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JOÃO BIEHL
Princeton University
I
am greatly honored to receive the 2006 Anthony Leeds Prize for my
book Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (with photographs
by Torben Eskerod—University of California Press 2005), and I
heartedly thank the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/
Global Anthropology. This honor is very special to me as it affirms
the force of a single person to reveal what is truly happening to fam-
ily, medicine, and the state in the global economy.
Largely incapacitated and at the margins of other people’s
experiences, Catarina spent her time assembling words in Vita, an The force of
asylum in the city of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. Although
Catarina’s external functions were almost dead, she retained a puz- a single person
zling life within her body. “The letters in this notebook turn and
to reveal
un-turn. This is my world after all.” Her seemingly disaggregated
words were in many ways an extension of the abject figure she had what is truly
become in family life, in medicine, in Brazil. Writing helped her to
draw out the best of herself and to make it all endurable: “from the happening
letters I form words, and from the words I form sentences, and from
the sentences I form a story.” to family,
I studied all the twenty-one volumes of the dictionary Catarina
was composing and discussed the words and associations with her. medicine,
In her recollections and writing, I found clues to the people, sites,
and the state
and interactions that constituted her life. There was also a free
pulsing of verse that first eluded and then slowly began to shape in the global
the terms of my own inquiry and cognition. As I juxtaposed her
words with medical records, family versions and worries, I was able economy
to identify those non-institutionalized operations that ensured
Catarina’s exclusion and that are, in my view, the missing contexts
and verbs to her scattered words. The verb to kill was being conju-
gated and she knew it.
City & Society, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 81–85, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X.
© 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/city.2007.19.1.81.
City & Society
The living related to “my ex-family.” She spoke of life in Vita as being outside
the bounds of justice, and the concept of the ex-human helped me
subjects of both to analyze and illuminate the fact that this condition is gen-
erated in institutions and exchanges that are suppose to constitute
marginal and nurture humanness.
The ethnography of Vita makes it painfully clear that there
institutions
are places in the present, even in a state founded on the premise of
are constituted inviolable human rights, where these rights no longer exist, where
the living subjects of marginal institutions are constituted as some-
as something thing other, between life and death. Such places demonstrate that
notions of universal human rights are socially and materially con-
other, between ditioned by medical and economic imperatives. Vita also reveals
the extent to which a certain kind of human rights discourse—the
life and death sort that generates “model programs” in restructuring states and
economies—in practice also works by a logic of exclusions; and it
confirms that public death remains at the center of various social
structures, animating and legitimating charity, political actors, and
economic strategies.
But I have always been worried that in representing the condi-
tion of the abandonados through such a philosophic-sounding term
as ex-human, I might generate a distance and thus unintentionally
partake in discursive regimes that ultimately miss the paradoxes and
dynamism involved in letting the Other die. It is the fundamentally
ambiguous being of the people in Vita that gives the anthropologist
the opportunity to develop a real human critique of the machine of
social death in which they are caught.
A human form of life that is no longer worth living is not just
bare life—language and desire continues. And as I listened to and
excavated what had made Catarina’s voice “posthumous,” a life
force—often gaining form in the figure of the animal and related to
libido and belonging—emerged to rework thought, social relations
and family life. Ethnography became the missing nexus between
the real of Catarina’s body and the imaginary of its mental and rela-
tional schemes, between the abandoned and the family, the house
and the city, individual and populations in Vita. Ethnography
composes history.
Catarina remarked that other people might be curious about
her words, but she added that their meaning was ultimately part of
her living: “There is so much that comes with time… the words…
and the signification you will not find in the book. It is only in
my memory that I have the signification. And this is for me to
untie.” Catarina refused to be an object of understanding for others.
“Nobody will decipher the words for me. With the pen, only I can
do it… in the ink, I decipher.”
84
Reflections
on Vita
85