I wanted to find out how Catarina’s subjectivity had become the conduit through which her “abnormality” and exclusion had been solidified. What were the various mediations by which Catarina turned from reality and was reconstructed as “mad”—what guaranteed the success of these mediations? As I understood it, new forms of judgment and will were taking root in that extended household, and these transformations affected suffering as well as people’s understanding of normalcy and the pathology that she, in the end, came to embody. Psychopharmaceuticals seem to have played a key role in altering Catarina’s sense of being and her value for others. And through these changes, family ties, interpersonal relations, morality, and social responsibility were also reworked.
Why, I asked Catarina, do you think that families and doctors send people to Vita?
“They say that it is better to place us here so that we don’t have to be left alone at home, in solitude . . . that there are more people like us here. . . . And all of us together, we form a society, a society of bodies.”
Catarina insisted that there was a history and a logic to her abandonment. As I tried to find out how her supposedly nonsensical thoughts and words related to a now vanished world and what empirical conditions had made hers a life not worth living, I found Clifford Geertz’s work on common sense illuminating. “Common sense represents the world as a familiar world, one everyone can, and should, recognize, and within which everyone stands, or should, on his own feet” (2000a:91). Common sense is an everyday realm of thought that helps “solid citizens” make decisions effectively in the face of everyday problems. In the absence of common sense, one is a “defective” person (91).
“There is something of the purloined-letter effect in common sense; it lies so artlessly before our eyes it is almost impossible to see” (2000a:92). That is unique to the anthropological endeavor: to try to apprehend these colloquial assessments and judgments of reality—that are more assumed than analyzed—as they determine “which kinds of lives societies support” (93). Work with Catarina helped to break down this totalizing frame of thought, which envelops the abandoned in Vita in unaccountability. After all, common sense “rests its [case] on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority” (93; my emphasis).
For me, Catarina’s speech and writing captured what her world had become—a messy world filled with knots that she could not untie, although she desperately wanted to because “if we don’t study it, the illness in the body worsens.” Geertz is well aware of the physiological dimensions of common sense. As stories about the real, he writes, common sense is first and foremost grounded in ideas of naturalness and natural categories (2000a:85).
In Catarina’s case, the soundness or unsoundness of her mind was the nature either presupposed by her kin and neighbors or mastered by pharmaceuticals and the scientific truth-value they bestow. Familial and medical de liberations over Catarina’s mental state and the actions that resulted made her life practically impossible, I speculated. Here, the familial and the medical, the mental and the bodily, must be perceived as existing on the same register: tied to a present common sense. Following the words and plot of a single person can help us to identify the many juxtaposed contexts, pathways, and interactions—the “in-betweenness”—through which social life and ethics are empirically worked out, that is, “to remind people of what they already know . . . the particular city of thought and language whose citizen one is” (Geertz 2000a:92).
During my 1999 visit, Catarina gave me her oral and written consent to be the subject of this work. I had no structured method in the beginning, other than continuing to return and engage Catarina on her own terms. She refused to be seen as a victim or to hide behind words: “I speak my mind. I have no gates in my mouth.” Clearly, it was not up to me to give her a voice; rather, I needed to find an adequate understanding of what was going on and the means to express it.4 The only way to the Other is through language. Language, however, is not just a medium of communication or misunderstanding but an experience that, in the words of Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, allows “not only a message but also the subject to be projected outward” (2001:22).
In the essay “Language and Body,” Das (1997) observes that women who were greatly traumatized by the partition of Pakistan and India did not transcend this trauma—as, for example, Antigone did in classical Greek tragedy—but instead incorporated it into their everyday experience. In Das’s account, subjectivity emerges as a contested field and a strategic means of belonging to traumatic large-scale events and changing familial and political-economic constellations. Inner and outer states are inescapably sutured. Tradition, collective memory, and public spheres are organized as phantasmagoric scenes, for they thrive on the “energies of the dead” who remain unaccounted for in numbers and law. The anthropologist scrutinizes this bureaucratic and domestic machinery of inscriptions and invisibility that authorizes the real and that people must forcefully engage as they look for a place in everyday life. In her work on violence and subjectivity (2000), Das is less concerned with how reality structures psychological conditions and more with the production of individual truths and the power of voice: What chance does one have to be heard? What power does speaking have to make truth or to become action?
In Vita, one is faced with a human condition in which voice can no longer become action. No objective conditions exist for that to happen. The human being is left all by herself, knowing that no one will respond, that nothing will crack open the future. Catarina had to think of herself and her history alongside the fact of her absence from the things she remembered. “My family still remembers me, but they don’t miss me.” Absence is the most pressing and concrete thing in Vita. What kind of subjectivity is possible when one is no longer marked by the dynamics of recognition or by temporality? What are the limits of human thought that Catarina keeps expanding? As the work progressed, I tried to help Catarina reconnect with her family and access medical care. But I was faced at every step with the terminal force of reality. This terminal reality requires an anthropological name for its condition.
Why did I choose to work with Catarina and not someone else? She stood out in that context of annihilation; she refused to be reduced to her physical condition and fate. She wanted to engage, and I had a gut feeling that something important for life and knowledge was going on that I did not want to miss. Her words pointed to a routine abandonment and silencing, and yet, in spite of all the disregard she experienced, Catarina conveyed an astonishing agency. Once I found myself on her side, we were both up against the wall of language. Language was not a point of separation but of relating—and comprehension was involved.
The work we began was not about the person of my thoughts and the impossibility of representation or of becoming a figure for Catarina’s psychic forms. It was about human contact enabled by contingency and a disciplined listening that gave each of us something to look for. “I lived kind of hidden, an animal,” Catarina told me, “but then I began to draw the steps and to disentangle the facts with you.” In speaking of herself as an animal, Catarina was engaging the human possibilities foreclosed to her. “I began to disentangle the science and the wisdom. It is good to disentangle oneself, and thought as well.” This remark meant the world to me. I wanted this work to be of value to Catarina. Working with her, as she looked for a way back to a familiar world, was also an anthropological bildung for me. Yes, a pedagogy of fieldwork is hierarchical, but it is also mutually formative, as Paul Rabinow notes: “As it is hierarchical, it requires care; as it is a process, it requires time; and as it is practice of inquiry, it requires conceptual work” (2003:90).5
Here, anthropology had to do something more than simply approach the individual from the perspective of the collective. Treated as mad, Catarina was presumed