Unfinished

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The Anthropology of Becoming

joão biehl & peter locke | editors

duke university press

Durham & London ​2017
© 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on
acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Matthew Tauch
Typeset in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing
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Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Biehl, João Guilherme, editor. | Locke, Peter
Andrew, [date]– ­editor.
Title: Unfinished : the anthropology of becoming /
João Biehl and Peter Locke, editors.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2017024177 (print) | lccn
2017040725 (ebook)
isbn 9780822372455 (ebook)
isbn 9780822369301 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822369455 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Ethnology—­Philosophy. |
Anthropology—­Philosophy. | Critical theory. |
Ethnosociology.
Classification: lcc gn345 (ebook) | lcc gn345 .u545
2017 (print) | ddc 301.01—­dc23
lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn.loc​.­gov/​
­2017024177

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the

support of Prince­ton University’s Committee on
Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences,
which provided funds ­toward the publication of
this book.

Cover art: Francis Alÿs, Reel-­Unreel, 2011.

In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal
Maiwandi; video documentation of an action;
film still.
 Contents

foreword. Unfinished
João Biehl and Peter Locke  ix

introduction ​| ​ethnographic sensorium
João Biehl and Peter Locke  1

i one ​| ​the anthropology of becoming

João Biehl and Peter Locke  41

ii two ​| ​becoming aggrieved
Laurence Ralph  93

three ​| ​h eaven
Angela Garcia  111

iii four ​| ​rebellious ­matter

Bridget Purcell  133

five ​| ​witness
Naisargi N. Dave  151
 iv six ​| ​i was cannibalized by an artist
Lilia M. Schwarcz  173

seven ​| ​on negative becoming

Lucas Bessire  197

v eight ​| ​time machines
Elizabeth A. Davis  217

nine ​| ​horizoning
Adriana Petryna  243

vi ten ​| ​m eantime
Peter Locke  269

eleven ​| ​h ereafter
João Biehl  278

afterword. Zen Exercises: Anthropological Discipline and Ethics

Michael M. J. Fischer  293

acknowl­e dgments  317

bibliography 319

contributors 353

list of illustrations  357

index 359
plate 0.1 ​Alice Neel, James Hunter Black Draftee, 1965
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 Foreword

UNFINISHED

joão biehl and peter locke

Alice Neel’s 1965 oil painting James Hunter Black Draftee is an arresting por-
trait. Hunter’s pensive face and supporting hand are richly filled in, while
his ears and the rest of his body are only loosely sketched. The uncompleted
image exposes how lifeworlds enter into the work of art: the artist had been
inviting passersby on the New York City street into her studio to sit for her.
Hunter, who said he had been drafted to fight in the war in Vietnam, never
returned for a second sitting.
We d­ on’t know what happened to Hunter.1 But we know who wanted war
and what war did, and how old and new wars make plain the transience and
value of all ­things. Outlined by Neel in the spur of the moment, the seem-
ingly invisible body of this fleeting subject is now a power­ful reminder of the
perennial strug­gle of minorities in the United States and elsewhere for full
political recognition of their personhood. Hunter’s detailed, expressive face
also evokes his singularity and the concerns that weigh on him, while reveal-
ing ­little of who he is. Yet it is Hunter who punctuates the repre­sen­ta­tion.
So the painting seems unfinished, and this transfixing unfinishedness—­the
worlds on edge and the open-­endedness of ­people’s becoming—is the very
stuff of art.
With its receptiveness to and incorporation of the accidental and the un-
known, Neel and Hunter’s artwork (not pos­si­ble without each other and the
world’s ongoingness) leaves us with a haunting, incomplete aesthetic and a
challenge to further inquire into the multiplicity of lifeworlds and the plastic-
ity of anthropological figures.
So, how can we ethnographically apprehend t­ hese worldly fabrications and
the lives therein, constituted as they are by that which is unresolved, and bring
this unfinishedness into our storytelling?
How are long-­standing theoretical approaches able—or not—to illumi-
nate emergent po­liti­cal, economic, and affective realities?
How can the becomings of our in­for­mants and collaborators, and the move-
ments and counterknowledges they fashion, serve as alternative figures of
thought that might animate comparative work, po­liti­cal critique, and anthropol-
ogy to come?
Ethnographic creations are about the plasticity and unfinishedness of h­ uman
subjects and lifeworlds. And the essays in this book are themselves unfinished
views of ­people (including anthropologists, scientists, and artists) in the pro­
cess of becoming through t­hings, relations, stories, survival, destruction, and
reinvention in the borrowed time of an invisible pres­ent.
The notion of becoming, which organizes our individual and collective ef-
forts, emphasizes the plastic power of ­people and the intricate problematics
of how to live alongside, through, and despite the profoundly constraining
effects of social, structural, and material forces, which are themselves plastic.
Unfinishedness is both precondition and product of becoming, and we chose
our title—­Unfinished—­as a way to draw attention to this impor­tant feature
of all of the book’s characters and inquiries, its attempts at open thinking
and experimental writing. Unfinishedness is a feature as generative to art and
knowledge production as it is to living.
We work with an expansive definition of unfinishedness. Our ethno-
graphic work always begins in the midst of social life, its rhythms, affects,
surprises (from the trivial to the tragic), and urgencies. The categories and
books we bring to our investigations are continually challenged by the fig-
uring out, disfiguring, and refiguring of lifeworlds and subjects. Desire fol-
lows world-­historical trajectories, and ethnographic subjects have their own
ideas of and relationships to the constraints and unfinishedness of their lives
and milieus. Becoming trou­bles and exceeds our ways of knowing and act-
ing. It pushes us to think against the grain, to consider the uncertain and un-
expected in the world, and to care for the as-­yet-­unthought that interrogates
history and keeps modes of existence open to improvisation. We are tasked
with the other­w ise.

