pinochet regime's use of state violence. Anthropologist Julia Paley documented the complex political processes in the early 1990s that established conditions for institutional politics as well as possibilities for grassroots mobilization today. Social mobilizations that had taken place during the dictatorship were in the process of being absorbed by the state itself in advancing a “participatory” democracy. Political mobilization in the poblaciones had to contend with the state's valorization of technical knowledge production in concert with its contracting out of public services to the community, in which community members were called on to “actively participate” in resolving their own local needs.
Simultaneously, in the early postdictatorship years, governments strategically advanced a discourse of “democracy” through opinion polls and community participation in order to politically legitimate the continuation and deepening of the economic model (Paley 2001). Indeed, entering into bilateral trade agreements with the United States, China, and South Korea, Chile has consolidated an international reputation of economic stability and fiscal responsibility, making it an attractive country for transnational capital and the possibility of future wealth creation. In this context, a growing private-sector credit industry, both national and transnational, has generated extreme wealth for an elite class, while economic indebtedness from consumer debts accounts for one-third of monthly expenditures in low-income households.
Chile now is registered as one of the ten most liberalized economies in the world, according to the Heritage Foundation. And according to the United Nations Development Program, it has the second-highest level of income inequality—after Brazil—in Latin America. The wealthiest 10 percent of the population earns thirty-four times more than the poorest 10 percent. The three largest private fortunes in Chile are equivalent to 10 percent of the nation's GDP (Fazio 2005, 44).
How these cultural and political adjustments manifest in everyday life, however, is not a straightforward or simple question. Yes, social policies to address poverty have posed citizens as “clients” or “consumers” of public goods, and women as mothers to be “civilized,” and the consumer credit system indeed provides possibilities for advancement in perceived class status. Yet social diagnoses that proclaim the breakdown of “the family” and the generation of a consumer society seem inadequate when one is drawn into lives, when one is invited into homes and takes part in chitchat in the street, cooks, cleans, helps do chores, and runs errands. How to attend to aspirations, disappointments, and bitter compromises became my struggle in writing. The struggle lies not in grasping a world but in being receptive to it.
LA PINCOYA AND RELATEDNESS
Within the boundaries of the municipality of Huechuraba, La Pincoya is bordered on the west by new upper-middle-class condominiums. The Ciudad Empresarial, or Business City, constructed in the late 1990s, also part of the municipality of Huechuraba, forms La Pincoya's eastern border. It is populated by high-rises that contain international advertising firms, global news outlets such as CNN, and offices for international banks and software engineering companies. Green hills on its northwestern and eastern sides separate La Pincoya from these wealthier areas but also provide the backdrop for children playing in the narrow streets, as well as exceptional locations for those children to fly kites on windy spring days.
Taking a bus from Santiago center to the población, one goes up one main street, Recoleta, passing the highway that rings the city, Américo Vespucio. One gets off as the street ends at the base of the hills. Smaller passageways branch off the main street, and walking up those streets, one greets neighbors who sit on the front steps of their patios, gossiping and taking in the sun. Dogs of various mixes and sizes sniff the sidewalks and laze on the patios. One might be called Perla (Pearl) and another called Pelusa (Fluffy), while another might be called Monster (in English) or Bruce (after Bruce Springsteen). Wrought iron fencing separates the street from the patios, which are enclosed on the sides by walls made of bricks, wood planks, or corrugated iron. Plants line many of the patios; some are shaded by grapevines growing on trellises or by large avocado trees. Folklore music streams from the open door of one house. A few houses up, reggaetón. Another one, Rammstein (a German heavy metal band) blares. Shop fronts (almacenes) appear every few houses, interspersed every so often with Pentecostal meeting places. Shops, like Pentecostal meeting places, are part of houses, built within the patio in front of the house and closed off with a large iron gate late at night.
Shops are called by the owners' nicknames or first names, such as La Viuda (the widow), selling fruits and vegetables; Sra. Cecy, selling cheese, cold cuts, powdered milk, bread, spaghetti noodles, Coca-Cola, Fanta, and pharmaceuticals; don Rodrigo, selling scissors, crayons, different papers, toner cartridges, and pens. Shop owners have, among their neighbors, loyal customers to whom they sell goods al fiado, or on trust, payable at the end of the month, although neighbors also tend to occasionally buy from different shops just to support the businesses of others. Continuing up the narrow streets, one is greeted by “Hola vecino/a” (Hi, neighbor), or with a wink and “Hola muñecos” (Hi, dolls). Nicknames are constantly used with endearment or cheeky irony: flaca (skinny girl), flaco (skinny guy), guatón (fat guy), negra (black), rusa (russian or blonde), huacha (“orphan,” or “illegitimate child”), volao (someone high on drugs). Or they relate to one's skills or profession: zapatero (shoe repair), joyero (jewelry maker), carpintero (carpenter), semanero (one who sells goods on credit and asks for weekly payments). I was called various names: negra, flaca, chinita, huacha, but also Clarita by friends and tía Clara (Auntie Clara) by their children.
