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"Posttraumatic stress disorder" has become a set of organizing concepts for trauma. In this essay, I explore alternative framings of trauma that arise out of political economic language. By describing the differing historical languages inhabited by these subjects, I attempt to evoke an understanding of trauma not as an individual possession or etiological event.
"Posttraumatic stress disorder" has become a set of organizing concepts for trauma. In this essay, I explore alternative framings of trauma that arise out of political economic language. By describing the differing historical languages inhabited by these subjects, I attempt to evoke an understanding of trauma not as an individual possession or etiological event.
"Posttraumatic stress disorder" has become a set of organizing concepts for trauma. In this essay, I explore alternative framings of trauma that arise out of political economic language. By describing the differing historical languages inhabited by these subjects, I attempt to evoke an understanding of trauma not as an individual possession or etiological event.
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. P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 170 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 172 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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. P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 174 C. HAN 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, P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 176 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 178 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 180 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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, P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 182 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. P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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 P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 184 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. P1: KEE pp1255-medi-489476 MEDI.cls July 5, 2004 22:31 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. REFERENCES Avelar, Idelbar 1999 The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and The Task of Mourning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan 1993 Dream World of Mass Culture: Walter Benjamins Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of Seeing. In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. David Levin, ed., pp. 309338. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caruth, Cathy 1995 Trauma and Experience: Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory. C. 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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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