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CLARA HAN
THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS: THE TRAUMATIC PRESENT
OF LATE CAPITALIST CHILE
ABSTRACT. In political and biomedical discourses, posttraumatic stress disorder has
become a set of organizing concepts for trauma and traumatic memory. These concepts,
however, are predicated on an understanding of traumatic memory as a discrete etiolog-
ical event that, when reexperienced, is productive of symptoms. In this essay, I explore
alternative framings of trauma that arise out of historical changes in political economic lan-
guage and fromexperiences of monetary, historical, and affective indebtedness in Santiago,
Chile. This ethnographic research is based in an historically leftist poblaci on (poor urban
sector) and follows the interwoven narratives of a formerly exiled communist militant and
her adopted daughter. Throughout this essay, I describe the mothers attempts to inhabit an
untimely language of socialist politics and the daughters rejection of both this language
and her mothers pain. I elaborate on how these attempts are products of and productive of
monetary and intersubjective indebtedness in a neoliberal present. By describing the differ-
ing historical languages inhabited by these subjects, I attempt to evoke an understanding
of trauma not as an individual possession or etiological event, but rather as a referential
dissonance in the neoliberal context. This referential dissonance emerges from the gap be-
tween the historical languages that informsubjectivities. I explore howsuch a gap can create
contexts in which the everyday itself both threatens the disarticulation of the subject and
produces injurious affective relationships. In this way, I interrogate relationships between
trauma, recovery, and the everyday.
KEYWORDS: anthropology of suffering, Chilean society, indebtedness, neoliberalism,
posttraumatic stress disorder, subjectivity, trauma
[H]ow does one not simply articulate loss through a dramatic gesture
of deance but learn to inhabit the world, or inhabit it again, in the
gesture of mourning?
Veena Das (2000), The Act of Witnessing: Violence,
Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity
And now what emerges is that what is to be acknowledged is this
existence as separate from me, as if gone from me . . . the world must be
regained every day, in repetition, regained as gone.
Stanley Cavell (1988), The Uncanniness of the Ordinary
INTRODUCTION
El que nace una chicharra, muere cantandoHe who is born a cicada, dies
singingsays Leticia.
1
Apopular saying in Chile, it expresses a persons essential
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28: 169187, 2004.
C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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170 C. HAN
continuity, that which resists the sculpting of history, and Leticia uses this saying
to describe herself in relation to a social world made alienating. A communist
militant during the socialist years of Salvador Allende (197073) and throughout
Pinochets military regime (197390), Leticia tells me she was labeled a terrorist
by the military regime and was exiled to Buenos Aires in 1987. She returned to
Santiago in 1995 and nowlives with four of her six children and three grandchildren
in a two-room provisional house in the historically leftist poblaci on (poor urban
sector) of La Pincoya.
Four years ago, I met Leticia when beginning my eldwork in La Pincoya, a
poor working-class community that experienced severe military repression dur-
ing the Pinochet era. Many of the inhabitants in La Pincoya know of, or have
experienced themselves, disappearances of family members, torture, and exile.
Such experiences of political violence continually inform the present, not only
through traumatic memories, but also in the way in which this violenceand the
neoliberal economic policies that it instantiatedhas transformed subjectivity and
intersubjective relations. I came to La Pincoya attempting to understand how such
violence has woven itself into the intimacies of family life in the postauthoritarian
and neoliberal context.
Such a focus on the intersections of political violence and neoliberalism with
subjectivity and intimate relations is in dialogue with critical anthropological work
on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma. This heterogeneous body of
work has explored the social and conceptual history of traumatic memory and
PTSD in psychiatric discourse (Young 1995), the politics of suffering and the
stakes of diagnosis in conferring humanitarian aid (James 2004; Salis Gross 2004),
and the cross-cultural comparison of concepts of trauma (Lambek 1996). But here
I would like to pay attention to the etiological nature of the traumatic event and its
relation to historical time and language. In discourses of PTSD, a discrete traumatic
event is linked to a subjects linear historical narrative, such that the event can be
interpretedas productive of PTSDsymptoms. This framingof traumatic memoryas
a reexperiencing of a discrete event, however, disallows other framings of trauma.
These framings are dependent on the interrelationships of language and history.
Consider PTSD from a psychiatric perspective: traumatic memory (and from
this, PTSD) is predicated on a prior etiological event that is causally related to
symptoms (Young 1995). The traumatic event, both inscribed as an unassimilable
memory and transformative of the material biology of the individual, suggests that
traumatic memory is a disease of time as well as an individual possession. That is,
as an owned entity, trauma is that which disrupts the narrative ow of biographical
time (Young1996). Thus, the historical narrative canbe readchronologicallyintwo
directions: the etiological event can be understood to produce present symptoms,
and it can be understood as a narrative that accounts for present symptoms. The
biological consequences of the etiological event, on the other hand, can only be
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 171
read in one direction: the traumatic event precedes current biological dysregulation
and therefore precedes present symptoms (Young 1996).
Psychoanalytic writings on trauma also explore this concept of belatedness
and the unassimilable nature of the historical event for the individual (cf. Janet
as cited in Young 1995; Caruth 1995). The return of the event in the form of
dreams, hallucinations, and thoughts is read as absolutely literal, unassimilable
to associative chains of meaning (Caruth 1995: 5). Yet in both cases, psychi-
atric and psychoanalytic, the underlying premise of an historical event that is
unassimilable to present chains of meaning rests in part on a stable language
of the everyday. In a sense, the stability of language is a condition itself for
the past event to be understood as haunting the individual in the form of aber-
rant symptoms. That is, the traumatic event, split off from a stable language,
makes failing attempts to reinhabit this language and is therefore productive of
symptoms.
