the methodological, ethical, and conceptual limits anthropology faces as it goes into the field and tries both to verify the sources of a life excluded from family and society and to capture the density of a locality without leaving the individual person and her subjectivity behind.
From the perspective of Vita and from the perspective of one human life deemed mad and intractable, one comes to understand how economic globalization, state and medical reform, and the acceleration of claims to human rights and citizenship coincide with and impinge on a local production of social death. One also sees how mental disorders gain form at the personal juncture between the afflicted, her biology, and the technical and political recasting of her sense of being alive.
How to restore context and meaning to the lived experience of abandonment? How to produce a theory of the abandoned subject and her subjectivity that is ethnographically grounded?
Catarina is subjected
To be a nation in poverty
Porto Alegre
Without an heir
Enough
I end
In her verse, Catarina places the individual and the collective in the same space of analysis, just as the country and the city also collide in Vita. Subjection has to do with having no money and with being part of an imaginary nation gone awry. The subject is a body left in Vita without ties to the life she generated with the man who, as she states, now “rules the city” from which she is banished. With nothing to leave behind and no one to leave it to, there remains Catarina’s subjectivity—the medium through which a collectivity is ordered in terms of lack and in which she finds a way to disentangle herself from all the mess that the world has become. In her writing, she faces the limits of what a human being can bear, and she makes polysemy out of those limits—“I, who am where I go, am who am so.”
Catarina’s subjectivity is discovered in her constant efforts to communicate, to remember, to recollect, and to write—that is, to preserve something unique to her—all of which take on new and special import in the zone of abandonment where she and I encountered each other. In a place where silence is the rule, and the voices of the abandoned are regularly ignored, where their bodies are politically useful only in the publicity of their dying, Catarina struggled to transmit her sense of the world and of herself, and in so doing she revealed the paradox and ambiguity of her abandonment and that of others. The human condition here challenges analytic and political attempts to ground ethics or morality in universal terms, or in the exceptions who stand outside the system. As I had to grapple with the ways Vita creates a humanity caught between visibility and invisibility and between life and death—something I came to call, sadly, the ex-human—I also had to find ways to support Catarina’s efforts to make feasible her own way of being.
In Vita, then—beyond kinship, the right to live, and the taboo against killing—emerges the social figure of Catarina. Her language, bordering on poetry, autopsies the human and grounds an ethics:
The pen between my fingers is my work
I am convicted to death
I never convicted anyone and I have the power to
This is the major sin
A sentence without remedy
The minor sin
Is to want to separate
My body from my spirit
The book brings forth the reality that hides behind this “I,” coming to a final line in Vita. It also transmits the struggle to produce a dialogic form of knowledge that opens up a sense of anticipation in this most desolate environment. How can the anthropological artifact keep the story moving and unfinished?
Vita 1995
Vita 1995
Vita 1995
Vita 1995
Vita 1995
Vita 1995
Vita 1995
Part One
VITA
A Zone of Social Abandonment
Vita sat on a hill of absolute misery. Gerson Winkler, a human rights activist, took me there in March 1995, along with Danish photographer Torben Eskerod. We were greeted by Zé das Drogas, Vita’s founder. “Vita is a work of love,” he told us. “Nobody wants these people, but it is our mission to care.”
The place was overcrowded and covered with tents. The few permanent buildings included a wooden chapel and a makeshift kitchen with no hot water. Some two hundred men lived in the recovery area, and two hundred additional people stayed in the infirmary. Each of these areas contained only one bathroom facility. The infirmary was separated from the recovery area by a gate, which was policed by volunteers, who made sure that those who were the most physically or mentally disabled would not move freely around the compound. These individuals wandered around in their dusty lots, rolled on the ground, crouched over or under their beds—when there were beds.
Each one was alone; most were silent. There was a stillness, a kind of relinquishment that comes with waiting, waiting for the nothingness, a nothingness that is stronger than death. Here, I thought, the only possible abstraction is to close one’s eyes. But even this does not create a distance, for one is invaded by the ceaseless smell of dying matter for which there is no language.
Like the woman the size of a child, completely curled up in a cradle and blind. Once she began to age and could no longer work for the family—“and worse,” explained Vanderlei, the volunteer who guided our visit, “she was still eating the family’s food”—relatives hid her in a dark basement for years, barely keeping her alive. “Now she is my baby,” said Angela, a former intravenous drug user, who most likely had AIDS. Angela had long ago lost custody of her two children and now spent her days caring for the old woman. “I found God in Vita. When I first came here, I wanted to kill myself. Now I feel useful. To this day, I have not discovered the grandma’s name. She screams things I don’t understand.” Yes, it was all horrific. Yet there seemed to be something ordinary and familiar in the ways these lives had been ruined. How to retrieve this history? And how to account for the unexpected relations and care emerging here? What is their potential, and how is it exhausted time and again?
A little later, words of salvation were everywhere. Loud, they emanated from the chapel that was now overcrowded with men