x | joão biehl and peter locke

 To attend to the unfinished, we need a conscientious empiricism wedded
to a radical analytical openness to complexity and won­der. For critical analy­
sis, writing, and social engagement, the rewards of staying with formations
that exceed us and exploring the incomplete are far from trifling. We can better
understand how po­liti­cal forces and capital expansions exhaust existing (not
ideal) forms and absorb some of the qualities and textures of individual and
collective experiments with relating and knowing—­lived tensions between
power and flight, mortality and vitality, history and invention, creation and
ruination, care and disregard, and belonging and fugitivity. As we seek to ar-
ticulate a ­human science of the uncertain and unknown, we can also restore
movement and possibility to ethical thinking and po­liti­cal practice: a coun-
tertechnique, a continual capacity for recalibration that the ethnographic craft
and theorizing enable.
Engaging a range of pressing con­temporary problematics—­including war
and its aftermath, economic transformation, racial in­equality, gun vio­lence,
religiosity, therapeutic markets, animal rights activism, and abrupt environ-
mental change—­the authors of Unfinished foreground the malleable nature
of human-­nonhuman interactions and demonstrate how ­people and social
forms partake of and are s­ haped by multiple systems and forces, themselves
contingent and shifting, all with variable degrees of agency.
We work at a granular level of ethnographic description and interpreta-
tion, following ­people and ­things—­those deemed ex-­human, canny artists and
wounded animals, forest firefighters and climate scientists, embattled neigh-
borhoods, inks and pharmakons, sites of prayer, the bones of missing war vic-
tims. We listen carefully and notice swerves, follow leads and trajectories, and
translate ­these movements into thought and writing. Each essay in Unfinished
finds its way to an arresting encounter, image, concept, or kernel that enters
into a series, always midway, providing prismatic points of contact with as-
semblages of force and form in multiple worlds.
An anthropology of becoming demands more than the flat realism that
comes with standard practices of contextualization and historicization, and
it must not simply mimic or echo the dark determinisms that mark much of
social theory. The authors of Unfinished insist on the indispensable moral and
analytical value of the micro, the singular and partial, which requires a dif­fer­
ent, more fine-­grained, and h­ umble logic than that of a generality subsuming
all ­things into aggregates, repetitions, and models. Thus we take a situated,
cartographic (rather than archaeological) approach to self-­world entangle-
ments and leaking social fields.

foreword |  xi
 ­Here, objects are milieus in themselves; worlds are at once material, so-
cial, and symbolic, si­mul­ta­neously precarious and in motion; and individu-
als and collectives are constituted as much by affects and intensities as by
structural forces. We trace ­people’s trajectories as they grow out of themselves,
fold in exteriorities, and become other. In attending to orientations, direc-
tions, entries, walls, and exits, our combined ethnographic essays produce a
geography of becomings: maps of the microdynamics of living and the new
configurations of thought, affect, solidarity, and resentment that create tears
and exclusions—­but also openings, however minor—in macro-­level realities
and scaling proj­ects.
To grow closer to our anthropological subjects—­and to build a form of
critique concerned more with identifying crossroads and opening up possi-
bilities than with making judgments and enforcing totalizing analytical
schemes—­each of the chapters in Unfinished embraces the literary expres-
sivity and exploratory potentials of the essay genre. Our “Ethnographic
Sensorium” introduces the book’s main ethnographic characters and life-
worlds and articulates the methodological and analytical significance of an
anthropology of becoming. Throughout Unfinished, the authors offer a rich
spectrum of the ways that becoming emerges in specific lives and milieus
and against the backdrop of world-­historical forces—­all experimenting
with writing and grappling with the incompleteness and open-­endedness of
fieldwork and cultural theory. In the book’s afterword, Michael M. J. Fischer
lovingly rereads the essays, teasing out their generativity and what they re-
veal about the becoming of anthropology and the problematics of ­futures
on the horizon.
We tell stories that are as much material and po­liti­cal-economic as personal
and ethical. We are always working outward: pulling into line with our sub-
jects, moving sideways to follow them, getting out of their way, returning and
sitting with them, drawing out characters, probing philosophical questions,
bringing certain concepts into focus, and letting ­others emerge only partially,
but meaningfully so. Our storytelling destabilizes hierarchies of expertise and
confuses the distinction between the finished and the unfinished, illuminat-
ing the ethnographic open systems in which anthropologists and subjects are
entangled, folded into lives, transformations, and thinking across time and
space.

xii | joão biehl and peter locke

 Unfinished’s ethnographic essaying is an invitation to readers to open their
own thinking to the unpredictability, multiplicity, and incommensurability
that animate lives and realities—­and the ethnographic craft itself—­and to
find resonances, keeping critical thought engaged and multiplying.

note
1 Alice Neel’s painting James Hunter Black Draftee was shown in the 2016 exhibit Unfinished:
Thoughts Left Vis­i­ble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. “We ­don’t think
[ James Hunter] died b­ ecause his name is not on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in D.C.,”
said Kelly Baum, one of the curators of the exhibit. “But we d­ on’t know what happened to
him” (quoted in C. Swanson, “What Happened to ‘James Hunter Black Draftee’? A Mystery
at the Met Breuer”). See also Baum, Bayer, and Wagstaff, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Vis­i­ble.

foreword |  xiii
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 Introduction

