not up to me to give her a voice; rather, I needed to find an adequate understanding of what was going on and the means to express it.4 The only way to the Other is through language. Language, however, is not just a medium of communication or misunderstanding but an experience that, in the words of Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, allows “not only a message but also the subject to be projected outward” (2001:22).
In the essay “Language and Body,” Das (1997) observes that women who were greatly traumatized by the partition of Pakistan and India did not transcend this trauma—as, for example, Antigone did in classical Greek tragedy—but instead incorporated it into their everyday experience. In Das’s account, subjectivity emerges as a contested field and a strategic means of belonging to traumatic large-scale events and changing familial and political-economic constellations. Inner and outer states are inescapably sutured. Tradition, collective memory, and public spheres are organized as phantasmagoric scenes, for they thrive on the “energies of the dead” who remain unaccounted for in numbers and law. The anthropologist scrutinizes this bureaucratic and domestic machinery of inscriptions and invisibility that authorizes the real and that people must forcefully engage as they look for a place in everyday life. In her work on violence and subjectivity (2000), Das is less concerned with how reality structures psychological conditions and more with the production of individual truths and the power of voice: What chance does one have to be heard? What power does speaking have to make truth or to become action?
In Vita, one is faced with a human condition in which voice can no longer become action. No objective conditions exist for that to happen. The human being is left all by herself, knowing that no one will respond, that nothing will crack open the future. Catarina had to think of herself and her history alongside the fact of her absence from the things she remembered. “My family still remembers me, but they don’t miss me.” Absence is the most pressing and concrete thing in Vita. What kind of subjectivity is possible when one is no longer marked by the dynamics of recognition or by temporality? What are the limits of human thought that Catarina keeps expanding? As the work progressed, I tried to help Catarina reconnect with her family and access medical care. But I was faced at every step with the terminal force of reality. This terminal reality requires an anthropological name for its condition.
Why did I choose to work with Catarina and not someone else? She stood out in that context of annihilation; she refused to be reduced to her physical condition and fate. She wanted to engage, and I had a gut feeling that something important for life and knowledge was going on that I did not want to miss. Her words pointed to a routine abandonment and silencing, and yet, in spite of all the disregard she experienced, Catarina conveyed an astonishing agency. Once I found myself on her side, we were both up against the wall of language. Language was not a point of separation but of relating—and comprehension was involved.
The work we began was not about the person of my thoughts and the impossibility of representation or of becoming a figure for Catarina’s psychic forms. It was about human contact enabled by contingency and a disciplined listening that gave each of us something to look for. “I lived kind of hidden, an animal,” Catarina told me, “but then I began to draw the steps and to disentangle the facts with you.” In speaking of herself as an animal, Catarina was engaging the human possibilities foreclosed to her. “I began to disentangle the science and the wisdom. It is good to disentangle oneself, and thought as well.” This remark meant the world to me. I wanted this work to be of value to Catarina. Working with her, as she looked for a way back to a familiar world, was also an anthropological bildung for me. Yes, a pedagogy of fieldwork is hierarchical, but it is also mutually formative, as Paul Rabinow notes: “As it is hierarchical, it requires care; as it is a process, it requires time; and as it is practice of inquiry, it requires conceptual work” (2003:90).5
Here, anthropology had to do something more than simply approach the individual from the perspective of the collective. Treated as mad, Catarina was presumed to operate outside memory, and in fact there was no evidence whatsoever to determine whether Catarina’s recollections were true or false, no one nearby to confirm her accounts, no information available concerning her life outside Vita. How to enlarge the possibilities of social intelligibility that she had been left to resolve alone? I had to find ways to decipher the real in her life and her words and to relate those words back to particular people, domains, and events of which she had once been a part—an experience over which she had no symbolic authority.
An immense parceling out of the specific ways communities, families, and personal lives are assembled and valued and how they are embedded in larger entrepreneurial processes and institutional rearrangements comes with on-the-ground study of a singular Other. Still, there was always something in the way Catarina moved things from one register to the other—past life, Vita, and desire—that eluded my understanding. This movement was her own language of abandonment, I thought, and that forced my conceptual work to remain in suspense and open as well.
I visited Catarina many times over the past four years, seeing her last in August 2003. I listened intently as she carried her story forward and backward. In addition to tape-recording and taking notes of our conversations, I read the volumes of the dictionary she continued to write and discussed them with her. I greatly enjoyed working with Catarina—looking into her eyes; speaking openly of things one does not understand; searching and finding, with someone else, not a perfect form but the means of knowing. And one must also search for ways to make the knowledge of singularity and immediate history that one finds in the field contribute to the care of self and others (Rabinow 2003; Fischer 2003). Talking extensively to friends and colleagues about my conversations with Catarina led the study—and also Catarina and her writing—into new contexts and possibilities. I am thinking not solely of the force of her poetic imagination to reach other lives but also of the thoughtful ways in which some health professionals and administrators interacted with Catarina, with her social and medical condition, and with her critical thinking as this investigation progressed.
At times, I began to act like a detective, seeking out the concrete trajectory of Catarina’s exclusion from everyday life, the acceleration of her physiological deterioration, and the roots of her language-thinking. Taking Catarina’s spoken and written words at face value took me on a journey into the various medical institutions, communities, and households to which she continually alluded. With her consent, I retrieved her records from psychiatric hospitals and local branches of the universal health care system. I was also able to locate her family members—her brothers, ex-husband, in-laws, and children—in the nearby industrial town of Novo Hamburgo. Everything she had told me about the familial and medical pathways that led her into Vita matched the information I found in the archives and in the field. Through return visits, patience, proximity, the laborious production of data that was not meant to exist, and the thick description of a single life, a certain block of reality came into view.
In tracing Catarina’s passage through these medical institutions, I saw her not as an exception but as a patterned entity. That is, she was subjected to the typically uncertain and dangerous mental health treatment reserved for the urban working poor. Medical technologies were applied blindly, with little calibration to her distinct condition. Like many, she was assumed to be aggressive and thus was overly sedated so that the institution could continue to function without providing adequate care. The diagnoses she received varied from schizophrenia to postpartum psychosis to unspecified psychosis to mood disorder to anemia. I interacted with health professionals who had overseen her treatments as well as with human rights activists and administrators who were involved in efforts to reform these services. I was attempting to directly address the various circuits in which her intractability gained form, circuits that seemed independent of both laws and contracts (Zelizer 2005).
After talking to all parties in Catarina’s domestic world, I understood that, given certain physical signs, her ex-husband, her brothers, and their respective families believed that she would become an invalid, just as
