“It’s a dump-site of human beings. You must go there. You will see what people do to people, what it means to be human these days.”
This quote comes from a book called Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment by João Biehl.
A Brazilian anthropologist and activist now teaching at Princeton, Biehl studies “changing political and medical institutions and new regimes of personhood in Brazil’s urban spaces.” The opening quote is something Biehl was told while doing fieldwork in Porto Alegre and it refers to an asylum called Vita. It doesn’t appear on city maps and Biehl describes it as “the place where living beings go when they are no longer considered people.” You can read about the book and his research in detail, but I just spent some time tracking down something I had read on Jodi Dean’s blog a couple of years ago about ways of looking at bare life that I’d like to flesh out a bit.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about doing anthropology, or more specifically with whom one actually does anthropology. Biehl’s book is about a particular place, Vita, and a particular person, Catarina, but it is also about being human. As other anthropologists describe it:
“In addressing social policy and ethics, ‘Vita’ demonstrates how one person’s life can be a basis for thinking about complex issues.”
“[It] focuses on a Brazilian city, [but] its lessons transcend national boundaries — it is as meaningful in the United States as it would be in Turkey. The reader is led into a world of market forces, inefficient bureaucracies and decomposing family ties in which no one and everyone is responsible for Catarina’s fate.”
Now is this, following Jean-Luc Nancy, about not just being but being-with? Is it about finding “communion across the exposition of [people's] own unsharable finitude, which becomes the very condition for their commonality”? Is it Lingis’ Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common? Are we bound to someone – or something – that offers us no truth?
Jodi Dean cites Patrick Mullins’ Day of Cine-Musique:
“These variations on ‘bare life’ bring into close communication people who would not have chosen each other as friends for any other reason except common distress and proximities to each other’s involvements in these distresses . . . New connections are made between the bare life figures and the sentient ones.”
and asks: “Is bare life a site or opening to friendship? Or are these fundamentally incompatible? An ethical relation to bare life is fragile, elusive…” This reminded me of what Biehl said about his work with Catarina and the ethnographic project in general:
“It drew the best out of me in so many instances. I love anthropology’s relentless empiricism and its openness to theories. But anthropology needs to develop a listening capacity and to engage in an activist way, to become involved with the problem, not just to observe it from a distance.”
So what is this ‘community’ to which we belong? When we study other people, how can we shape them and they shape us?
(Thanks to antropologi.info for the pointer to Biehl’s work.)
2 Comments
Nice post Anne. I haven’t read any of the texts, but I will propose something here in relation to Agamben’s idea of ‘bare life’ in Homo Sacer and other works.
There are a few important elements or at least key points at play. Here is what i think you are saying:
1) That bare life has something to do with being human, and that it is not restricted to national boundaries or particular places. Rather, life is embedded in ‘place’ only loosely defined; and
2) that this observation has particular repurcussions for how community ‘really’ operates, or is ‘inoperative’ all the while providing connections and influences that we might not initial have thought in a purposive sense. Community is more than intentionality.
I think this is interesting because you point to the ways in which we might be able to conceive of “life” beyond the reach of sovereign power, which is historically and currently concerned with national borders, and specific jurisdictions of hegemony. However we might like to remain within the law-sovereign understanding of political power, for practicality, dogma methods, or other reasons; nonetheless, there is this whole ‘other-side’ of power. There is the enduring problem that we are all potentially ‘bare’. From the perspective of the sovereign, as Agamben claims, life and law become nearly indistinguishable today. In a word, life becomes law. Yet, if we are to understand life from the perspective of life, things look much different. There is always a surplus of life over law, of life over the instrumentality of sovereign power, and state representation.
However, as you ask, what does this mean for our understanding(s) of community? This is a very difficult question. I think if we work with the idea of ‘absolute immanence’ it may provide some answers. Yet, I think there is something else ‘operating’ here beyond the usual dichotomy between transcendent/immanent conceptualizations. Perhaps, we should (re)turn to Foucault, and especially his work that searches to inquire into how power operates through both sovereignty and discipline. Discipline does not replace sovereignty, but they tend to become interpenetrated in modernity.
Power traverses the boundaries we construct, and so we need to find today more properly how life also over-flows the boundaries constructed to constrain it.
There is the enduring problem that we are all potentially ‘bare’ [...] and so we need to find today more properly how life also over-flows the boundaries constructed to constrain it.
Yes!