Ethnographic Sensorium

joão biehl and peter locke

Hear the loud crack of gunfire, followed by Mrs.  Lana’s piercing scream. She
has just seen her son fatally shot in their neighborhood in gangland Chicago.
Mrs. Lana goes mad, and in the weeks and months that follow, she keeps scream-
ing at passersby. As neighbors look ­after her and continue to hold her in high
regard, they too reflect on the countless young black lives lost. With and through
Mrs. Lana’s unanswerable cry, the community itself becomes aggrieved and con-
templates what form of life might be livable in the American city t­ oday.
Picture Catarina writing her dictionary, her ailing body struggling to inscribe
the words that form her from within: “What I was in the past does not ­matter.”
Abandoned as a meaningless leftover in Vita, an asylum in southern Brazil, she
invents a new name for herself—­Catkine—­from the drug Akineton, one of
many that have mediated her social death and supposed madness. As Catkine
tries to disentangle herself from the forces that led her to Vita’s endpoint and
holds onto what could have been—­“mine is an illness of time”—­she seeks vital-
ity in an exhausted pres­ent. Years l­ater, her d­ aughter Andrea, who was given up
for adoption by her f­ ather, reaches for ties to a lost ­mother. Andrea calls on the
anthropologist, who has also become a part of his characters’ metamorphoses.
A po­liti­cal demonstration in Mexico City: feel the crowd, the rage as thou-
sands protest the devastating vio­lence of the drug war and demand that the
government find the forty-­three students who have recently dis­appeared. As
the demonstration unfolds, security forces are descending on anexos in the
surrounding barrios—­religiously inspired drug rehabilitation centers for the
poor, where vio­lence is inseparable from healing. What w ­ ill come of their sud-
den takeover by the state?
In southeast Turkey, just across the border from Syria, where the threat of
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (isis) looms: another crowd in another world
on the edge. Notice the movement of thousands of pilgrims congregating at a
mosque on the holiest night of the year. Look closer: you ­will see Özlem and
Zuhal, young students of Islamic theology, growing agitated by the crowding, the
noise, and the garbage strewn across the sidewalks, ill at ease with the supposed
healing power of the site’s sacred ­waters. Amid revivalist reforms and the upheaval
of war and displacement, the faithful confront new challenges in relating to ritual
space and practice—­becoming, in the pro­cess, new kinds of religious subjects.
In a bright Rio de Janeiro studio, the artist Adriana Varejão is making ink
for each of the more than one hundred skin color terms that Brazilians use to
describe themselves and ­others. Collaborating on a proj­ect inspired by Brazil’s
complex history of race and racism, an anthropologist finds her own thinking
on “the spectacle of the races” unpredictably cannibalized by the artist. Along
the way, she comes to a new understanding of works of art as lively agents that
combine, reconfigure, and reinterpret the materials and ideas that make up
­people and shape time’s passage.
An encounter with a wounded ­horse on a crowded Indian road turns an
onlooker into an animal rights activist, its bleeding eye sockets a call to wit-
ness and surrender. This meeting marks a rebirth of sorts for the witness and
­others, the surrender of the self to working against futility for a life of respon-
sibility to nonhumans. It also propels movements: an opening of the social
skin and a thickening of worldly relations. What becomes of both ­human and
animal in t­ hese multispecies intimacies, t­ hese encounters with unfree suffer-
ing ­others? Does becoming animal subvert or reinforce our human-­centric vi-
sions of ourselves and our worlds?
Elsewhere, ­there is waiting: a meantime haunted by unresolved legacies of
vio­lence and dispossession, by unimaginable loss, by longing for transformation.
Post-­war Sarajevo, Bosnia-­Herzegovina: pockmarked façades are smoothed
over, and shopping centers rise in place of hollow ruins. Two hours to the
east, world leaders speak of hope and regret as newly identified remains are
interred on the twentieth anniversary of the genocide at Srebrenica. As thou-
sands of desperate refugees from the M ­ iddle East make their way through the
Balkans, Bosnians live with the unresolved legacies of their own violent con-
flict. ­Here Sarajevo’s urban poor—­and the civil society groups that support

2 | joão biehl and peter locke

them—­await a still uncertain transformation, finding ways to get on with life
and change themselves amid a stagnating transition.
Peer over shoulders at the gloved hands of forensic anthropologists sorting
and identifying ­human bones ­under the glare of laboratory lights—­applying
and tinkering with techniques pioneered in the aftermath of the Bosnian war.
In Cyprus, the remains and belongings of the missing transform experiences
of time and loss for families and scientists de­cades ­after the vio­lence of conflict
has subsided. Recovered and identified against a painful backdrop of paranoia,
rumor, and unsettled grievances, ­these troubling objects trigger new personal
and po­liti­cal strug­gles at the collapsing frontiers of past, pres­ent, and ­future.
Paraguay: in the dense forests and cleared pastures of South Amer­i­ca’s Gran
Chaco, Tié and Cutai whisper stories by firelight. Aasi, once a warrior, became
a peacemaker and l­ater, a­ fter encounters with missionaries, a Christian. His
nephew Pejei thrashes against the ropes binding him, gripped by urusoi, a mad-
ness wrought by the soul fleeing the body. They are Ayoreo, members of one of
the last bands in the Chaco to be “contacted” and ushered violently into brutal
interpersonal and regional economies. To endure world-­ending vio­lence and
ravenous deforestation, many radically disavow their precontact ways of life—­
here self-­negation is a technique for reproducing moral life in a world of death.
The anthropologist is not immune; in his witnessing, he, too, is caught up in
the delirium.
Time-­lapse images, clear and breathtaking, show the rapid retreat of enor-
mous Arctic glaciers over just a few years. Far away in the American Southwest,
as megafires blaze, first responders grapple with the failure of predictive models
in the face of new and frightening wildfire dynamics. As scientists strug­gle to
anticipate forms of environmental calamity that elude prediction in the bor-
rowed time of an invisible pres­ent, extinctions continue, and models for reme-
diation must be continually re­scaled. As we face dire tipping points, how can
communities and policy makers prepare for the unknowable f­ utures of our planet
and maintain its ability to sustain life?

plasticity

­ ese moments and stories are incomplete views onto subjects and lifeworlds
Th
in the pro­cess of becoming. Taken together, they make up an ethnographic sen-
sorium: a multifaceted and affective point of contact with worlds of in­equality,
hovering on the verge of exhaustion while also harboring the potential for
­things to be other­wise.