My questions regarding violence and trauma, however, are framed in a different
manner, taking for granted neither cultural idioms nor medical knowledge as lan-
guages that provide the conditions for the everyday. That is, I have been concerned
with the radical doubt experienced by subjects whose intimate relations are embed-
ded in ongoing politicaleconomic violence, conditions in which language itself
is often mutable and historically contingent. These are dimensions of trauma that
escape both critical analyses of medical knowledge and cultural idioms, dimen-
sions that necessitate working on the borders of language, narrativity, and political
economy.
2
Recent works on violence, recovery, and subjectivity have unpacked the signif-
icance of reoccupying and renarrativizing sites of destruction and injury in order
to regain or recuperate a sense of the everyday (see Das 1997; Das et al. 2001).
This often painful recovery of the everyday necessarily entails some kind of work
of mourning, work which involves weaving traumatic memories, spaces marked
with violence, and the fragmentation of social orders into ongoing intimate rela-
tionships. Yet as I came to know Leticia and her children, I began to have further
questions and worries about this link between the work of mourning and the re-
cuperation of the everyday. For Leticias work of mourning occurs in a socialist
discourse that her children do not want to or cannot acknowledge
3
; and instead
of making possible the intricate repair of relationships, her discursive practices
have created a context of injurious affective relationshipsso injurious that, for
Leticia, the everyday itself remains in question.
Thus the concerns I seek to explore in this piece focus on the work of mourning
when it occurs in an untimely site of discourse. Literary critic Idelbar Avelar
refers to the untimely as that which runs against the grain of the present. . . . The
untimely takes distance from the present, estranges itself from it by carrying and
caring for the seeds of time (Avelar 1999: 20). Reading postdictatorial literature of
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172 C. HAN
the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil), Avelar views untimeliness
as that which allows for a critical thinking through of the epochal transition from
State to Market and the historical defeat that this transition entailed for Southern
Cone writers (Avelar 1999: 20). That is, the untimely discourse of a socialist
politics in the Southern Conea defeated discourseallows for both a critical
engagement with and mourning over the present hegemony of neoliberal political
economic discourse.
4
But here, I am concerned with how subjects like Leticia inhabit this untimely
discursive locus, a locus that arguably has lost its present social referents. I examine
how, in the throes of the market themselves, these subjects are pulled between an
embodied discourse of socialism and the vicissitudes of the market. In inhabiting
this contradictory space the subject him- or herself is at stake (Povinelli 2000: 510).
What are the subjective and intersubjective tensions experienced by subjects who
face competing obligations from family members and their untimely discursive
practices, and from the logic of capital and ideological commitments? What kind
of recuperation of the everyday is possible in such contexts?
RETURNING EXILE
Thus, we return to Leticia, who continues to speak and narrate from the site of
a ruined and untimely discourse. In distinction to her family, Leticia yearns for
the arrested socialist project of Salvador Allende and laments a present milieu of
consumerist apathy. She speaks of herself as a militant communist who fought
against Pinochet and who paid for her idealism through her past political exile.
Yet through this disjuncture between her locus of speech and that of her family
members, and their violent negotiations over these different modes of narration,
her sense of exile continually returns.
The alienation, she says, did not begin with Pinochets golpe del estado (coup
d etat), but with her return to Chile after eight years of political exile. Institu-
tionalizing a radical form of technocratic governance, the military government,
from 1973 to the beginning of the so-called democratic transition in 1990, at-
tempted to make Chile into a state-managed laboratory for neoliberal economics.
The regimes Chicago school-trained economists sought to bring about a pro-
longed and profound operation to change Chilean mentality (as cited in Silva
1996) in which the ideal of homo economicus would be economically and socially
inculcated in the populace, materializing classical economic writings on the cult
of rationality and individual liberty (Silva 1996: 119).
With the incipient democratic transition in 1990, Chiles international fame
as a successful model for neoliberal economics and postauthoritarian status
continued to recongure the referential frame of Chilean political economic
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 173
discourse. Thus the Socialist party, in an alliance with the Christian Democrats
(the Concertaci on), itself uncritically adopted the language of the market as a fun-
damental part of democratic governance. Anthropologist Julia Paley (Paley 2001)
aptly elucidates the changing political discourse of the Socialist party: during the
Allende administration, politics were rooted in a Marxist economic analysis. Dur-
ing the transition, however, renovated socialists focused their efforts on restoring
political democracy. Socialist party member Enrique Correa epitomized this dis-
cursive shift and its material consequences: The Socialist Party . . . represents a
new way to be leftist: . . . the Socialists are moderate, democratic, trust in the rules
of the market . . . no longer believing in statism and centralism, but rather in a state
which has only a regulating function and in an increasingly privatized economy
(Correa as cited in Paley 2001: 99). Further, the Concertaci on worked to legitimize
the economic success of the Pinochet regime while dissociating it frompast author-
itarian rule, as Edgardo Boeninger, secretary general to the rst Concertaci ons
administration, remarked: Without this legitimation . . . the model of an economy
open to the exterior, based on private property and the market, would not have
developed in Chile. We have legitimated the past . . . on the basis of this being part
of the reality of Chile in the present and future (as cited in Paley 2001: 126).
