group, a (supposedly) ‘natural,’ genetically ‘ancestral population’—the ‘last major primitive tribe . . . anywhere on earth,’ is diminished or disappeared and the experiments upon them have ceased and the experimenters departed, what sort of presence in our minds, what sort of whatness, are they now to have? What sort of place in the world does an ‘ex-primitive’ have?” (2001:21, 22).
Vita is a place in the world for ex-humans. I use this concept reluctantly as I try to express the difficult truth that these persons have been de facto terminally excluded from what counts as reality. I first thought of the term “ex-human” as Catarina told me, “I am an ex,” and constantly referred to herself as an “ex-wife” and her kin as “my ex-family.” It is not that the souls in Vita have had their humanity and personhood drawn out and are now left without the capacity to understand, to dialogue, and to keep struggling. Rather, when I say ex-human, I want to highlight the fact that these people’s efforts to constitute their lives vis-à-vis institutions meant to confirm and advance humanness were deemed good for nothing and that their supposed inhumanness played an important role in justifying abandonment. In the end, too many people “too poor to have debts”—even perhaps too poor to have families—are reduced to struggling without being able to survive on their own. As an extension and a reflection of the country’s political-economic and domestic readjustments, zones of abandonment such as Vita emerge. They make the regeneration of the abandonados impossible and their dying imminent. Before biological death, there comes their social death.
Social death and mobilization of life coexist in Brazil’s political and medical institutions, and the process of making decisions about who shall die and who shall live and at what cost has increasingly become a domestic matter (Biehl 2004).31 Against an expanding discourse of human rights and citizenship, we are confronted with the limits of infrastructures that help to realize these rights, biologically speaking, but only on a selective basis. As the reality of Vita reveals, those incapable of living up to the new requirements of market competitiveness and profitability and related concepts of normalcy are included in the emerging social and medical orders only through their public dying—and as though these deaths had been self-generated.
By “self-generated,” I mean that these noncitizens remain by and large untouched by governmental and nongovernmental interventions and become partially visible in the public health system only when they are dying. Without legal identification, they are marked as “mad,” “drug addicts,” “thieves,” “prostitutes,” “noncompliant”—labels in which their personhood is cast and which are meant both to explain their dying and to blame them for it. In the end, no records of their individual trajectories remain. The families or neighbors who disposed of them are also not to be found. The overall poverty and the complex social and medical interactions that seem to have exacerbated infections and weakened immunity remain unaccounted for. Moreover, Vita’s environment is so charged that the sickest are constantly exchanging diseases with the mad, so to speak, leaving them no possibility but “to die each other.” I do not know precisely what I mean by this expression “to die each other,” but I have seen the complexity of what happens in Vita, both in institutional and experiential terms, and I struggle to understand the matter of dying and what makes life and death so intimate with one another. No one mourns the abandoned, cast into oblivion.
Unknown man, Vita 2001
Unknown woman, Vita 2001
Citizenship
I returned to Vita in March 1997, two years after my first visit with Gerson Winkler, the human rights activist, and Torben Eskerod, the photographer. This time, I could see an incipient citizenship being generated along with social death. Some of Vita’s residents were now being effectively rehabilitated and given the possibility of a future. In the recovery area, men were developing discipline, becoming drug-free, and being retrained as potential workers; a few of them even had access to state-funded AIDS disability pensions, specialized medical care, and free antiretroviral therapies. People in the infirmary, however, continued to live in utter abandonment, Catarina now among them—waiting with death.
The previous November, Zé das Drogas had been evicted from the establishment by a philanthropic coalition called Amigos do Vita (Friends of Vita), headed by Representative Luchesi. Captain Osvaldo, a police officer working for the state of Rio Grande do Sul, began to administer Vita. The volunteers working there were more reserved now and generally refused to talk about what had led to the coup. Over time, I learned that Zé had become consumed by his cocaine addiction and that he and his immediate associates had used Vita as their source of income. “The more rundown the place, the more donations they got,” an insider told me, reluctantly. A local human rights coordinator alluded to the political interests of Luchesi and his associates: Vita would now be their base for denouncing the ruling government and advertising their own paternalistic politics.
In addition to his responsibilities for Vita and the police department, Captain Osvaldo attended to Representative Luchesi’s personal security and took night courses in law. He proudly considered himself the mayor of Vita. “Here, we work with finances, health, the provision of food, building maintenance. . . . It is a city of sorts.” This population, the captain noted, “does not pay taxes, so how to sustain this work?” He explained that Vita had taken advantage of new state legislation encouraging civic responsibility for welfare functions and had officially become what is called an “entity of public utility.” Given this new status, the institution could now receive state funds to build its infrastructure as well as accepting tax-exempted industry donations.
Vita was indeed undergoing impressive structural changes—“an environmental transformation,” as the captain described it. Much construction was going on in the recovery area (though not in the infirmary): houses and shacks for lodging were replacing the tents, new administrative offices had been built, and space had been allocated for a pharmacy, a medical and dental clinic, and a large building for state-funded job training. Monthly contributions from Friends of Vita and various industries provided for daily living. Vita was also raising money through its bakery, producing some fifteen hundred small loaves of bread for its inhabitants’ daily consumption as well as four hundred sweet breads sold in nearby neighborhoods. Individual donations were still pouring in, mainly from Luchesi’s radio listeners.
“Privileged society does not contribute. Their only contribution is to call the radio and say, ‘There is a homeless person in front of my building, making the sidewalk dirty.’ I say, bring the person here, and he says, ‘No, he will fill the car with smells and dirt.’ Can you imagine if we were to bring in all the cases that are called in?” The captain stressed that “we are now overpopulated.” Before the change in administration, some ten to fifteen people showed up every week needing some form of help. Now, however, a triage system was in place to keep Vita’s population “stable,” in the words of the institution’s secretary.
Such triage was the job of Dalva, a social worker and the captain’s wife. Previously, she had worked at the Santa Rita Hospital, but after changes in the universal health care system, she was sent to the emergency service. “My role was to decide who would receive treatment and who wouldn’t. Terrible, right, to decide who will go on and who will not?” She had been volunteering for more than a year at Vita, “but Zé das Drogas always created barriers to my work. He seemed to be afraid of what I could do.” She suggested that there had indeed been an intricate plot to change the course of the institution. “Vita was not rehabilitating. But now it has changed. In order to do good work, we must diagnose and know our clientele. This is a very diversified population. We must have a group and an individual approach, work on all questions, and try to bring the family into the rehabilitation