introduction | 3
 Indeed, the realities in which we are all entangled t­oday, and in which the
becomings of our characters unfold, are on the edge: of financial collapse, infra-
structural breakdown, and environmental calamity; racial vio­lence, right-­wing
pop­u­lism, and alarming new regimes of security and surveillance; and chronic
warfare, mass migration, and deadly health disparities. In the meantime, ­people
may find ways to endure the intolerable and strug­gle to repair and heal, un-
tangle themselves from the known and establish new relations (or not), negoti-
ate threatening detours and the newly uncertain, and make use of t­hese very
realities to craft ­viable forms of life and proj­ect themselves into a ­future—or
simply remain in suspension amid the collapse of messianic structures. Yet
amid ­today’s alarming global po­liti­cal shifts, it is also obvious that ­people’s
plasticity—­shaped as much by fear and resentment as by hope and desire—­
carries destructive and violent potentials.
The anthropology of becoming is about the plastic power of p­ eople, worlds,
and thought—­that is, “the power of specifically growing out of one’s self, of
making the past and the strange one body with the near and pres­ent.”1 In this
book, we are concerned with the ways in which our ethnographic subjects,
their bodies, the material and symbolic worlds they inhabit, and the structural
forces they must navigate all grow out of themselves, becoming other and un-
predictably constructive or perilous in their entanglements and over time.
As ethnographers of the con­temporary, we always begin our work in the
midst of social life, within asymmetries and constraints of all kinds, traversed
by myriad flows that are of indeterminate origin and destination, both vital and
deadly. Above all concerned with plasticity and with the unfinishedness that
emerges through intensive work with ­people and their trajectories, we break
open totalizing abstractions; pursue lives that are bifurcated, stagnating, or in
flux; chart the worlds and abrupt changes that our characters are caught up in;
and rec­ord the granularities of the ongoing, shared episodes that shape life sto-
ries and horizons—­our subjects’ and our own. We are interested in the h­ uman
subject as always ­under construction and in the unforeseeable concepts that
can be generated through fieldwork. In attending to t­ hese pro­cesses, we find
materials for a critique of ­today’s evolving dynamics of knowledge produc-
tion, po­liti­cal economies, and social control that are themselves plastic and
have real ­human and material consequences.
This plasticity does not exist in­de­pen­dently of contingency and death.
Omnipresent materially and figuratively for the characters and scenarios in
the essays that follow, re­sis­tance to destruction and death in all their forms—­
historical oblivion, social abandonment or po­liti­cal exclusion, accidents, sick-

4 | joão biehl and peter locke

ness and the end of biological life, or the loss of an ­imagined f­ uture—is woven
into all pro­cesses of becoming, activating and shaping ­people’s trajectories. As
Angela Garcia puts it in chapter 3, in considering the brutal toll of the War on
Drugs in Mexico, “the darkness of the pres­ent moment is the very condition
that might generate the possibility of moving beyond it. It is the site of hope
and the precondition of becoming.”
In contrast to judgments of intellectual stagnation and ­futures without an-
ticipation, this book’s ethnographic sensorium opens new channels of commu-
nication and conceptual work, calling attention to the plethora of existential
strug­gles, improvisations, ideas, and landscapes that shape what life means
and how it is experienced and i­ magined in splintering and pluralizing pres­ents.
­People’s becomings and their varying forms of dissent and flight are fundamen-
tal to both how ethnography unfolds and its own potentialities. They drive our
craft’s capacity to map alternative fields of immanence and to illuminate new
ethical terrains and politics in the making.
In this way, ethnographic inquiry brings us closer to the world’s ­matters
of fact and p­ eople’s simultaneous movements away from and t­ oward material
structures and relational fields, unsettling established forms of thought and
invoking both alternative conceptual frameworks and figures of what is yet to
come. “Like a bullet,” Laurence Ralph writes in chapter 2, Mrs. Lana’s voice
“was an intrusion that ruptured the pres­ent. Symbolically reinstating the vio­
lence that had taken Jo Jo, she drew an audible line, ­every day, between life
and death.” And as Adriana Petryna reminds us in chapter 9, “tipping points—­
points that, if crossed, mean irreversible change—­exist and require a counter-
technique, a continual capacity for recalibration, a horizoning work” on the
part of scientists, policymakers, and communities all over the world.

unfinishedness

The anthropology of becoming can be understood through three distinct,

though related, dimensions. First, it emphasizes the plastic nature of human-­
nonhuman interactions and acknowledges that p­ eople belong si­mul­ta­neously
to multiple systems that themselves are made up of p­ eople, ­things, and forces
with varying degrees of agentive capacity.2 Attuned to “the mutual constitution
of entangled agencies” and the unstable nature and malleability of all social fields
and subjectivities, the anthropology of becoming acknowledges how power and
knowledge form bodies, identities, and meanings, and how inequalities disfig-
ure living, while refusing to reduce ­people to the workings of such forces.3

introduction | 5
 Instead of viewing p­ eople in terms of core princi­ples or as fully bounded
by structure or form, the anthropology of becoming attends to p­ eople’s trans-
formations and varied agencies, and to the ways in which power itself is shifting
and contingent—­less a solid, stable entity than a product of manipulation, sys-
tematic falsehood, and ongoing strug­gle, and constantly punctured and put to
flight by ­people’s becomings. In this way, anthropology makes space for unfin-
ishedness, and bodies, power, and ­things do not remain frozen in place.
The second dimension has to do with experiences of time, space, and de-
sire. Lived time is not reducible to clock time, and ­people inhabit multiple
temporalities at once. Becoming occupies its own kind of temporality that un-
folds in the pres­ent: a dynamic interpenetration of past and ­future, ­actual and
virtual. Distinct from potentiality and not reducible to causality or outcomes,
becoming is characterized by the indeterminacies that keep history open, and
it allows us to see what happens in the meantimes of h­ uman strug­gle and daily
life. Becoming also attunes us differently to the shifting cultural and mate-
rial particularities of the spaces our interlocutors must traverse: cartographic
rather than archaeological, becomings “belong to geography, they are orienta-
tions, directions, entries and exits.”4 The very materialities of space affect and
impinge on the subject, encouraging or constraining possibilities for move-
ment and adding further texture to lived experiences.
­These meantimes and interstitial spaces are not stagnant vacuums: they
overflow with shifting aggregates of desire and power, the emerging sociopo­
liti­cal fields and intersubjective entanglements produced as ­people imagine
and attempt to make real what they need and long for. Desire does not seek
a singular, decontextualized object, but a broader world or set of relations in
which the object is embedded and becomes meaningful.5 Attending to this ag-
gregating capacity and the operative fields in and through which institutions
and social pro­cesses combine and collapse, the anthropology of becoming ap-
proaches the interplay between the motions of becoming dif­fer­ent and mo-
ments of impasse or plateaus of stabilization.
The third dimension involves an attentiveness to the unknown, both as
a critical feature of ­people and material worlds and as a productive force in
research and conceptual work. Through its relentless empiricism and radi-
cal analytical openness, anthropology creates the conditions of possibility
for moments of surprise and the sustained, open-­ended engagements that
won­der, itself always historically and locally situated, precipitates. ­W hether
through the classic anthropological realization that other systems and ideas
or­ga­nize life elsewhere, or the recognition that our own presuppositions often