For subjects like Leticia, such a change in the referential landscape transformed
a once familiar time and place into an ongoing exile. This sense of alienation eluci-
dates the fundamental relationship between language and exile. Michel de Certeau
elaborates on this relationship in his work on the crisis of Christendom during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For religious believers, he remarks, the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries in France were a period of radical questioning of
Christendom and a disintegration of a sacred world; the institutions of meaning
were shattered and believers
had nothing left but present exile. . . . In other words, they were leading lives of exile,
hounded fromtheir land by the delements of history. The themes of mourning, disconsolate
despite the intoxications of newaspirations, were endlessly repeated. Here again, referential
permanence is lacking. (de Certeau 1997: 86)
Such is the case with many leftists in La Pincoya; with referential permanence
lacking, they reluctantly and quite painfully seek to weave themselves into the
new fabric of signiers within Chiles late capitalism.
Others, however, are not so fortunate in rearranging accounts of past events to
endow them with a different meaning and to draw out reasons for acting differ-
ently in the future (White 1987: 150). Some, like Leticia, are called crazy by
both their family members and neighbors, because their disconsolate discourse of
mourning is seemingly out of joint with local and national realities, and because
the consequences of their discourse as concrete actions have devastating and tragic
effects not only on them, but on their close relations.
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Abare light bulb illuminates the concrete oor and the couch in the house where
Leticia lies, her worn boots still on. With no money for parafn to heat the house,
she burns charcoal in a tin can in the center of the oor. In one room, Leticia lives
with her three youngest children: Lorenzo, 22, Hector, 13, and Darwin, 12. In an ad-
joining room, Leticias adopted daughter, Julieta, 34, lives with her husband Jorge
and their three small children. Leticia is exhausted fromher work as an assistant to a
kindergarten teacher, fromthe continual ghting of her two youngest children, and
from her social commitments. She tells me that she is having a crsis emocional
and is experiencing depresi on neoliberal (literally neoliberal depression) due
to her feelings of isolation from her family and feelings of impotence and frus-
tration at the current economic, political, and cultural climatea climate that she
characterizes as individualistic, consumerist, with neither memory nor justice. We
remain in silence. Radio Nuevo Mundo, a community-based radio station, begins
to play the songs of Victor Jara, a renowned communist singersongwriter. He was
tortured and executed by Pinochets military regime ve days after the golpe del
estado, on September 16, 1973. With her arm over her head, Leticia sings with the
lyrics,
Lev antate y mrate las manos Rise and look at your hands
Para crecer estrachala a tu hermano To grow, outstretch your hand to your brother
Juntos iremos unidos en la sangre Together we will go united in blood
Ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte Now and in the hour of our death
Amen, amen, amen. Amen, amen, amen.
Wiping away tears, she explains to me,
And this was thirty years ago, and we are in the same situation, and no est a ni ah la gente (the
people do not care). In this epoch, we were all a family, to be a compa nero was like . . . like
to be I myself, we were all one and one was all. It was a climate of solidarity, commitment,
companionship that I will never see again before I die. . . . My dreams, my hopes, my
memories are all linked to an epoch [the socialist epoch of Allende] that permits you to
survive this emotional crisis. (En este epoca, eramos todo una familia, ser compa nero era
como . . . como ser yo mismo, eramos todo uno y uno era todo, era un clima de solidaridad,
compromiso y compa nerismo que creo que me voy a morir, y, a lo mejor, nunca voy a vivir
lo que viv. . . . Mis sue nos, mis esperanzas, mis recuerdos estan todo ligado a una epoca
que te permiti o sobrevivir en este crsis emocional.)
Now, she says, not even my children understand me and all I have left are
my own memoirs. Leticia began to privately write her memoirs two years ago,
giving them the title From the window, because, as she explained to me, she
feels that she is witnessing both her past and present life outside of her, as if
looking through glass. The past assumes the status of the romantic, as an epoch
charged with an excess of personal and social meaning. And of the present,
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 175
Leticia remarks, this reality is all images, consumers without memories, nothing
concrete.
In her opposition to consumerist and individualist forms of life, Leticia narrates
an autobiography hinging on her political militancy and consequent exile as a
social and personal sacrice gone unacknowledged. During the Pinochet regime,
she worked by day as an assistant to a primary school teacher and by night as
a triage nurse, extracting bullets out of the bodies of her compa neros who had
taken up arms against the milcos (the military). She recounts how she worked
25 hours in a 24 hour day; how she once hid a wounded compa nero in her house
for three days while the military scoured the neighborhood in search of him; how
she carried barrels of water on her back from a common faucet in the poblaci on
because the military regime cut off the water supply to individual houses; how
she and other women formed an olla com un (communal cooking) to stretch the
available food in the poblaci on so that no one would starve.
In 1987, however, military repression intensied, particularly on targeted red
areas such as La Pincoya. During this time, Leticias photo appeared on leaets
withthe headingTerrorista. Withher face plasteredonbrickwalls andlampposts,
Leticia knew that her time to leave the country or be apprehended by the secret
police was fast approaching. That same year, on a tip that the secret police were
waiting at her home to take her away, Leticia did not return home from her day
job. Instead, she boarded a bus to Buenos Aires, leaving her family without an
explanation. While exiled, Leticia only received news of her children through
compa neros who made trips between Santiago and Buenos Aires. For eight years,
no direct communication took place between Leticia and her children.
