Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile

by Clara Han

Overview

Chile is widely known as the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America, carried out and made possible through state violence. Since the beginning of the transition in 1990, the state has pursued a national project of reconciliation construed as debts owed to the population. The state owed a “social debt” to the poor accrued through inequalities generated by economic liberalization, while society owed a “moral debt” to the victims of human rights violations. Life in Debt invites us into lives and world of a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago. Tracing relations and lives between 1999 and 2010, Clara Han explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by poverty and mental health policies and reparations for human rights violations are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries. Attending to intimate scenes and neighborhood life, Han reveals the force of relations in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. Lucidly written, Life in Debt provides a unique meditation on both the past inhabiting actual life conditions but also on the difficulties of obligation and achievements of responsiveness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520272095
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/05/2012
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Clara Han is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Symptoms of Another Life
2. Social Debt, Silent Gift
3. Torture, Love, and the Everyday
4. Neoliberal Depression
5. Community Experiments
6. Life and Death, Care and Neglect
Conclusion: Relations and Time

Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, thoroughly researched and theoretically nuanced."—Times Higher Education

Editorial Reviews

Han's exploration of how care and violence are constructed and lived through multiple levels of debt is thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, thoroughly researched and theoretically nuanced.

Times Higher Education

"In this moving ethnography, Clara Han delivers a devastating and thought-provoking portrait of urban poverty in contemporary Chile."

American Anthropologist

Brimming with insights and textures. . . . Han brilliantly, often quite beautifully, fleshes out the intersections between the existential and the economic.

Somatosphere - Larisa Jasarevic

Brimming with insights and textures. . . . Han brilliantly, often quite beautifully, fleshes out the intersections between the existential and the economic. . . . This book has much to contribute to the global scholarship on debt, beyond the Chilean and Latin American context.

Somatosphere

Thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, thoroughly researched and theoretically nuanced.

Times Higher Education - Deborah R. Altamirano

"Thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, thoroughly researched and theoretically nuanced."--Times Higher Education

"Brimming with insights and textures. . . . Han brilliantly, often quite beautifully, fleshes out the intersections between the existential and the economic."--Somatosphere

From the Publisher