6 | joão biehl and peter locke

prove inadequate in describing the complex realities of the lives of ­others,
fieldwork moves us away from entrenched categories and expands the
­perspectives—on other cultures, space-­times, and species—­from which we
can perceive and understand the world (if only always partially). Ethnographic
subjects are, in a sense, both life experimenters and figures of surprise—­not
knowable ahead of time, unpredictable, and capable of shifting something in
our own thinking. Remaining open to the unfathomable complexity of lay-
ered entanglements of biology, environment, social life, and material forces
of all kinds, and acknowledging—­even embracing—­the unknown can inspire
scholars to produce a more h­ umble, tentative social science, keeping our the-
ory more multirealistic and sensible and our modes of expression less figura-
tive and more readily available for swerves, breaks, and new paths.
Together, ­these three dimensions challenge the craft of anthropology to
continue to cultivate forms of field research and expression that can bring
us closer to the plasticity and virtuality, the transformations and dead ends,
of our ethnographic subjects and their worlds within worlds and languages
within languages—­none of which can be known in the abstract or ahead of
time. Such a commitment to ethnographic empiricism, we hope, can help il-
luminate how older dynamics of difference-making and vio­lence are reinvigo-
rated and the conditions ­under which something new might be produced.

becomings

In working ­toward an anthropology of becoming, we have drawn on the work

of French phi­los­o­pher Gilles Deleuze (in dialogue with his longtime collabo-
rator Félix Guattari), whose par­tic­u­lar empiricist sensibility and attentiveness
to the constructedness of both subjects and power lends itself to ethnographic
inquiry and to a more ­humble and creative form of critique and conceptual
thinking. For us, Deleuze offers one opening into the multiple theoretical and
disciplinary lineages that work with and from this plasticity and inventiveness
of ­people, and he attunes us to ongoing, diverse exchanges between anthropol-
ogy and philosophy.6
In Deleuze’s writing we find approaches that seem refreshingly ethnographic
and unabashedly open-­ended—­cartography as opposed to archaeology, rhi-
zomes as opposed to deep structures, leaking social fields as opposed to enclosed
systems, and lines of flight and deterritorialization forever breaking through
the impasses imposed by totalizing forms of power and knowledge. The ten-
sion between empirical realities and theories is permanent and irresolvable,

introduction | 7
and ­these approaches allow theory to be always catching up to real­ity, always
startled, making space for the incompleteness of understanding that is often a
necessary condition for anthropological fieldwork and thinking.
One of the key terms of Deleuze’s thought, becoming embodies such sen-
sibilities and has been particularly productive in our own work. As deployed
by theorists, the concept of becoming destabilizes the primacy of being and
identity in the Western philosophical tradition in ­favor of attending to shifting
sets of relations and the ongoing production of difference in the world. Becom-
ing moves through ­every event, so that each is si­mul­ta­neously the start, end,
and midpoint of an ongoing cycle of production. In this Nietz­schean eternal
return of change and difference, the worlds and histories we traverse are both
products and conditions of becoming, and the ­human subject is not an auton-
omous, rational individual or a stable self but an always unstable assemblage
of organic, social, and structural forces and lines of flight that at once shape
and are shaped by their milieus.7 The nonlinear space-­time and the extensive,
contingent itineraries of becoming cannot be permanently closed, completely
deciphered, or planned in advance.
In the essay “Many Politics,” Deleuze articulates more precisely how be-
coming fits into his larger theory of individuation and the forming of social
fields. “­W hether we are individuals or groups, we are made up of lines,” he
says.8 ­These lines fall into three main kinds.
The first kind of line is segmentary, defining and sorting p­ eople according
to categories: “binary machines of social classes; of sexes, man-­woman; of
ages, child-­adult; of races, black-­white; of sectors, public-­private; of subjec-
tivations, ours-­not ours.”9 If ­these ordering and classifying “molar”10 lines
are part of Foucauldian normalizing apparatuses of power,11 then the second
kind of line is “supple,”12 charting the ­actual lives and social worlds that de-
pend on the rigidity of forms, categories, and bound­aries while never quite
corresponding to them. Ever crossing thresholds, ­these molecular lines are
the means and materials of meandering transformations that cannot be en-
gineered by arts of governance. Many ­things happen on this second kind of
line: “becomings, micro-­becomings, which ­don’t even have the same rhythm
as our ‘history.’ ”13
The third kind of line—­the line of flight—is both distinct from and of a piece
with the molecular lines that jostle with the molar lines, more radical and myste-
rious: “as if something carried us away, across our segments, but also across our
thresholds, ­towards a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-­
existent.”14 Above all, the point is that “all t­ hese lines are tangled” as they make

8 | joão biehl and peter locke

up concrete social fields; mutually constitutive and dependent, each type of line
comes with its own openings, dangers, and dead ends.15
To write, says Deleuze, is “not to impose a form (or expression) on the ­matter
of lived experience.”16 Lit­er­a­ture (and ethnography tuned to becomings, we
hope) instead moves “in the direction of the ill-­formed or the incomplete . . . ​
it is inseparable from becoming.”17 Becoming, as theorized by Deleuze, always
happens “in the m ­ iddle”: ­people moving along and amid multiple lines, pushing
the bound­aries of forms, escaping and inventing new forces, and combining
with other fluxes.18
To become is “not to attain a form” but to find “a zone of proximity, in-
discernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished
from a ­woman, an animal, or a molecule—­neither imprecise nor general, but
unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularized out of a population rather than
determined by a form.”19 Beyond mere resemblance or sentimental identifica-
tion, one can enter into such a zone of deep proximity with anyone or any-
thing—­“I is an other,” in Arthur Rimbaud’s formulation20—­“on the condition
that one creates the literary means for d­ oing so.”21
Always singular yet ever producing multiplicity, the work of becoming is in-
herently a work of creation. It invokes the capacities of ­people to endure and live
on as they reckon with the overdetermined constraints and resources of the
worlds into which they are thrown, while also, crucially, calling on their ability
to approach the open-­ended, to imagine worlds and characters that do not—­
but may yet—­exist. One of the guiding princi­ples of Deleuze’s conceptual work
is that the real and the virtual are always coexisting, always complementary,
two juxtaposable or superimposable parts of a single trajectory: “two ­faces that
ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror” that bears witness
­until the end to a new vision whose passage it remains open to.22
Training anthropology’s focus on ­people’s becomings across forms and
scales and over time highlights the extent to which a bounded concept of so-
ciety, culture, or politics does not neatly align with empirical realities. “For me,
society is something that is constantly escaping in ­every direction,” Deleuze said
in a conversation with Paul Rabinow in the mid-1980s: “It flows monetarily, it
flows ideologically. It is r­ eally made of lines of flight. So much so that the prob­
lem for a society is how to stop it from flowing. For me, the powers come ­later.”23
To draw on this productive unmooring, we might need to let go of some
venerable assumptions about the h­ uman condition and about where we lo-
cate po­liti­cal action, instead asking what life-­forms, collectives, and new kinds
of politics are on the horizon, brewing within the leaking excesses of existing