Between 1968 and 1971, the confluence of state housing policy under President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970), and popular movements for housing (tomas de terreno), established La Pincoya as a población on the northern periphery of Santiago. The presidential election of Frei Montalva in 1964 set the conditions for La Pincoya's emergence. The Christian Democrat party advanced the slogan “Revolution in Liberty,” based on combining technical expertise, liberal political doctrine, and Christian humanistic values (Smith 1982, 110). This position coincided with the Catholic clergy's growing concern for the poor, voiced in two landmark 1962 pastoral letters, and the state's desire to stem communism. Consistent with this evolving Christian doctrine, the Christian Democrats argued that instead of viewing social reality as a struggle between workers and employers, Chilean society should be understood in terms of a tension between “marginality” and “integration” (Salazar Vergara and Pinto 1999; Scully 1992; Smith 1982).
This theory of marginality was advanced by the Belgian Jesuit Roger Vekemans and the Chilean group DESAL (Centro para el Desarrollo Económica y Social de América Latina) under Vekemans's leadership between 1964 and 1970.4 The theory drew in a selective fashion from Oscar Lewis's “culture of poverty” school, emphasizing the traits of self-perpetuating poverty to the exclusion of Lewis's insistence on fundamental structural change, such as wealth redistribution, to contend with poverty (see Lewis 1966). Thus, the urban masses were associated with a premodern, “traditional,” and rural character. Upon migration to the city, these peripheral urban masses were thrown into a state of psychological anomie and political and participatory apathy. The poor, peripheral urban masses were unable to overcome their situation of marginality. They were passive subjects in need of charity and guidance to become active subjects (Castells 1983; Espinoza 1989; Tironi Barrios 1990).
As Janice Perlman explains, this idea of marginality does not signify a “group of the population that occupies the lower rungs of the social scale. They [the marginals] are actually off such a scale. Marginals have no position in the dominant social system” (Perlman 1979, 119). According to Vekemans and DESAL, those marginals, who are understood as outcasts from the social system, require “integration” into the social system and mainstream political process. Two notions of participation were crucial in understanding the nature of marginality. First, passive—or receptive—participation is that participation entailed in the receiving of material benefits from society. Second, active participation is participation in the mainstream political process. Framing poverty in terms of the duality of marginality and integration casts poverty and institutional responses to it in a specific way, as Perlman critically remarks. “The fight against marginality must, therefore, proceed through the creation of new institutions capable of administering external help to the afflicted population” (p. 121). The afflicted population—the marginals—is viewed as not having a self-organizing capacity. It is the reception of material benefits (from the state or charitable institutions) that allows them to self-organize, but within the framework of mainstream politics and sociality.
The Christian Democrats drew on this theory in their implementation of social programs that would instigate a process of internal integration of the marginals. Christian humanism and a liberal state were jointly advanced through the estado social benefactor, or social-benefactor state. Frei's administration began the process of agrarian reform, expropriated 51 percent of the copper mining industry as a source of national income, and expanded social policies for housing and health to address the growing pauperism in the major cities. Public spending and investment were indicators of the scale of this effort. By 1969, total public investment was 74.8 percent of all investment within the country. By 1970, public spending had reached 46.9 percent of the GDP.
To address the housing crisis and illegal land occupations on the peripheries of Santiago, the Christian Democrats advanced Operación Sitio, a new policy that sought a rapid, technical solution. Inaugurated in 1966 by President Frei, the program consisted of the provision of urbanized housing sites, cooperatives, and self-help projects with governmental support, and promoted a concept of the liberal subject who, with proper state support, would build “houses according to [his] own needs and at [his] own pace” (Castells 1983, 180). Yet, while Operación Sitio parsed land into individual properties, it did not include the installation of sewer systems, electricity, or street pavement, nor did it provide building materials for the construction of houses (see Paley 2001).