In 1995, she returned to La Pincoya with two small children born in Buenos
Aires, and her new lover, El Negro, a Chilean militant communist (MIRista) who
himself had been tortured and exiled. Amidst the lingering headiness of redemoc-
ratization, however, Leticia found her children turned to adults, with Julieta, the
oldest, acting as care-taker of her three younger brothers, and her utopian ide-
als of socialism thoroughly discredited with the international success of an
economically emergent Chile. El Negro, bitterly disillusioned by the change
in Chilean mentality, immersed himself in cheap wine and hard liquor. Leti-
cia and El Negro fought like never before, with El Negro beating Leticia and
the children. After a year in the house, he had an affair with a new lover and
left Leticia. Yet, Leticia says that she still is in love with El Negro. Hes a
machista, she says, but he is intelligent and consciente. Hes made a compromiso
social.
As in her injurious bond to El Negro, Leticias desiring and despairing grip on a
socialist politics and form of life rubs raw her family relationships in the present,
fomenting a multiplication of everyday violences (Kleinman 1997). Working dur-
ing the day, she attends meetings for cultural and political groups at night, spending
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176 C. HAN
more time involved in community organizing than with her two younger children,
Darwin and Hector. She comes home with shooting, prickling pains that radiate
down her spine and arms. The pains are so intense that she yells at Darwin and
Hector when they come to embrace her. They angrily shout back: they hate her,
they want her to die, and they want to live with their father, El Negro. They at-
tempt to hit her and she angrily yells back at them, Callate! (Shut up!), and
sometimes she hits them back.
After a particularly violent outburst, Leticia, obviously shaken, said to me, You
know, I never was beaten as a child. Now you have seen me hit Darwin, but hitting
him also hurts me. I never was a golpeadora (a woman who beats her children)
and I was not brought up a golpeadora. At times, no s e quien soy (I do not know
who I am). After a pause, she continued
I feel un conicto por adentro (an internal conict). Perhaps if I had not left the country, if
I had been a mother to the children, then maybe they would not ght with me. And maybe
they would be more committed to remembering. Of course I feel guilt, but they also mistreat
me. Just today, Julieta mistreated me, Darwin mistreated me, and Lorenzo mistreated me.
Julieta thinks only of her family [her husband Jorge and their children]. They dont share.
And look at Lorenzo, hes 22 years old and he acts like he is 15.
She then asked me, Do you see a familia integrada aqu (an integrated, close
family)? I responded, Here? Here, in this house? Yes, she replied. I hesitated,
hoping to forestall judgment, not knowing quite what to say. She replied impa-
tiently, Obvio (obvious), no, look everyone here is en su lado (off on his own).
I work for lo social (the social) and here, in my own house, every one is alone.
Her feelings of guilt were palpable, as was a certain subjective crisis in which the
compulsory obligation of motherhood and family relationships threw into doubt
her discursive practices, and even more, shook her conception and experience of
the everyday.
Perhaps in Leticias predicament, we can imagine inhabiting a formation of sub-
jectivity threatened by skepticism, when language repudiates its everyday func-
tioning, and when grasping a day, accepting the everyday, the ordinary, is not
a given, but a task (Cavell 1988: 171). For Leticia, the doubt cast on her form
of life and her historical trajectory arises when a descent into present everyday
life renders the social world more unknowable or untouchable (recall the title of
Leticias memoirs, From the window; see Das 1998). Thus, Leticias relation-
ship to the external world becomes problematic when the immediate social context
vanishes with the repetition of old words, forgoing a connection with the present
(Cavell 1994: 114). We could consider this shadow of skepticism as fundamen-
tally coextensive with Leticias work of mourning and her plunge into states of
melancholia (Freud 1989). For Leticia is mourning the loss of language itself, a
now untimely language that formed her historical subjectivity. With this loss not
only does the social world become strange and intimate relations wounded, but
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 177
the subject herself becomes part of the loss as well, such that the repeated efforts
to recover this lost language wear thin the sense of self.
DEBT AFFECTS
The story of Leticia has shown us how competing obligations of motherhood
and untimely discursive practices can threaten the disarticulation of the subject
and the givenness of the everyday. But Leticias subjectivity is tied to multiple
registersdiscursive, political, and ideological, and also economic. Caught in a
neoliberal political economy of exible labor, job insecurity, and credit-based
consumption, Leticia and her children are also tethered to the mobility of capital
and forms of monetary and affective indebtedness. Such tetherings both amplify
the discursive disjunctures between them and at the same time bind them into
unbearably obligating relationships.
After nancing a local childrens cultural group on her US$200-a-month in-
come, Leticias money vanishes before she can feed her malnourished children,
and she must ask neighbors, who live in the grips of unemployment and daily job
insecurity, for evening bread. Like many in the poblaci on, Leticia lives in perpetual
indebtedness, using loans from local creditors to pay off the most pressing debts.
In La Pincoya, local creditors can be the neighbors of their debtors or local mar-
kets and department stores; and often, monthly visits by representatives of these
department stores send a foreboding signal to begin squeezing pesos from a slen-
der budget. But other kinds of indebtedness transgure these circulating monetary
debts in the narrow streets and iron-roofed houses. These debts are of an affec-
tive nature, moral obligations between mother and daughter, brother and sister,
neighbor and neighbor, and obligations between political subjects, compa neros
of the beleaguered Communist party, supporters of Pinochet, or the now populist
right-wing parties.