introduction | 9
force fields and imaginaries. Becoming, thus, is a style of noticing, thinking,
and writing through which to capture the intricate relations, movements, and
dynamics of power and flight that make up our social worlds.
The time of becoming is the real time in which life strug­gles are waged, in
which stasis is sustained or transformation plays out, fragmented and uneven.
As Deleuze argued in an interview late in his life, “becoming ­isn’t a part of his-
tory; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that
one leaves ­behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new.”24
While ethnographic work bears out Deleuze’s insight that becoming unfolds
at a dif­fer­ent tempo of change from the seemingly linear march of historical
events, it also trou­bles the phi­los­o­pher’s sense that becoming unequivocally
“leaves ­behind” the force of the past. Even as becoming cannot be reduced to
history and our subjects often carve out unexpected paths, history remains
folded into the pres­ent and the contingent, both imposing limits on and fur-
nishing resources for ­people’s social and material ­labor.25 In Bridget Purcell’s
words in this volume, “layered histories persist—­not only as material traces,
but folded, also, into perception, practice and sensibility.”
Indeed, if the concept of becoming provides impor­tant openings for an-
thropology with its emphasis on transformation and its attention to the con-
stant reworking of lives and worlds, in its typical philosophical renderings and
uptake it may be too distant from experience, missing something of the vari­ous
constraints and conditions that shape how becomings actually unfold.26 ­These
conditions beg for a distinct perceptual capacity and critical understanding
and are themselves rich starting points for alternative theorizing, holding off
what the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart calls “the quick jump from concept
to world—­that precarious habit of academic thought.”27 Attending to life as it
is lived and adjudicated by ­people produces a multiplicity of approaches, criti-
cal moves and countermoves, and an array of interpretive ­angles as vari­ous as
the individuals drawn to practice anthropology. At stake is finding creative
ways of not letting the ethnographic die in our accounts of the contemporary.
Ethnography is not just protophilosophy, but a way of staying connected to
open-­ended, even mysterious, social processes—­a way of counterbalancing the
generation of certainties and foreclosures by other disciplines.28 Ethnographic
subjects like Mrs. Lana and Catarina/Catkine, who open this sensorium, em-
body complex realities in unforeseeable ways, neither fully constrained by nor
fully detached from the legacies of historical patterns and systemic vio­lence.
Mrs. Lana’s mourning emerges from stubborn structures of in­equality with
deep roots, yet it also triggers new conversations and solidarities in her com-

10 | joão biehl and peter locke

munity. In Cyprus, the remains of the missing do not freeze the past in place
but renew it, in all its uncertain tragedies and crimes, as a symbolic and mate-
rial excess that lends po­liti­cal and social force to the intertwined grievances
of the bereaved. Crowds in Mexico City protesting the enormous ­human toll
of state and drug-related vio­lence and turn the intense affect of personal loss
into a fierce collective demand for accountability and ­will for po­liti­cal change,
however fleeting.
The ethnographic sensorium, in other words, shows us social aggregates
not as givens that must be embraced or resisted, but as temporary collectives
that—­whether they evaporate or congeal into lasting forms of change—­reveal
transformative visions and potentials emerging from unexpected corners. In-
deed, ethnography has a knack for apprehending and mediating changes in
­people’s lives that are not only political-­economic and material but also ethi-
cal, interpersonal, and singular.
Like the Ayoreo in Paraguay, whose negative existence emerges through
traumatic encounters with dominant forms, ­people in the field show us the
extent to which becoming is always excessive and unruly. To be unformed is
a kind of active (if unanticipated) re­sis­tance. The po­liti­cal subjects of ethnog-
raphy are ambiguous, creative, and unpredictable, always pushing the bound­
aries of our abstractions. They act, borrowing Michael  M. J. Fischer’s apt
phrasing, as “pebbles and labyrinths in the way of theory,”29 calling on anthro-
pologists to resist synthetic closure and totalizing explanation and to keep our
focus on the interrelatedness and unfinishedness of all h­ uman life—­indeed,
of all life and of the planet itself—in the face of precarity and the unknown.30
Grounded in this candid empiricism and emancipatory openness, attentive
to deadly impasses as well as to abrupt—­even catastrophic—­forms of change,
ethnography can generate empowering social and po­liti­cal critique with our
subjects rather than about them, illuminating the rationalities, interests, and
moral issues of our times and the shifting horizons against which they un-
fold.31 In the anthropology of becoming, “relationships with our subjects,” as
Lilia M. Schwarcz puts it in chapter 6, “transform, create, or suggest new forms
of communication and perhaps understanding.”

