(Foucault 1980, 174). The “close-knit family cell” (p. 182) is the milieu of the child as future adult and is hooked in a reciprocal relation to public health and the institutionalizing and protection of the doctor-patient relation. For Foucault, this medicalization must be understood through a “history of these materialities,” of institutional rearrangements, medical technologies, urban space, the family cell, and bodies of individuals (p. 182, emphasis mine). I do not take Foucault's point here as an explanation for the daily decision making regarding disease and illness within families today. Rather, he offers a key insight: that I might understand medicine, kinship networks, neighborhood, institutions at the margins of the state, and state violence as a specific history of materialities. That is, medicalization has singular histories. Through interviews and partaking in everyday life, I saw the category of depression dispersed into various bodily aches and pains that women colloquially called depresión a ratos (depression from time to time). Experiences of exile and torture were woven into self-making but also carefully bounded. Life was moving. Another thematic horizon took shape.
Over time, I found myself drawn into a range of relationships, from allowing myself to be claimed as a godmother—and therefore assuming responsibilities to my hijado (godchild) and my comadre, as well as to her intimate kin relations spread over three houses—to being claimed by several intimate friendships that have taken shape over a decade. As I was drawn into these relationships, it became evident to me that my concerns with care were not posed in relation to a fixed ideal of the normative family or its opposite, “nonnormative” kinship relations. Rather, because I became implicated in the lives of others in various ways, I had to engage norms in their lives: to appreciate the work of domestic relations, the stakes in concealing need, the delicate struggles over intimate relationships in which the body was staked, or the small neglects and denials that also made up everyday life.
In his essay “The Normal and the Pathological,” historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem asks us to treat life as “an order of properties,” a precarious organization of forces rather than a system of laws against which the “individual [is] a provisional and regrettable irrationality” (p. 125). From this perspective, “living beings have a normative relation to life” (Marrati and Meyers 2008, ix). That is, they respond to their internal and external conditions. Individuality is not an obstacle to the norm but the very object of the norm itself. Paraphrasing Kurt Goldstein, Canguilhem writes, “A norm…must help us understand concrete individual cases…. An alteration in the symptomatic content does not appear to be disease until the moment when the being's existence, hitherto in equilibrium with its milieu, becomes dangerously troubled” (Canguilhem 2008, 129). Disease is therefore “an aspect of life regulated by norms that are vitally inferior or depreciated” (p. 131). We might extend this thought further to consider how living beings experience moments when the whole of their existence is called into question. Experiences of such moments are not normless. Rather, they are experiments with life. This normative relation to life, for example, is revealed in the improvisations that people engage in to mitigate and normalize pains and distress and the moments when these pains are problematized in everyday life (see Das and Das 2006; Garcia 2010; Fullwiley 2011).
Through the process of writing this ethnography, I began to further appreciate the experiments with life that were in my field notes, my interviews, and my ongoing relationships with family and friends in La Pincoya. Desires to care for kin with addiction to pasta base and with chronic mental illness are enmeshed in economic pressures such that the experience of care could pass a threshold and become an experience of one's limit. Everyday aches and pains from unstable work and pervasive indebtedness are treated with a local formulary of anti-inflammatories, vitamins, and sometimes antidepressants. To a large extent, these aches and pains are normalized and taken as part and parcel of the bodily experience of living. I began to appreciate the significance of boundaries: experiences of poverty in La Pincoya call for an acknowledgement of the delicate concealment of both need and assistance that occur during moments of economic scarcity. And, I learned to pay attention to experiments with genre in the efforts to make the self intelligible to others, to present the self to others and to be received by them. Reworking the conventions of the testimonio genre, for example, was one way of making the self present to others, but also a way to withhold the violations of life so that one's children may live normal lives.
If this book expresses a wariness of the fixity of certain critiques, it is because of this engagement with the lives of others. I am wary of a diagnosis of social fragmentation and individualism that relies on a representation of a relational past. I am also wary of a critique of this diagnosis that takes the continued presence of intimate relations as a given. Both assert fixed normative imaginaries of what an individual is and what is expected of intimate relations. To counter dominant imaginaries of the atomized individual and discourses of “self-responsibility”—whether they be of drug addiction, mental illness, or consumer desires—by asserting a fundamental human interdependency based on intimate affects of care and love may eclipse the very boundaries of specific relational modes, the uncertainty in relationships, and the problem of separateness.
Understanding the normative as experiments with life and with self-making allows for the often subtle and fragile ways in which health, or more broadly, a sense of well-being, is momentarily achieved. In the delicate task of responding to others and discovering one's finiteness amid difficult circumstances, life and death are not opposed but rather sketched into each other in different ways at specific moments in a life. I imagine the chapters of this book as leaning on each other. Each chapter takes up specific concerns; the chapters' conversation with each other may further enrich them from within. The challenge for me was to consider both the singularity of a life and the availability of social conventions and genres in which life takes shape, in which the self presents itself to another (Butler 2005). Thus, my writing offers no grand diagnosis, but instead the hope that we might be attentive to the difficulties and achievements of being in another's present.
CHAPTER 1
Symptoms of Another Life
A TIME OF PURE NERVES
“Pure nerves.” Sra. Flora crumbled a soda cracker in her hands. It was the afternoon of Easter 2004 in La Pincoya. She had invited me to help her prepare an elaborate Easter lunch for her extended family. But the festive plans had abruptly dissolved with the news that her partner, Rodrigo, had lost his job in a textile factory where he had worked for the past twenty-five years. Instead, bites of homemade bread and sips of sugared tea mingled with stifled conversation.
Sra. Flora, Rodrigo, tío Ricardo, and Sra. Flora's daughters and grandchildren lived together in a two-story house that was a process of autoconstruction. First-floor brick rooms joined others of corrugated iron insulated with drywall. Above them, wood beams and iron sheets made a second floor. Outside, a gate of blue-painted iron bars and sheeting bounded the front patio. As part of the toma (land seizure) of 1970 that gave rise to La Pincoya, Sra. Flora and her former husband arrived on this plot of land with little more than a tent. They first built their home with materials scavenged from construction sites.
After her separation from her husband in the late 1970s, Sra. Flora and her new partner, Rodrigo, continued to build and furnish the home through bank loans and department store credit. Her daughters Carmen and Sonia, both single and in their midthirties lived on the second floor, each with two children. Separated by a thin wall was tío Ricardo's small room. On the first floor, Sra. Flora's twenty-five-year-old daughter, Valentina, shared a room with twenty-four-year-old Margarita, an adopted niece with cerebral palsy. And in a room abutting that of Sra. Flora and Rodrigo, her thirty-year-old daughter, Florcita, lived with her partner, Kevin, and their two children.
Rodrigo's job loss had rippled through family relations. Carmen and Sonia worked in unstable jobs that often changed month to month: office cleaning, stocking supermarket shelves, selling pirated CDs. They would have to take on extra hours to pay the utility bills and the monthly quotas on debts until Rodrigo could