Simmering in the density of these monetary and affective debts, Leticias nar-
ration thickens the air within the dusty walls of the provisional house, at times
making it difcult for others to breathe. Her stories of past political camaraderie
justify assuming the monetary debts of her communist compa nero as an act of ide-
ological loyalty, although local creditors knock on her door for her own monthly
quotas gone unpaid. To cover her other debts, Leticia anxiously signs another high-
interest loan from a different local creditor and asks her ex-lover, El Negro, for a
personal loan to buy sewing machines. She tells him that she hopes subcontracted
piecemeal sewing can add 50 dollars a month to her budget. Instead, she uses the
sewing machine to start a microenterprise to sell girls sweatpants in the local mar-
ket, and she takes out another loan froma local creditor to pay for fabric. However,
her partnership with two other women in La Pincoya falls through. Between her
work and her involvement in local politics, Leticia did not have time to sew her
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178 C. HAN
quota of sweatpants. Bolts of fuzzy material in blues, greens, and yellows litter
one corner of the house.
Shortly after this, Leticia joins another microenterprise, selling liquid detergent
fromher home. Plastic bottles full of greenliquidll the panes of the front windows.
She puts a can on the windowsill to keep track of the money earned from selling
detergent. But soon she loses track of the earnings, drawing money out of the can
whenever she needs to go to the corner store for bread or milk. When she has
nished selling off the last of her detergent, Leticia nds that she does not have
enough money saved to buy the supplies necessary to produce and sell her product.
And, without another source of income, she is unable to pay back the loan from
her ex-lover, leaving her indebted to him. Other creditors constantly knock on the
door, and she has either her son Lorenzo or me tell them that she is not home.
Leticia never directly mentioned the extent of her indebtedness to me, and when
I did manage to ask her about her monetary debt, she engaged my questions by
criticizing consumismo (consumerism) and the political economy of facile credit
that esta ahogando (is suffocating) the poblaci on. She used her children as an
example of this suffocation by credit. Look at Julieta, spending money on cable
when she herself is out of work. And, Lorenzo who cannot pay las letras (monthly
quotas) on a new camera that he did not need. I only gathered an account of
her debts through her son Lorenzo and through my role of warding off repeated
calls from various creditors who told me how much she owed them. Lorenzo was
also uncertain of the depth of Leticias indebtedness. However, he underscored
the gravity of her situation by observing that her income seems to disappear the
minute she receives a paycheck, even as monthly bills remain unpaid. He remarked,
Where does the money go? No one really knows. But I am sure she is struggling
pagando las letras (paying monthly quotas from creditors). I asked Lorenzo why
Leticia would not tell me about her debt. He said, la da verg uenza (it gives her
shame). Imagine, she cannot even tell me, Lorenzo, her own son, how much debt
she has, can you imagine how it would be to tell you? He then tells me, It gives
me shame too, to tell you about her debt. Yet if the debts that Leticia has accrued
remain shamefully unspoken, they are a public secret, creating effects by the fact
of their existence.
With water, light, and telephone bills outstanding, the debts that hang on Leticia
have got Julieta, her adopted daughter, hanging by the neck (colgando del
cuello). Starving and abandoned by her alcoholic mother, Julieta was found and
adopted by Leticia when she was two years old. Now34, Julieta tells me that she is
the only poor fool (huevona) that will stand with her mother until the day she dies.
Nevertheless, to Leticia, Julieta is a disappointing apolitical consumer. She wears
ideology like trendy clothing bought in the market: Julieta only participated in
protests against Pinochet when they were de moda (in style), and she is more
interested in aparentandose (creating an image of wealth above ones material
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 179
means) than in improving the situation of herself, her family, or the community.
Evoking the sense of the other to inscribe her autobiographical narrations, Leticia
tells neighbors that her adopted daughter walks around with la cabeza lavada
(brainwashed) and chases Julietas friends away from the house, calling them
ordinario (coarse, ordinary) and consumista (consumerist).
Nevertheless, bound to Leticia in this agonistic relation, Julieta is obliged, or
indebted, to Leticias vision of the social. She says she owes her life to Leticia,
and she pays her debt by transmuting obligation into household money. Faced with
her monthly bills and debt payments, Leticia ironically demands that Julieta pay
the bills or leave the house; for, stemming from her commitment to the social, she
has not a peso to her name. On the income of her husbands part-time work as a
supermarket butcher, Julieta pays rent to Leticia for occupying one room of the
house and for her familys daily needs and cable TV, which she views as a basic
necessity for herself and her children. Given these monthly ultimatums, Julieta
frantically scrambles for extra money. She is frustrated that Leticia gives away
her own income and Julietas rent payment to all things social before paying for
the familys basic necessities. In contrast to her brother Lorenzo, Julieta attributes
Leticias vanishing income not to her perpetual indebtedness, but rather to her
over-commitment to, or compulsion for, lo social.
Yet, even with the added burden of monthly bills, Julieta tells me that she does
not feel rabia (anger or rage) toward her mother. Rather she feels culpable
(guilty) and says that Leticia me da pena (gives me pain). For Julieta believes
that her mother is advancing these monthly ultimatums not only out of economic
desperation, but also out of a desire to test Julietas loyalty. As Julieta says, She
knows that I will always be a su lado (by her side), she knows that she can always
depend on me. So she does this s olo para molestarme (only to bother me). In the
same breath, however, Julieta tells me that she feels atrapada (trapped) within
these four walls. Leticia knows that she has nowhere else to go.