As the demands for housing went unmet by Operación Sitio, pobladores (the poor of the city) who were living in overcrowded conditions in neighboring sectors of the city began to organize for tomas de terreno on the northern and southern peripheries of Santiago. Organized into comités sin casa (committees of those without housing), the pobladores occupied the land, setting up tents and carrying wood, basic foodstuffs, and lanterns. Once established, they negotiated with the state for housing (a claim to both rights to land and assistance for building) and the basic infrastructure for urbanization, such as electricity and sewage systems. Pobladores as social and political actors emerged in relation to this struggle for housing during the 1960s. Through state employment, they paved the roads and installed the sewer system and organized to buy materials for houses, all of which was called auto-construcción. Autoconstruction thus implicated collective organizing to build both neighborhoods and individual houses (Márquez 2006). Outside Santiago, in all other major cities, tomas occurred on a massive scale. Between 1969 and 1971, 312 tomas occurred throughout Chile, involving 54,710 families, approximately 250,000 people. By 1970, one in six inhabitants in Santiago was a poblador living in precarious shantytown housing formed through tomas (Garcés 1997, 46–47).
La Pincoya was formed through this combination of Operación Sitio and tomas. Between 1969 and 1970, the Ministry of Housing had assigned 1,152 housing sites on the terrain of La Pincoya. The demand for housing, however, far exceeded these sites, and organized tomas extended the occupation of land to the hills that now establish La Pincoya's northern border. With the election of President Salvador Allende, this occupation of land resulted in the designation of 2,036 housing sites.
While organization for housing offers a rich exploration of the dynamics of popular social movements and political process (Castells 1983), the house as process of auto-construcción within a neighborhood also offers ways of approaching relatedness and the moral in everyday life. As Janet Carsten has aptly remarked, “For many people, kinship is made in and through houses and houses are the social relations of those who inhabit them” (Carsten 2003, 37). Houses as material things are constantly being repaired, renovated, and added onto. In the sector of La Pincoya where I worked, houses were originally built as duplexes, with two houses sharing one wall, each with its own patio. Houses originally built with wood frames, partial brick walls, and corrugated iron roofs are augmented with a second story or improved with drywall and insulation. Mediaguas, provisional wood shacks provided by government organizations and charities, expand the living space and are placed in back of the original house or in the patio. These mediaguas can either be free-standing or connected to the original house via a covered walkway of corrugated iron. Walls may be constructed brick by brick through patient effort when money can be spared. Adult children of the second generation live in the mediaguas with their partners and children while trying to save money to qualify for a state-financed home loan. When inhabited, the mediagua (the building material) is called a pieza, or “room.”
The idea of the house helps us attend to the materiality and obligations of kinship. People speak of one's casa de sangre (house of blood) as the place of primary intimate relations. Kinship obligations are spoken of as the compromiso con la casa (the commitment to the house) and include helping economically to maintain the house. Women may say with relief and happiness that their children turned out to be caseros/as (home bodies) rather than callejeros (of the street), meaning that these children are not only responsive to their kin but also protected from the unpredictable forces that the world of flesh-and-blood relations constantly mitigate. The autoconstruction of the house, therefore, can also be understood as the process of constructing and achieving relatedness. That process of achieving, however, can also come with the possibility of estrangement and disconnection.
Houses, however, exist within a neighborhood life of multiple relational modes. They are interconnected through intimate kin relations that are most intensely sustained between women—between mothers and their daughters, between sisters, and between friends. Such interconnections form domestic relations that, again, mitigate the forces of economic precariousness. Separate from domestic relations of intimate kin and friends are relations with neighbors, and through neighbors there is a constant circulation of gossip (pelambre).
When I first arrived to La Pincoya in 1999, I met Leticia through a feminist activist in a nongovernmental organization, who picked Leticia's name out of a Rolodex. Leticia had returned to Chile four years earlier after being exiled to Argentina. She told me that to engage in the life of the población I would have to live in the población. She invited me to live with her in her house. Through her daughter, I met Ruby, and through Ruby, I met Susana. These three women introduced me to their intimate kin, friends, and immediate neighbors. I engaged in both participant-observation in daily life—that is, life as lived—and conversations and interviews with women and men who spoke about their relations, their political commitments, and actual conditions of life in the población. As Robert Desjarlais puts it, “The phenomenal and the discursive, life as lived and life as talked about, are like the intertwining strands of a braided rope, each complexly involved in the other, in time” (Desjarlais 2003, 6).
While engaged in everyday activities such as helping to sew, looking after children, doing the laundry, learning how to wire a doorbell or rig an electricity meter, cooking, and going to the feria (outdoor market), I began to appreciate how the dynamics of economic reforms, as well as state violence, were lived in intimate lives. Far from being the place of safety or take-for-granted stability, as Carsten remarks, “the house and domestic families are directly impinged upon by the forces of the state” (Carsten 2003, 50). Rather than thinking of the forces of the state as “impinging” on the house from without, however, we can think of multiple ways in which the state is layered in people's intimate lives, such that houses and domestics are not neatly overlapping. State institutions and economic precariousness are folded into people's intimate relations, commitments, and aspirations. And further, for many of the men and women I came to know, experiences of torture, exile, and disappearance were realities that took shape in their intimate lives, casting doubt on modes of intimacy themselves.
