As we returned to Ruby's house, an elderly man stopped me. “Madame, madame,” he said. He was noticeably drunk. “Allende is present! Those assassins must die! Because they have the monopoly!” The young men around him started whistling and jeering. He continued, “Here, our compañero is present. Assassins, those evil Pinochet supporters! Because they are evil. And what is here? The pueblo—”
A teenage boy interrupted him, yelling, “United!” both ridiculing and predicting the man's next words. While the youth laughed, other men and women turned to walk away. The man continued, “The pueblo united will never be defeated! But, well. Excuse me, madame. Excuse me that we do not have so much education. But well, our Chile!” He turned to look angrily at the high and drunk youths encircling him, Ruby, and me. He turned back to us, saying quietly, as if addressing the nation, “Chile, they killed me…” A young man yelled, “Shut up, crazy idiot!” The man turned around, raising his fist. “They say that I am crazy, but you know, I, thirty-five years working! I am old, ah! And you know, you know…ah, you know madame, we are equal. Equal to what? For each other. Thank you, madame.” He shook my hand. The young men continued to ridicule him. Ruby intervened, saying to the man, “You are the only one talking sense here. You are not the one that is crazy.” The young men grumbled as the man thanked Ruby, holding both her hands.
September 11, 1973, is a critical event in the lives of the people in this book and for the Chilean population generally (Das 1995). Marking the beginning of a dictatorship that disappeared thousands and subjected hundreds of thousands to torture, fear, and insecurity in tandem with a profound reorganization of the state and market, September 11 evokes a complex mixture of pain, mourning, resentment, defiance, and rage in La Pincoya. September 11 commemorations in La Pincoya, as in other poblaciones of Santiago, are more than a conflictive remembering of past violence. In street scenes, grief over the loss of a political project—an alternative vision of democracy and social justice—is both ridiculed and acknowledged, crystalizing frustrations and resentments that emerge from persistent inequalities and economic precariousness that shape the lives of the poor in the present.
Since 1990, the coalition of democratic parties cast the state's project of transitional justice in terms of debts to the population. The state owed a “social debt” to the poor through the inequalities generated by the regime's economic liberalization, while society owed a “moral debt” to the victims of human rights violations. Accounting for these debts would occur partly through the expansion of poverty programs, mental health programs dedicated to low-income populations, and the official acknowledgment of human rights violations under the Pinochet regime. Through such an accounting, a reconciliation over the past would be achieved, and the unified nation could look toward a prosperous future. In casting the past as debt that could be accounted for, however, the state performatively marked a break with the past while leaving intact the actual institutional arrangements of the state and market, as well as the kind of subject imagined within social policy and interventions.
Life in Debt attends to such debts in their concrete manifestations as poverty programs, reparations for torture, and treatments for depression in the lifeworld of one población, La Pincoya. It explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by these interventions are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries, as well as through the aspirations, pains, and disappointments that men and women embody in their daily lives. It traces the forces of kinship, friendship, and neighborliness—and the shoring up of the boundaries between them—in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. And it attends to how a world could be reinhabited by those who staked their existence on political commitments and aspirations for democracy, as well as by those who live today with bitter disappointment.
In this book, I attempt to bring into focus and into question this performative break with the past by considering how and when state violence is experienced as a past continuous that inhabits present life conditions. That is, rather than assume that the past of dictatorship has been sealed through a project of reconciliation, I consider the ways in which the state's “care” in the democratic transition is inhabited by that past. Therefore, this ethnography is an extended meditation on boundaries between past violence and present social arrangements of care. But it is also a meditation on care in everyday life, care that takes shape and is experienced through concrete relations inextricably woven into unequal social arrangements. This book asks: How are the claims of others experienced in the face of minimal state assistance and institutional failures, and how do obligations track along relational modes? How can anthropology attend to the ways in which individuals are both present to and failing to be present to one another? How are modes of care and living with dignity related to boundaries of speech and silence?
Although neoliberal reforms in Chile have displaced the responsibilities for care onto families and individuals, divesting the state of crucial responsibilities for the well-being of the population, an ethnographic exploration of “care” does not move smoothly across the registers of governmental discourse to lifeworlds.2 Discourses of “self-care” and “self-responsibility” that are advanced in health and social policy presume a self that is sovereign, morally autonomous, and transparent posed against social determinations of “the poor,” who must divest themselves of such determinations to be “free” (see Povinelli 2006). Simultaneously, the expansion of consumer credit and an expanded range of consumer goods impels public discourses on the disorganizing force of neoliberalism in its fragmentation of “nonmarket” regimes of value and social ties (Greenhouse 2010). How self, agency, and collectivity are conceived through these discourses, however, comes into awkward tension with relations as they are actually lived, embodied, and experimented with. Any stable or certain notion of care becomes unsettled when ethnography explores how individuals are always already woven into relationships and how they awaken to their relationships “thus becom[ing] aware of the way they are connected and disconnected” (Strathern 2005, 26).
This book is based on thirty-six months of fieldwork consisting of short two- to three-month trips between 1999 and 2003, eighteen months of continuous fieldwork between 2004 and 2005, and follow-up visits in 2007, 2008, and 2010. Throughout the chapters, I attend to life and the singularity of lives in La Pincoya, a poor urban neighborhood on the northern periphery of Santiago, while drawing on interviews with a range of institutional actors, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and human rights activists. I explore how social and health policies manifest as group therapy sessions, circulations of psychopharmaceuticals, and point scores for poverty programs. I examine how unstable work patterns and the expansion of consumer credit has shaped experiences of poverty, experiences that are manifested and lived in intimate relations. These experiences critically recast official narratives of state violence. Throughout this book, I consider this matrix of debt and state interventions within scenes of daily life to explore how political and economic forces are realized in people's lives.
NEOLIBERAL EXPERIMENT
The aspirations, disappointments, and daily struggles that make up this book reveal how a past continuous inhabits actual life conditions, specifically through continuities in economic and social policies between the dictatorship and the democratic governments. During the dictatorship, life conditions underwent a profound reorganization through Chile's experiment in neoliberal economics. Led by Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago's school of economics, who were known as the Chicago Boys, this experiment in free market reforms drew from a history of unequal north-south relations that took place in the cold war context.
In 1955, the University of Chicago and the Catholic University in Santiago signed an agreement for academic exchange, allowing for the training of more than a hundred Chilean graduate students at the University of Chicago (Valdés 1995). As is well known, the Chicago school proposed that economic theory was premised on “natural