When Julieta cannot manage to pay the outstanding bills, the water, electricity,
or telephone is cut. Ironic smiles and acidic gossip about Leticia gone crazy
run up and down neighboring streets. Among her neighbors, some say that Leticia
cares more about the social than her own children, much to Julietas shame.
After days without either electricity or water, Julieta, at her wits end, reluctantly
asks her mother-in-law Sandra, who lives across the street, for a loan. But, Sandra
is also struggling, with two of her daughters addicted to pasta base (a form of
crack-cocaine) and no source of income save her sons work as a cook. Sandra
offers to bring almuerzo (lunch) for Julietas children. She says that the children
should not go hungry at the cost of paying the bills. But she can do no more.
When all else fails, she visits Don Alejandro, as she did when I lived and worked
with her and Leticia. Alocal butcher and shop owner, he is also the local campaign
point man for the municipalitys right-wing mayor. In exchange for a promise
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180 C. HAN
to campaign for the right-wing party, Julieta meets with the mayor. As a result,
Leticias bill payments are postponed and basic necessities reconnected. To Julieta,
the exchange of local political support for debt relief posits neither Julietas nor
Leticias leftist political views against the mayors conservative politics. No estoy
ni ah (I could care less), she says. In distinction to her mother, Julieta evokes
another popular saying, Hoy por m, ma nana por t (Today for me, tomorrow
for you), and argues that this is the only politics one can live by in todays Chile.
In discussing the relationships between money and distanciated relations,
Giddens describes credit and debt as a mode of deferral, providing the means
of connecting credit and liability in circumstances where immediate exchange
of products is impossible. . . . Money provides for the enactment of transactions
between agents widely separated in time and space (Giddens 1990: 24). Thus,
credit and debt are a means of bracketing time-space by coupling instantaneity
and deferral, presence and absence (Giddens 1990: 25). Georg Simmel outlines
the psychological and sociological consequences of money in modern times by
remarking that it provides the necessary psychological distance or barrier needed
for the maintenance of modern social life: In this way, an inner barrier develops
between people, a barrier, however, that is indispensable to the modern form of
life (Giddens 1990: 2627; Simmel 1990).
The debts accrued by Leticia and transferred to Julieta, however, mark a different
sort of modern subjectivity: the indebted subject. Here, indebtedness engenders an
emotive tonality of the subject, a subject who is pulled apart between different
levels of ethical and monetary demands (Povinelli 2000: 511). Thus, Leticia para-
doxically mourns a neoliberal present through monetary transactions that keep her
tethered to her untimely socialist ideals. And fromthis fractured position emanates
the shame expressed by her silence over her debts. This silence is worth noting, for
it evokes the complex interactions between the subject threatened by skepticism
and the fate of language expressed as the condition of the human voice (Cavell
1994: 139). In Leticias silence we see the subject made fragile by inhabiting such
profound contradictions, for her absence of voiceas an emotive toneagain
reveals the uncertainty of her existence in the contradictory present.
But the work of indebtedness moves beyond the radical doubt created for the
subject. In the case of Leticias family, it is a condition of intersubjective relations, a
kind of atmosphere that cannot be expelled to an outside (Das 1997: 208). And
such a condition of indebtednessas a groundwork for intersubjectivitycreates a
eld of contradicting affects and effects. Consider Julietas obligating relationship
to Leticia. Julieta experiences Leticias monetary debts as a continual testing of
her own historical indebtedness to Leticia and Leticias socialist politics. These
historical debts make Julieta feel unbearably tied to Leticia, or trapped in Leticias
untimely language. Yet to maintain this relationship, Julieta must betray Leticias
language (her socialist politics) by creating her own debts with local right-wing
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 181
politicians. Such contradictions and betrayals, however, also create the bedrock
for other narrations of history and a different retrieval of voice.
JULIETAS RETELLING
Such a retrieval of voice marks Julietas retelling of her familys history. Until now,
I have written of Leticias work of mourning and her loss of voice. Her untimely
referential frame has cast her into self-doubt and fomented painful relationships.
Through Julietas retelling of Leticias exile, however, we can locate an historical
agency of the subject through language allow[ing] not only a message but also the
subject to projected outward (Das and Kleinman 2001: 22). Such retellings also
give us an entr ee into howintersubjectivity makes possible interactions between the
loss and retrieval of voice and the limits of acknowledgment in certain contexts.
5
Leticia talks about exile, hueveando (fucking around, making nonsense), but
she never really was exiled, Julieta told me. Leticia fell in love with El Negro
while she was married to Julietas father, the father of the three younger brothers.
She began to have an affair with El Negro and was pregnant with their rst child,
Hector, when El Negro was arrested and tortured for his work as a communist
militant. He was forcibly exiled to Argentina in 1987. Rather than face the exile
of her embodied political ideals and lose the father of her unborn child, Leticia
decided to follow her lover and leave her family. Julieta said that she was the only
one in the house that knew about the affair and Leticias pregnancy. When Leticia
did not return home that day from work in 1987, Julieta knew that she had left
us abandoned and took it upon herself to tell her father the news of her affair.
Leticias abandonment and Julietas knowing silence so angered Leticias husband
that he stormed out of the house, never to return.