With the golpe on September 11, 1973, history abruptly took a different course. On that day, men and women in La Pincoya saw helicopters and jets fly over the hills surrounding the población. From those same hills, they saw smoke pouring out of the presidential palace, La Moneda, where Salvador Allende had given his last radio address to the nation and then died. Because of the force of social movements, as well as its association with both socialist and communist militants, the población was a threat to the military regime. Rumors circulated that the regime had plans to bomb La Pincoya and, as people said to me, “erase it from the map.” The regime persecuted the población, subjecting it to military sniper fire. Men and boys were rounded up and contained on the soccer field while military officers interrogated them for suspected leftist leanings. Allanamientos, or household raids, were performed in order to search for contraband materials, such as pamphlets, newspapers, and books, and to take men and women into preventive detention. Men were humiliated in front of their families. Relatives and friends were disappeared, politically executed, and tortured. Those who were militants had to live clandestinely or were exiled.
Along with this state violence in the form of repression and terror, the regime advanced a policy of decentralization to fragment political organization and spatially separate the rich from the poor. According to the regime, decentralization would be the foundation of a “protected democracy.” Grassroots organizations would articulate concrete, local demands to the municipality. Thus, the state, freed of political pressure, would be able to fulfill its bureaucratic technical role. Paradoxically, Pinochet decreed “local participation,” instantiating “participation” through authoritarianism. In 1982, he decreed that municipalization would be institutionalized to “juridically organize the direct participation of the community in local government.” He then consolidated this “local governance” into law in 1988 with the Municipal Government Law (Gideon 2001; Greaves 2005, 193). Mayors were appointed, not elected. Political demands thus became tightly circumscribed to geographic location.
In the name of “local governance” and “participation,” the municipalities were now to provide for their own populations in several key areas: primary care and education, transport and public highways, sanitation, sports and recreation, and local planning and development (Gideon 2001, 224). In urban housing policy, erradicaciones (“eradications,” the forced movement of the poor to land of low value) were undertaken to facilitate the free-market regulation of housing supply. Poor and rich were geographically separated, paving the way for social spending targeted to spatial areas (Dockendorff 1990; Espinoza 1989). Thus a decrease in social spending (from 25 percent of GNP in 1971 to 14 percent in 1981) mirrored an increase in the amount of state subsidies given to the extreme poor. In 1970, 37 percent of the income of a poor family was subsidized by the state, in 1988, this subsidy had increased to 57 percent. The subsidies, however, were barely half of what a worker would make at the monthly minimum wage.
The municipality of Huechuraba was formed through this decentralization process. In 1981, Huechuraba came into existence when the larger municipality of Conchalí, in which it had been embedded, was split into two sections. The new Conchalí was the historic lower-middle-class sector with a slightly higher income level. The new municipality of Huechuraba was, at the time of the split, comprised of poblaciones (the working poor) and campamentos (squatter camps). It now includes a burgeoning transnational business sector, called the Ciudad Empresarial. This sector is directly connected by highway to the international airport. With the influx of upper- and upper-middle-class people into Huechuraba came a pervasive rumor that has ebbed and flowed over the years: that there are plans to expropriate the entire neighborhood because of this sector's surge in property values.
In 2008, when I visited Ruby, a developer was trying to make alliances with local social leaders, such as the president of the Junta de Vecinos (Neighborhood Council), in order to gain neighborhood support for his development plan for La Pincoya that he was proposing to the state under its new “Quiero Mi Barrio” (I Love My Neighborhood) community development program. This program consists of forging public-private partnerships in the name of community development. Thus, the state contracts with private companies, selected through a competitive process, who invest in “development.” I happened to be staying with Ruby when the developer visited. He plugged his pen drive into my laptop and showed us the PowerPoint. His plan involved converting La Pincoya into a barrio bohemio (bohemian neighborhood) of discotheques and bars for international clientele, converting the green hills to flower farms to produce blooms that could be sold to the owners of upper-class condos, and creating what he called a “head-hunting agency” (in English) to filter out the “thieves” in La Pincoya and thus find “honest women” who would be able to work as nannies in the condominiums. He explained his plan while eating a homemade sopaipilla and taking tea in Ruby's house with the children and Ruby's husband, Héctor. Afterward, Ruby politely thanked him for stopping by and offered more than a few niceties; but as she came back into the house, she called him a “snake.” Her eldest son offered more colorful prose. Ruby talked about him to Sra. Cecy, her neighbor, who said she would chain herself to her house before anyone would expropriate it. “People in La Pincoya would not leave their houses.” He did not return, and the plan has not been realized.
