Catarina was constantly recalling the events that led to her abandonment. But she was not simply trying to make sense of them and to find a place for herself in history, I thought. By going through all the components and singularities of these events, she was resuming her place in them “as in a becoming,” in the words of Gilles Deleuze, “to grow both young and old in [them] at once. Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new” (1995:170–171). As Catarina rethought the literalism that made possible a sense of exclusion, she demanded one more chance in life.
This is a dialogic ethnography, and the book’s progression mirrors the progression of our joint work. Both Catarina’s efforts, as desperate as they were creative, to write herself back into people’s lives and the anthropologist’s attempts to support her search for consistency and demands for a possibility other than Vita are documented here. The narrative is constructed around my conversations with Catarina and the many people with whom we interacted as the study and related events unfolded—the other abandoned persons and the caretakers in Vita, Catarina’s extended family, public health and medical professionals, and human rights activists. I personally conducted all the interviews that compose the main body of the text and translated them to the best of my ability; they appear chronologically and have been edited only for the sake of clarity and conciseness.14 I wanted the book’s texture to stay as close as possible to Catarina’s words, to her own thinking-through of her condition, and to the reality of Vita, which envelops Catarina and her words.
Fieldwork and archival research further addressed the circuits and actions—the verbs, if you will—in which those words and thoughts were entangled, illuminating their worldliness and that of the social practices that affected Catarina. The book follows a logic of discovery. Throughout the narrative, I provide glosses on the history and scale of the various forces impinging on her abandonment. Just as I would like Catarina to talk to the reader, I also would like the reader to become increasingly intimate with the broader social terrain in which her destiny was configured as nonsensical and valueless. The book is written in a recursive mode, to convey the messiness of both the world and the real struggles in which Catarina and her kin were involved. At each juncture, a new valence of meaning is added, a new incident illuminates each of the lives in play. Long-term ethnographic engagement crystallizes complexity and systematicity: details, often dramatically narrated, reveal the nuanced fabric of singularities and the logic that keeps things the same. This ethnographic sense of ambiguity, repetition, and openness collides with my own sensibility in the way I have tried to portray the book’s main characters: as living people on the page, with their own mediated subjectivities, whose actions are both predetermined and contingent, caught in a constricted and intolerable universe of choices that remains the only source from which they can craft alternatives.
Tracking the many interconnections of Catarina’s life also allowed the tentative untangling of the puzzling strings of words that compose her dictionary, the book’s touchstone. The selection presented in Part Six is just a small sample of the richness of her creation. The more I learned of the literal conditions of Catarina’s life, the more I seemed able to decipher some of the raw poems in her writing. I hope that this ethnographic rendering of Catarina and her life will also help the reader to hear the desperation lying within her words and to respond to her unique capacity to transfigure that desperation into a form of art.
As the ethnographer and interpreter, I am always present in the account. Every time I went one step further in knowing Vita and Catarina and their symbiotic world, I was faced with anthropology’s unique power to work through juxtaposed fields and particular conditions in which lives are—concurrently, as it were—shaped and foreclosed. I find this ethnographic alternative to be a powerful resource for building social theory. The book weaves various theoretical debates through the human and ethnographic material. Throughout the book, as layers of subjectivity, reality, and theory open up, the figure and thought of Catarina provide critical access to the value systems and often invisible machineries of making lives and allowing death that are indeed at work both in the state and in the home. The book thus also represents the anthropologist’s ethical journey: identifying some of the ordinary, violent, and inescapable limits of human inclusion and exclusion and learning to think with the inarticulate theories held by people like Catarina concerning both their condition and their hope.
Vita is a progressive unraveling of the knotted reality that was Catarina’s condition—misdiagnosis, excessive medication, complicity among health professionals and family members in creating her status as a psychotic—and the discovery of the cause of her illness, which turned out to be a genetic and not a psychiatric condition. It charts the domestic events and institutional circumstances through which she was rendered mentally defective and hence socially unproductive and through which her extended family, her neighbors, and medical professionals came to see the act of abandonment as unproblematic and acceptable. Psychopharmaceuticals used to “treat” Catarina mediated the cost-effective decision to abandon her in Vita and created moral distance. Zones of abandonment such as Vita accelerate the death of the unwanted. In this bureaucratically and relationally sanctioned register of social death, the human, the mental, and the chemical are complicit: their entanglement expresses a common sense that authorizes the lives of some while disallowing the lives of others.
Catarina embodies a condition that is more than her own.15 Her life force was unique, but the human and institutional intensities that shaped her destiny were familiar to many others in Vita. In the dictionary, Catarina often referred to elements of a political economy that breaks the country and the person down and to herself as being out of time:
Dollars
Real
Brazil is bankrupted
I am not to be blame
Without a future
By tracking the social contexts and exchanges in which Catarina’s abandonment and pathology took form, this book reflects on the political and cultural grounds of a state that keeps playing its part in the generation of human misery and a society that forces increasingly larger groups of people considered valueless into such zones, where it is virtually guaranteed that they will not improve. The book demonstrates that, through the production of social death, both state and family are being altered and their relations reconfigured. State and family are woven into the same social fabric of kinship, reproduction, and death. Catarina’s body and language were overwhelmed by the force of these processes, her personhood unmade and remade: “Nobody wants me to be somebody in life.”
In many ways, Catarina was caught in a period of political and cultural transition. From his inauguration in 1995, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso worked toward state reform that would make Brazil viable in an inescapable economic globalization and that would allow alternative partnerships with civil society to maximize the public interest within the state (Cardoso 1998, 1999).16 But in the process and on the ground, how are people, particularly the urban poor, struggling to survive and even prosper? And what is happening to the polity and social relations?
Scholars of contemporary Brazil argue that the dramatic rise in urban violence and the partial privatization of health care and police security have deepened divisions between the “market-able” and the socially excluded (Caldeira 2000, 2002; Escorel 1999; Fonseca 2000, 2002; Goldstein 2003; Hecht 1998; Ribeiro 2000). All the while, newly mobilized patient groups continue to demand that the state fulfill