Vita. João Biehl

      Those early conversations with Catarina crystallized three problems I wanted to specifically address in our work together: how inner worlds are remade under the impress of economic pressures; the domestic role of pharmaceuticals as moral technologies; and the common sense that creates a category of unsound and unproductive individuals who are allowed to die. As Catarina elliptically wrote: “To want my body as a medication, my body.” Or, as she repeatedly stated: “When my thoughts agreed with my exhusband and his family, everything was fine. But when I disagreed with them, I was mad. It was like a side of me had to be forgotten. The side of wisdom. They wouldn’t dialogue, and the science of the illness was forgotten.”

      According to Catarina, her expulsion from reality was mediated by a shift in ways of thinking and meaning-making in the context of novel domestic economies and her own pharmaceutical treatment. This forceful erasure of “a side of me” made it impossible for her to find a place in family life. “My brothers are hard-working people. For some time, I lived with Ademar and his family. He is my oldest brother; we are five siblings. . . . I was always tired. My legs were not working well, but I didn’t want to take medication. Why was it only me who had to be medicated? I also lived with Armando, my other brother. . . . Then they brought me here.”

      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).