peopling critical theory

Nearly a ­century of critical theory emanating from anthropology and re-

lated fields, including feminist and postcolonial critiques, has dislodged
the sway of crude universals in f­avor of attending more closely to the

introduction | 11
specificity and world-­historical significance of ­people’s plasticity and every-
day experiences.32
In the early twentieth ­century, Sigmund Freud wrote of the “allo-­plastic”
capacity of his neurotic patients to alter real­ity through fantasy,33 while Broni-
slaw Malinowski argued for the “plasticity of instincts” u­ nder culture.34 In the
same era, Marcel Mauss articulated his famous concept of l’homme total
to highlight the malleability of the ­human subject at the interface of psy­
chol­ogy, social relations and modes of reciprocity, and culturally ingrained
routines and “body techniques.”35 A few de­cades ­later, in his seminal explo-
ration of ­mental health u­ nder the French colonial regime in Algeria, Frantz
Fanon demonstrated that the “I” is a material of politics, the platform on
which agonistic strug­gles over in­equality, domination, and h­ uman dignity
are waged. To the question facing the colonized subject—­“In real­ity, who
am I?”—­Fanon’s answer is one of deconstruction: which and whose real­
ity is this?36 More recently, Judith Butler has written incisively of the self-­
empowerment afforded to the subjected by ambiguity. She denaturalizes
gender norms and highlights people’s capacities to defy and rewrite cultural
scripts, while exploring the specific forms of vulnerability and grievability that
shape precarious lives.37
Since its emergence as a research methodology, ethnographic fieldwork has
been essential to understanding how this plasticity of ­people and social fields
unfolds in historically and culturally contingent worlds. In their classic work
among the Tswana of southern Africa, for example, Jean and John Comaroff
highlight how colonial encounters confronted Eu­ro­pe­ans with the possibility
of other forms of personhood. For the Tswana, they explain, “the person was
a constant work in pro­gress,” referring “not to a state of being but to a state of
becoming. No living self could be static. Stasis meant social death.”38
In its emphasis on understanding personhood in context and through field
and archival research, the Comaroffs’ work exemplifies how anthropology and
critical theory can attend to pro­cesses of becoming as empirical realities of
socie­ties past and pres­ent: the ­labor of making oneself and one’s life, always
already in relation to ­others and to the values and imperatives of the social—­
and, in the Tswana case, against a background of colonial domination. In such
contexts, anthropologists have also explored what Michael Taussig, drawing
on the work of Frankfurt school thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Walter
Benjamin, calls the “mimetic faculty”—­that ­human capacity to “copy, imitate,
make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other.”39 Subjugated
communities, Taussig shows, blur subject-­object divides, instrumentalize

12 | joão biehl and peter locke

misrecognitions, and sustain capacities for alternative becomings, even amid
the vio­lence of colonial power relations.40
Indeed, the notion of becoming—or some close analogue—­has long been
familiar and helpful to anthropologists, and innovative scholars have fore-
grounded kindred ideas as guides for peopling critical theory through fieldwork
and ethnographic writing. For example, Michael M. J. Fischer has brought
ethnographic groundedness to science studies through his attention to the
“emergent forms of life” that arise through and in contrast to the technologies,
networks, and infrastructures of con­temporary bioscience, the media, and hu-
manitarianism.41 How, Fischer asks, can anthropology build new ethical ter-
rains of decision making and new landscapes of po­liti­cal assemblages within,
around, and beyond older frameworks? Fischer draws our attention to new
and challenging “ethical plateaus” (a term that comes from the anthropologist
Gregory Bateson, via Deleuze and Guattari) on which multiple technologies
interact, showing that our ethical and analytical models are failing amid fast-­
paced revolutions in our technoscientific worlds ranging from big data to ge­
ne­tics.42 Fischer argues that by carefully attending to what he calls “switching
points”—­moments when technoscientific innovations or po­liti­cal maneuvers
make pos­si­ble alternative forms of life and citizenship—­and by staying close to
how new technological and social infrastructures are lived with, ethnographic
work helps ensure that our analyses keep pace with the times and remain able
to imagine new institutions and forms of protection for the vulnerable, and to
deflate dehumanizing theoretical abstractions and universals.
As the work of Fischer—­and that of many other critical anthropologists
of science, technology, and medicine—­continually remind us, the categories
of supposedly objective scientific nomenclature always carry real po­liti­cal,
ethical, and bodily stakes.43 Consider the ways in which the notion of a new
“Anthropocene” geological era—­the term was first coined by the Nobel Prize–­
winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 1995 and has been gaining popularity ever
since—­may continue to mystify the global workings of power and in­equality
even as it adds much-­needed urgency to the work of recognizing ­human re-
sponsibility for environmental change. “The formal definition of the Anthro-
pocene,” as two earth scientists write in Nature, “makes scientists arbiters, to
an extent, of the human-­environment relationship, itself an act with conse-
quences beyond geology.”44 The universal humanity of anthropos obscures the
ways in which specific politics and ways of living have contributed to the cli-
mate crisis, painting as universal and somehow innate to our species the highly
contingent—­and devastatingly destructive—­patterns of consumption and

introduction | 13
production that characterize the world’s wealthiest cap­it­ al­ist socie­ties. “Ours
is the geological epoch not of humanity, but of capital,” writes one ecologist.45
From vast planetary timescales and transformations to cells u­ nder the
microscope, scholars are increasingly identifying power and in­equality at
work even in the most ostensibly natu­ral—­read “apolitical”—­processes. In
their book Biosocial Becomings, for example, the anthropologists Tim Ingold
and Gisli Palsson draw on the work of heterodox biologists, the new field of
epigenet­ics, and a post-­Darwinian understanding of evolution to perceive
a world not of discrete life-­forms transforming through linear pathways of
descent, but a “developmental unfolding of the entire matrix of relations”—­
inevitably conditioned by history, culture, and power—­“within which forms
of life (­human and non-­human) emerge and are held in place.”46
Indeed, even at the molecular level, epige­ne­tic researchers now find that
specific politics and histories shape the intertwined becomings of p­ eople and
ecosystems, both within the individual life course and across generations.47
Such findings hold out the promise of lending broader legitimacy to exist-
ing social scientific concepts that emphasize entanglements between bodies
and the worlds they live in—­from the biosocial48 and the ecosocial49 to the
mindful body50 and local biologies.51 Yet while epigenet­ics has the potential to
make space for the social in conversations about the biological body, it might
also, as Margaret Lock warns in her recent writings, serve as a new form of
“somatic determinism” by reifying social determinants as static variables that
can be clearly distinguished from biological pro­cesses.52
Ingold and Palsson draw on anthropology’s long tradition of critiquing
reductive nature-­culture dichotomies to highlight how the biological and
the social are always bound together in a pro­cess of mutual becoming and
transformation—­a pro­cess in which genes are exchanged between organisms,
historical traumas alter what is inherited, and what might first appear as an indi-
vidual organism (the h­ uman subject, for example) is in fact an aggregate of nu-
merous life-­forms existing in symbiotic cooperation and evolving together.53
“­Humans become ­human through relations with other becoming organisms
and species and the environments within which they are embedded,” writes
Palsson,54 evoking the fecundity of new work in the burgeoning area of “multi-
species ethnography.”55 “Becoming,” as Deleuze suggests, “is “always ‘between’
or ‘among.’ ”56 The entanglement of the h­ uman, the animal, and the material
produces the shifting matrix of relations through which one “becomes-­woman,
becomes-­animal or vegetable, becomes-­molecule to the point of becoming-­
imperceptible”57—this, in Deleuze’s words, is what “makes a world.”58

