Life in Debt. Clara Han
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