The children were left to manage on their own and only heard about their
mother through her compa neros. There were promises that she would send for
her children, but none were fullled. As the oldest, Julieta found work as a live-
in nanny to support her three brothers and herself. She recounted her work as
degrading and dehumanizing, a time in which the owner of the house attempted
to rape her and violently beat her for resisting his sexual advances. During this
time, the oldest of her younger brothers, Marco, became the leader of the militant
Communist youth group in La Pincoya, and after Leticias absence, their house did
in fact become a site of intense police vigilance. Under this extreme political and
economic pressure, Julieta effectively became la due na de casa (person in charge
of the household) and was economically and morally responsible for the running
of the household. As she said, I paid the bills, and saque la cresta (beat up) any of
my brothers who got into trouble. She compared herself to Leticia:
When I was running the house, none of the cabros (the kids, referring to her younger
brothers) were taking drugs. If they did, I would beat them up and they knew it. But now,
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182 C. HAN
look, Lorenzo is addicted to pasta base, and Leticia just turns a blind eye. This huevon
(fucker) is medio loco (half crazy), and Leticia says nothing.
When Leticia came back to the house, she could not accept Julietas new role
as older sister/surrogate mother. Leticia attempted to reinstate herself as the moral
authority of the household. She also attempted to have the children accept her
new lover El Negro as their own father. When Leticia told Julieta to call El Negro
father, she refused and told her younger brothers to refuse as well. Leticia kept
slapping my face, telling me to say father, but I refused, just stayed silent. Is this
huevon (fucker) related to me? No. Hes only her compa nero. Its her business. I
would not say it. She gave up, and my cheeks, they were red, red fromthe slapping
for days.
The house was then divided into two, with Julieta and her husband Jorge taking
one side and Leticia, El Negro, and the three brothers and two half brothers born
in Buenos Aires taking the other. Even with this split in the household, however,
Julieta says that she still maintained her position of moral authority. As she said,
All of my younger brothers, they come to me when they need advice. Marco came to me
with all his worries before he was going to marry his wife Vero. Did he talk to Leticia about
his worries? No, he came to me because he trusts me. And Lorenzo, he comes to my side
of the house when he loses another job and is in trouble. Does he talk to Leticia? No. None
of them depend on Leticia. They all know that she is media loca (half crazy).
Julieta then went on to negate Leticias role as a proper mother.
Look, I never saw Leticia as a mother. She is more an egoista than she is a mother. She
expects everyone to give to her, crying about howshe has no money, howshe is so depressed,
but she gives nothing to us in return. If I could, I would live apart from her, cada uno para
su lado (everyone in his place).
Since the time that Leticia came back, the house has also been lled with a
distrust of the others words. Julieta said that Leticias abandonment of the children
and her desperate commitment to lo social has irreparably broken a fundamental
trust between them. She said, How could she just leave us botados (thrown out)
and come back and lie about her exile? Now, although she said that she still feels
indebted to Leticia, she did not believe her stories of suffering. Julieta warned
me, Dont trust everything Leticia tells you. Shes always making up stories
about her suffering. Always llorando (crying) about her exile. You have to get
used to it and dont let it affect you. Me acostumbr e (I got used to it) and now
la dejo hablar y hablar (I let her talk and talk). Thus, with her retelling of
history and her doubt of Leticias pain, Julieta projects herself as a subject outward
to the social world and to those that listen to her. In a move that negates her
mothers pain and her role as a proper mother, Julieta instantiates her historical
agency in a situation in which she is irrevocably tethered to monetary and affective
debts.
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 183
CONCLUSION: THE TRAGIC
As a spoken narration, Julietas words slip quietly into and out of the pauses of
Leticias laments; and Leticia herself may possibly never hear Julietas words.
Yet through her storied movements, Julieta marks empathic limits to her mothers
untimely practices. In a tragic sense, Leticias narration of exile materializes and
mutates in the intimate ssures traversing her autobiography and her daughters
historical narrative, her task of mourning both amplied and renounced. Such a
state of returning exile evokes the importance of acknowledgment and the tragic
consequences of a turning away fromanothers pain. For what is at stake in Julietas
acknowledgment is not only the future of intimate relations themselves but also
the recovery of the everyday.
6
The limits of acknowledgment evoked in Leticia and Julietas relationship point
us to a central problem in the recovery of the everyday for subjects whose institu-
tions of meaning have been radically altered and who now inhabit a social context
where historical signiers have lost their signieds. It is a crumbling of language,
as it were. As we have seen, while Leticia attempts to recover her sense of the
everyday through her obligations as a post-communist militant mother, her work
of mourningevidenced in her compulsive work for the socialis in an untimely
language, a language which neither her family nor her social world shares. Such
mourning creates a crisis of the everyday, and puts into question what recovery
from exile means or how it would take place. Through a lack of acknowledgment
based on the dissonance between languages, the moment of exile is continually
re-inscribed, and a reoccupation of the site of devastation leads to more undoing
of relations.
But the undoing of intimate relations insinuates neither affective distance nor
bonds broken. Rather, what I have attempted to evoke is how this limit to ac-
knowledgment is instantiated in the context of monetary, historical, and affective
indebtedness. Such indebtedness ties subjects together while creating painful con-
ditions for the loss of voiceas seen in Leticias shameand the retrieval of
voiceas seen in Julietas retelling of history. Here, however, we see that such
interactions between loss and retrieval of voice are not moments of healing and
recovery, but traumatic moments of a turning away from the present world or from
the others pain.