CHAPTERS IN TIME
For many of the men and women I came to know, memory is both an ethical practice of the self and autonomous from the self. It is tied to the self's political commitment, but it is also lived in intimate relations and in the very materiality of the house and the neighborhood. Memory also manifests through a past of state violence that is available to the present through the arrangements of the state and market today. Aspirations for democracy and disappointment with actual political and economic conditions also constitute a medium through which relations with intimate kin are lived and sometimes broken.
While I came to know men and women who had been militants in the democratic movements, I was also introduced by these men and women to neighbors whose political affiliations were completely at odds with theirs. Neighborhood life does not fall along clear fracture lines of political affiliation. There are feelings of deep betrayal among those of the same political affiliation, and differences in political commitment within families. While a neighbor might despise her neighbor's political commitments, she might also say that her neighbor is “a good neighbor,” meaning that she is helpful and respectful. In La Pincoya, people inhabit different relational modes simultaneously, so that attending to others in daily life might not entail an all-or-nothing judgment. By considering how people are enmeshed in these different relations, ethnography can attend to the possibilities of solidarity, generosity, and kindness in everyday life. Thus, this ethnography does not just make the point that the self is always in relations with others, as opposed to a self-constituted “I.” Rather, this ethnography considers the importance of how the self is enmeshed in relations. That is, the self is simultaneously enmeshed in different relations that entail different demands and desires.
Likewise, the travails of “the market” are lived through relations: in the difficulties of making ends meet, in temporary work contracts and their unstable wages, and in pervasive economic indebtedness. Indeed, keeping up with mortgage payments on the house through the help of one's intimate kin shows that the forces of the market are not disembodied market values that come from somewhere else and fragment “the family.” Moreover, credit has become a resource in caring for those in one's “house of blood,” a house that connects intimate kin and friends outside that house with those in the house through domestic relations. At the same time, the feelings of responsibility to multiple kin and enormous economic pressures can make this responsiveness a bitter struggle.
In each of the chapters, I attend to different emphases of the market and the state in intimate relations and neighborhood life while also exploring how the state's accounting for the social and moral debts takes shape in La Pincoya. I also write about life in time—as a movement in time, as a work of time on relations, as a past continuous inhabiting the present, or as a being in another's present. Writing in time came both with the long-term nature of this ethnography, which took shape between 1999 and 2010, and with the struggle of finding orientations to time that would open rather than foreclose an inquiry into care.
In chapter 1, I explore the domestic struggles to care for kin as these struggles become entangled with debt and violence in the home. In following the relations in one house between 2004 and 2008, I consider waiting both as a modality of care and as a force of kinship embodied by those in the house. Specifically, I attend to how domestic relations and institutional credit provide temporal and material resources for the care of mentally ill and addicted kin within the home. In this scene, care may be understood in relation to the desire to be infinitely responsive to kin and the difficulty in limiting that desire. Institutional credit becomes entangled with this desire for infinite responsibility to kin.
In chapter 2, I move from the house to the field of friends and neighbors to consider how critical moments of economic scarcity are mitigated and acknowledged through domestic relations, in popular economic forms, and among neighbors. The state sought to address the social debt by expanding poverty programs targeted to the extreme poor, and in this chapter I discuss how the technologies of verification have transformed the social debt into a debt that the poor owe the state for receiving aid; the poor are assumed to be certain kinds of subjects of aid. I then explore how economic precariousness and critical moments are acknowledged in the fabric of neighborhood life, and discuss how boundaries between neighbors and friends inform a dignity that is locally intelligible. By attending to acts of kindness in everyday life, I consider the limits of the actual justice of the social debt, a debt that is empirically accounted for through disciplinary technologies.
In chapter 3, I return to scenes of intimate life, moving between 1999 and 2006. I explore how the official acknowledgment of torture under the Pinochet regime circulated in neighborhood life, and how this official acknowledgment was animated in the everyday lives of Ruby and Héctor, who experienced torture under the regime. I attend to the existential aspects of political commitments and explore how torture is spoken of in relation to conditions of unstable work and economic indebtedness. I bring into focus how aspirations for democracy, and disappointment with actual conditions, are woven into intimate life. Seeking acknowledgment for violations becomes one of many ways in which an awakening to one's present relations might occur.
