I want to take one paragraph from the second chapter (Social debt, silent gift) from Clara Han’s compelling account of the braiding of care and violence in postPinochet neoliberal Chile and work out its implications for anthropology with regard to questions of social suffering, poverty, and how we may understand the pursuit of the good. The paragraph that occurs on page seventy-nine goes as follows: Later, when I asked Paloma who her friends were in the poblacion, she said to me, “Friends? I don’t have any friends. Susana is my friend. We share our intimacies. Friends are few, neighbors are many.” Indeed, such a sentiment was echoed to me by many women in La Pincoya. Only upon meditation upon the boundary between neighbors and friends did I begin to realize that the crucial difference between inhabiting friendship and neighborliness lay not in the perceptive ability of catching those signs of critical moments, such as the cry of Paloma’s hungry child, but in how that catching would be or could be addressed. To follow Han’s thought here it is necessary to step into the streets and houses that she describes in such depth and ask, what does she mean by “critical moments”? Understanding the critical moments in the life of a family requires that we shift scales and ask how economic precariousness is produced in the lives of the poor through the transformations in economic policy. As Han argues, the successive democratic governments in Chile continued with the “growth with equity” model of the Pinochet regime that was consistent with a neoliberal vision. This economic model had particularly perilous effects on the poor with its flexible labor regimes, shifts from permanent to temporary labor contracts, and easy availability of credit cards with high interest rates and punishing schedules of repayment. Though various successive governments recognized a social debt to the poor, welfare programs were decentralized with technologies of verification by social workers
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Sep 2, 2018
Nancy Postero + 2
Open Access