It is within this nexus of dissonant languages and multiple debts that I engage
the question of trauma. I have sought an exploration of trauma as neither an in-
dividual possession nor etiological event, but rather as a referential dissonance in
the neoliberal context. For, through the stories of Leticia and Julieta, the symp-
toms of trauma emerge as the limits to acknowledgment. These symptoms arise
neither from the belatedness of a singular traumatic event nor through biological
processes, but rather through the gap between historical languages and how those
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184 C. HAN
languages inform subjectivity. And in this neoliberal context, a modern indebted
subject such as Leticia wanders in this gap facing both the past and present as
moments of disarticulation, and as moments in which her most intimate relations
turn away from her laments.
7
It is the tragic aspect of this turning away that I have chosen to mark this text,
as exemplary of the traumatic nature of the present time for many in Santiago.
For writing the story of Leticia and Julieta creates a counterpoint to the liberatory
praise of a neoliberal democratic Chile, while allowing for the existence of a body
that can be marked by the pain of both subjects (see Das 1998). And perhaps,
at this moment when there is precious little consolation from current economic
strictures, an acknowledgment of the tragedy of this present time for subjects who
mourn referents lost and others who are affected by this mourning is one humble
intervention of the ethnographic endeavor.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost I thank the families of La Pincoya for inviting me into their
lives and making this work possible. I am grateful to my advisors Arthur Klein-
man, Byron Good, and Kay Warren for their ongoing advice and support. I amvery
thankful to my colleagues at the Pan-American Health Organization, Regional Pro-
gram on Bioethics in Santiago, Chile who graciously provide me a warm home.
I am indebted to fellow graduate students Diana Allan, Narquis Barak, Angela
Garcia, Johan Lindquist, Jessica Mulligan, Emily Zeamer; mentors Jo ao Biehl,
Adriana Petryna, and Vincanne Adams; and my sister Alysia Han for their insight-
ful comments and conversations since the beginning of my research. Many thanks
also to Josh Breslau, Mike Fischer, Chris Dole, Lindsay French, Amy Grunder,
Marcos Amaral, Fernando Lolas, Sergio Zorrilla, Alex Bota, Viviana Riquelme,
Laura Rueda, Isabel Toledo, Patricia Delaigue, Leonardo Gonzales, and the Friday
Morning Seminar for Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry at Harvard Univer-
sity for engaging with drafts and thoughts of this work in one form and context
or another, as well as the reviewers and the editors at Culture, Medicine and Psy-
chiatry. This work was supported by an NSF Pre-Doctoral Fellowship; the David
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Weatherhead Center for
International Affairs, Harvard University; the Crichton Fund, Department of So-
cial Medicine, Harvard Medical School; and a National Institutes of Mental Health
NRSA M.D./Ph.D. Pre-Doctoral Fellowship.
NOTES
1. All names used here are pseudonyms.
2. I owe thanks to Josh Breslau for helping me frame this argument.
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THE WORK OF INDEBTEDNESS 185
3. Here, I use the termacknowledgment as elaboratedbyStanleyCavell. Acknowledging
is not an alternative to knowing but an interpretation of it. In incorporating, or in-
ecting the concept of knowledge, the concept of acknowledgment is meant, in my
use, to declare that what there is to be known philosophically remains unknown not
through ignorance (for we cannot just not know what there is to be known philosoph-
ically, for example, that there is a world and I and others in it) but through a refusal
of knowledge, a denial, or a repression of knowledge, even a way of killing it (Cavell
1988: 50).
4. Avelars formulation of the untimely also resonates with Benjamins dialectical image,
the presentation of the historical object within a charged force-eld of past and present
that produces political electricity in a lightning-ash of truth (Buck-Morss 1993: 312).
The dialectical image is a material juxtaposition of images from two time dimensions to
reveal the truth of modernity, at once redemptively, as the expression of utopian longing,
and critically, as the failure to fulll that longing (Buck-Morss 1993: 316).
5. The relationship between trauma and voice therefore sheds light on the possibility of
the encounter with the other. From a psychoanalytic trajectory, Cathy Caruth remarks, But
we can also read the address of voice here, not as the story of the individual in relation to the
events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which ones own trauma is tied up with
the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with
another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to anothers wound(Caruth
1996: 8).
6. As Stanley Cavell remarks of pain, You are forced to respond, either to acknowledge
it in return or to avoid it; the future between us is at stake (Cavell 1997: 94).
7. We can see an analogous situation elaborated by Michel Foucault on Don Quixote,
a gure who once inhabited a discursive world of resemblances and is then forced by
chance to live in the new discursive world of representation: Don Quixote is a negative
of the Renaissance world; writing has ceased to be the prose of the world; resemblances and
signs have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge
upon the visionary or madness; things still remain stubbornly within their ironic identity:
they are no longer anything but what they are; words wander off on their own without
content, without resemblance to ll their emptiness; they are no longer the marks of things;
they lie sleeping between the pages of books and covered in dust. . . . The erudition that once
read nature and books alike as a single text has been relegated to the same category of its
own chimeras: lodged in the yellowed pages of books, the signs of language no longer have
any value apart from the slender ction which they represent. The written word and things
no longer resemble one another. And between them, Don Quixote wanders off on his own
(Foucault 1970: 4748). I thank one of the anonymous reviewers of this paper for pointing
out this theoretical analysis to me.
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MD/PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
and
Department of Social Medicine
Harvard Medical School
641 Huntington Ave., 2nd Floor
Boston, MA 02115
USA
E-mail: clara han@student.hms.harvard.edu

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