In chapter 4, I am concerned with the relations between sexuality and political community, specifically with the figure of the mother militant. I turn to the lives of Leticia and her daughter, Julieta, between 1999 and 2006 and bring into soft focus how a break with intimate kin is lived. I explore how, for Leticia, her experience of exile is amplified by a return to the conventional world of kinship relations. I consider how her children's difficulties in receiving Leticia back into the home are haunted by a liberal imagination of political community, which engenders ideas of agency, sacrifice, and the citizen and posits men and women's different attachments to the life of political community. I then consider how Julieta's experiences of the domestic also bear traces of this liberal imagination, specifically in relation to reproduction.
In chapter 5, I change register to consider the fates of community mental health treatment programs for depression in different municipalities, focusing on the creation of the state's National Depression Treatment Program for low-income women. I discuss the consequences of decentralization for this program and then examine the group psychoeducational sessions as sites of experimentation. In La Pincoya, the group sessions invited an exploration of the incorporation of conservative Catholicism into a therapeutic discourse.
In chapter 6, I return to intimate scenes in everyday life to explore care and abandonment and trace how life and death are at play in specific moments of a life. I explore how the program's antidepressants, as well as a host of other medications, are forces within concrete domestic arrangements, or affective configurations. Attending to these configurations can open further questions with respect to domestic triaging, or the domestic decision making on the care and neglect of family members. It queries the limits to an anthropological account of abandonment, particularly when access to context itself is not secure.
AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CARE
This book's central concern is with care and limits in circumstances of poverty and economic precariousness. It is concerned with how care manifests and takes shape in intimate relations, as well as how limits are intimately discovered in the midst of institutional responses to disease, distress, and need. In Chile, and regionally in Latin America, an uneven distribution of resources for health care and public education is accompanied by an expansion of funding for the identification and treatment of specific diseases and for programs that address extreme poverty. A politics of care geared to high-profile diseases such as HIV/AIDS has constituted global health as a right to medication and has increasingly focused long-term intervention in terms of an implementation of health care delivery systems (cf. Biehl 2007; Farmer 2003), even as long-standing and emergent configurations of poverty, need, and disease go unproblematized.
In studies of urban poverty, for example, the paucity of public resources for health and education, the rise of incarceration, and drug-related violence have generated powerful representations of poor urban neighborhoods. These representations have consequences for attending to life within them. Elaborating the notion of “advanced marginality,” urban sociologist Loïc Wacquant has argued that the precarization of labor, along with “state policies of social retrenchment and urban abandonment,” have transformed poor urban neighborhoods from places “bathed in shared emotions and joint meanings, supported by practices of mutuality, to indifferent ‘spaces’ of mere survival and relentless contest” (Wacquant 2008, 241).
But such a representation may elide textures of life and the fragile efforts in self-making that are occurring in circumstances of poverty and how those efforts complexly articulate with institutions. And further, this representation does so through a specific relationship to time: it creates a break between the past and present in order to represent the past (see Strathern 1995). Thus, against the representation of “collective oekumene” in the past, the poor urban neighborhood of today is represented as a “social purgatory” or “territory of perdition” (Wacquant 2008, 233), in which the poor engage in “informal individual strategies of ‘self-provisioning’” (p. 244). Such spaces of perdition, then, call for mechanisms of social and political incorporation to “reintegrate” these spaces back into the fold of a recognizable form of life.
Recent critiques of humanitarian reason have engaged the political and moral stakes in these representations of pervasive suffering and alienation. Didier Fassin, for example, argues that a new moral economy centered on humanitarian reason has marked a shift in the way in which “we” have come to describe and interpret the world. Representations of exclusion and suffering mobilize moral sentiments of compassion, indignation, and care, and these moral sentiments have political value, which entails specific forms of intervention (Fassin 2012). For anthropologist Miriam Ticktin, a politics of care is an antipolitics insofar as it preserves the social order rather than generates a radical political critique (Ticktin 2011). Based on the universality of suffering and pain, this politics in fact operates selectively through compassion for suffering bodies recognized as morally legitimate.
These critiques illuminate how categories of suffering and trauma migrate across domains. In the process, they begin to define new fields of intervention and redraw lines of inclusion and exclusion. Attending to the ways in which violence and harm are existentially experienced, however, shifts the anthropological exercise. Rather than focus on representations of the suffering subject to trace a general moral shift, globally speaking, an anthropological writing that acknowledges suffering engages and responds to a specific life and world. This engagement opens thought to the experience of time in relation to violence as well as the concealments and boundaries in everyday life (see Kleinman et al. 1997; Das et al. 2000). For friends, family, and neighbors in La Pincoya, acknowledgment of the effects of present-day economic precariousness falters when an anthropologist holds up a representation of collectivities and intimate relations that existed in the past in order to emphasize what was “lost.” Rather, the past presents in specific ways and moments. These effects, or affects, are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries in the present, and invest relationships with different hopes, desires, and limits.
Through these refractions, I engage moral projects in everyday life, in which care is a problem rather than a given. I take care as being diffuse and not definable in any simple way. Attending to care is similar to attending to violence, in which, as Veena Das remarks, “contests around the question of what can be named as violence are themselves a sign of something important at stake” (Das 2008, 284). To attend to care as a problem in everyday life, rather than a category with defined borders, has implications for my relation to ethnography. Everyday life is a scene to which I am drawn, rather than a set of routines, practices, or interviews that I observe, evaluate, and extrapolate judgments from. It also has implications for how I understand and engage the moral. While there might be a great deal of moralizing in everyday life, the struggles in caring for others and the complex affects that compose a discovery of limits are existentially experienced in ways that implicate the moral fabric of self-making (Kleinman 2006, 2010). Throughout this book, I engage care as a problem within intimate life, which is itself layered with institutions. I consider the moral not in terms of moral judgments but in the very ways in which self is implicated with others.5 This implication is where limits are experienced.
How might such limits appear in ethnographic engagements with poverty and disease? Unsettling any sentimentalized notion of the family and challenging the taken-for-granted affects that “should” manifest among intimate kin, anthropologists have elaborated such limits around the problem of abandonment. For example, Nancy Scheper-Hughes's discussion of child death in a setting of poverty and extremely high infant mortality highlights the complexity and range of what might constitute abandonment. A small error or a moment of inattention can have fatal consequences: “so much greater vigilance is required to keep an infant alive, even the smallest lapse in maternal attention and care can sometimes be fatal” (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 360; see also Das 2010b). But simultaneously, given the pervasiveness of child death and the often overwhelming circumstances of poverty, “a good part of learning how to mother on the Alto includes knowing when to let go of a child who shows he wants to die” (p. 364). In the lives of Alto women and in the face of multiple dangers to life, death is not opposed to life; rather death is a “valid part of existence, so that death, too, must be lived” (p. 364). A play of life and death is at work in the relationship between mother and infant; abandonment here cannot be understood solely as a discrete moment with intentionalities ascribed to it.
Focusing on the shaping of intimate relations by market forces and medical technologies, João Biehl's discussion of abandonment centers on the domestic triaging of the mentally ill and unwanted (Biehl and Eskerod 2005). The normative family is a parapolity—a “state within the state”(p. 185)—engaged in a “making live” and “letting die” of its family members (see Foucault 1978). Those deemed unproductive, economically speaking, are actively ejected from the family and relegated to zones of abandonment—a social and biological death. These works raise a further set of important questions: How is ethnographic method implicated in understandings of accountability, care, and abandonment? How do modalities and temporalities of engagement with ethnographic sites shape descriptions of the dynamics of care? How do anthropologists come to know the shifting lines of the normal and abnormal, and what are limits to an anthropological knowing?
When I first started my research as a graduate student in anthropology and a medical student, I was interested in the high prevalence of depression in Santiago, which had reached 29.5 percent in primary care. According to the World Health Organization, this prevalence of depression was the second highest in the world (WHO 2001). Psychiatrists and public health officials initiated a national depression treatment program for the diagnosis and treatment of low-income women. This program was cast as both part of a national project of moral healing and an intervention for the health of the poor. The project fit key-in-lock within a critical inquiry of the biopolitical state and the medicalization of the family, in which the woman as mother is responsible for the well-being of her children, the future of the population. But situating myself in La Pincoya, I grew uneasy with a project that focused almost exclusively on citizenship and a circumscribed medical intervention. A whole range of relations and circumstances seemed to be eclipsed through a focused critique of the normative family and “the neoliberal state.”
This local density of relations suggested a different reading of Foucault's writings on medicalization, the family, and the biopolitics of the population. In “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” Foucault traces how medical politics “has as its first effect the organisation of the family, or rather the family-children complex, as the first and most important instance for the medicalisation of individuals” (Foucault 1980, 174). The “close-knit family cell” (p. 182) is the milieu of the child as future adult and is hooked in a reciprocal relation to public health and the institutionalizing and protection of the doctor-patient relation. For Foucault, this medicalization must be understood through a “history of these materialities,” of institutional rearrangements, medical technologies, urban space, the family cell, and bodies of individuals (p. 182, emphasis mine). I do not take Foucault's point here as an explanation for the daily decision making regarding disease and illness within families today. Rather, he offers a key insight: that I might understand medicine, kinship networks, neighborhood, institutions at the margins of the state, and state violence as a specific history of materialities. That is, medicalization has singular histories. Through interviews and partaking in everyday life, I saw the category of depression dispersed into various bodily aches and pains that women colloquially called depresión a ratos (depression from time to time). Experiences of exile and torture were woven into self-making but also carefully bounded. Life was moving. Another thematic horizon took shape.
Over time, I found myself drawn into a range of relationships, from allowing myself to be claimed as a godmother—and therefore assuming responsibilities to my hijado (godchild) and my comadre, as well as to her intimate kin relations spread over three houses—to being claimed by several intimate friendships that have taken shape over a decade. As I was drawn into these relationships, it became evident to me that my concerns with care were not posed in relation to a fixed ideal of the normative family or its opposite, “nonnormative” kinship relations. Rather, because I became implicated in the lives of others in various ways, I had to engage norms in their lives: to appreciate the work of domestic relations, the stakes in concealing need, the delicate struggles over intimate relationships in which the body was staked, or the small neglects and denials that also made up everyday life.
In his essay “The Normal and the Pathological,” historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem asks us to treat life as “an order of properties,” a precarious organization of forces rather than a system of laws against which the “individual [is] a provisional and regrettable irrationality” (p. 125). From this perspective, “living beings have a normative relation to life” (Marrati and Meyers 2008, ix). That is, they respond to their internal and external conditions. Individuality is not an obstacle to the norm but the very object of the norm itself. Paraphrasing Kurt Goldstein, Canguilhem writes, “A norm…must help us understand concrete individual cases…. An alteration in the symptomatic content does not appear to be disease until the moment when the being's existence, hitherto in equilibrium with its milieu, becomes dangerously troubled” (Canguilhem 2008, 129). Disease is therefore “an aspect of life regulated by norms that are vitally inferior or depreciated” (p. 131). We might extend this thought further to consider how living beings experience moments when the whole of their existence is called into question. Experiences of such moments are not normless. Rather, they are experiments with life. This normative relation to life, for example, is revealed in the improvisations that people engage in to mitigate and normalize pains and distress and the moments when these pains are problematized in everyday life (see Das and Das 2006; Garcia 2010; Fullwiley 2011).
Through the process of writing this ethnography, I began to further appreciate the experiments with life that were in my field notes, my interviews, and my ongoing relationships with family and friends in La Pincoya. Desires to care for kin with addiction to pasta base and with chronic mental illness are enmeshed in economic pressures such that the experience of care could pass a threshold and become an experience of one's limit. Everyday aches and pains from unstable work and pervasive indebtedness are treated with a local formulary of anti-inflammatories, vitamins, and sometimes antidepressants. To a large extent, these aches and pains are normalized and taken as part and parcel of the bodily experience of living. I began to appreciate the significance of boundaries: experiences of poverty in La Pincoya call for an acknowledgement of the delicate concealment of both need and assistance that occur during moments of economic scarcity. And, I learned to pay attention to experiments with genre in the efforts to make the self intelligible to others, to present the self to others and to be received by them. Reworking the conventions of the testimonio genre, for example, was one way of making the self present to others, but also a way to withhold the violations of life so that one's children may live normal lives.
If this book expresses a wariness of the fixity of certain critiques, it is because of this engagement with the lives of others. I am wary of a diagnosis of social fragmentation and individualism that relies on a representation of a relational past. I am also wary of a critique of this diagnosis that takes the continued presence of intimate relations as a given. Both assert fixed normative imaginaries of what an individual is and what is expected of intimate relations. To counter dominant imaginaries of the atomized individual and discourses of “self-responsibility”—whether they be of drug addiction, mental illness, or consumer desires—by asserting a fundamental human interdependency based on intimate affects of care and love may eclipse the very boundaries of specific relational modes, the uncertainty in relationships, and the problem of separateness.
Understanding the normative as experiments with life and with self-making allows for the often subtle and fragile ways in which health, or more broadly, a sense of well-being, is momentarily achieved. In the delicate task of responding to others and discovering one's finiteness amid difficult circumstances, life and death are not opposed but rather sketched into each other in different ways at specific moments in a life. I imagine the chapters of this book as leaning on each other. Each chapter takes up specific concerns; the chapters' conversation with each other may further enrich them from within. The challenge for me was to consider both the singularity of a life and the availability of social conventions and genres in which life takes shape, in which the self presents itself to another (Butler 2005). Thus, my writing offers no grand diagnosis, but instead the hope that we might be attentive to the difficulties and achievements of being in another's present.