14 | joão biehl and peter locke

 Building on this and related notions of becoming-­animal, multispecies
ethnographers are broadening the scope of their proj­ects to study the “mu-
tual ecologies” that develop between h­ umans and other beings.59 In a time
of discouraged, apocalyptic theorizing about the accumulating consequences
of man-­made environmental transformation, Eben Kirskey finds that new
and promising relations between ­people, environments, and other species are
“flourishing in the aftermath of order-­destroying disruptions.”60 Such “emergent
ecologies”—­crucially, perceived only through the nimble deployment of eth-
nographic fieldwork far from centers of ivory tower expertise—­challenge both
the social and natu­ral sciences to attend to the ways in which “a multitude of
tinkerers and thinkers are transforming feelings of futility into concrete action,
cynicism into happiness and hope,” even amid destruction and extinction.61
­Here the promise of multispecies ethnography lies not in casting aside
anthropology’s strengths in learning from ­people in context as somehow ob-
solete; instead, it makes the tinkering of everyday eco-­bricoleurs a source of
insight and inspiration for imagining how alarming forms of environmental
change may yet reveal new opportunities for the mutual becoming-­other of
­human socie­ties and the “swarming multitude” of nonhuman life forms with
whom we share the planet.62 Yet even as we consider emerging forms of hope,
to understand the limits of life in local worlds and on our shared planet—­and
the kinds of politics and policy that are pos­si­ble or desirable—it remains cru-
cial to address questions of history, po­liti­cal economy, the theorizing of differ-
ence, and the uneven global distribution of risk and vulnerability.
As Anna L. Tsing notes, we are “surrounded by many world-­making proj­ects,
­human and not ­human.”63 The challenge, it seems, is to integrate interspecies
relations and shifting ecological contexts into our understanding of “biosocial
becomings” without obscuring64—in the pursuit of, for example, an “anthro-
pology beyond the ­human”65—­the unavoidable fact that the fields of our field-
work are both peopled by ­human communities in their multiple engagements
and perspectives66 and ­shaped by the forces and flows of global capitalism.67
In The Mushroom at the End of The World, Tsing shows what it might look like
to attend to the broad weave of life—­human and nonhuman—in the increas-
ingly precarious “blasted landscapes” of our “worldwide ruination” without
losing sight of po­liti­cal economy (or assuming its totality).68 Rejecting strongly
held beliefs about pro­gress (economic, scientific, or other­wise), the anthro-
pologist calls on us to cultivate our “arts of noticing” and to “look around rather
than ahead.”69 While highlighting the precarious yet vital “possibility of life in
cap­i­tal­ist ruins,” her capacious forms of attention bring nonhumans into the

introduction | 15
fold without hiding from capital or the state: “assemblages,” she insists, “drag
po­liti­cal economy inside them, and not just for ­humans.”70
Shifting from living beings and ecosystems to material objects, how might
an anthropology of becoming also address the vibrancy of ­matter without los-
ing sight of the ­human? As Elizabeth A. Davis’s work with the bones and be-
longings of missing war victims shows, objects work through and on us. They
do not exist outside of sociohistorical worlds, and thus they come to be infused
with multiple, sometimes contradictory, ­human meanings and signs. As Davis
writes in chapter 8: “The force operated by the artifacts of the missing lies in
their capacity not to exceed but to slip between semiotic captures, to condense
multiple temporalities and thus to accommodate discrepant meanings. They
are in the right place at the right time to make ­things happen.” Or, as Schwarcz’s
reflections in chapter 6 on her collaboration with the artist Adriana Varejão
demonstrate, ­things themselves—in this case, paintings and sculptures—­are
inscribed in multiple systems of meaning and reference that shape their pro-
duction, their legibility, and their effects on us: “instead of using images as
illustrations,” Schwarcz suggests, “the idea [is] to understand how works of art
can interfere in real­ity, creating and destroying customs, values, and symbols.”
In Vibrant ­Matter, the po­liti­cal theorist Jane Bennett proposes a dual
philosophical-­political proj­ect that takes nonhuman t­hings as its object of
analy­sis.71 Writing against the “idea of m­ atter as passive stuff, as raw, brute, or
inert” and the supposed “partition of the sensible” that divides “dull ­matter
(it, t­hings)” from “vibrant life (us, beings),” she argues that ­matter itself is
vital, lively, and—in its own way—­agentive.72 ­Things, she argues, possess vital
powers, serving “not only to impede or block the ­will and designs of ­humans
but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or ten-
dencies of their own.”73 Yet if, as Arjun Appadurai has cautioned, the “new
materialisms” of con­temporary social theory sometimes leave ­little space for
“questions of ethics, accountability, normativity, and po­liti­cal critique,” focus-
ing less on objects as givens and more on their trajectories and milieus allows
us to see the crossroads and configurations that work on h­ uman subjects and
the worlds they occupy.74 In this way, as Davis’s and Schwarcz’s work shows, we
might read ­things as lively not only ontologically or in themselves, but as mate-
rial artifacts or “mediants” (to use Appadurai’s word) that are entangled with
larger social, po­liti­cal, and economic forces.75
While fieldwork among p­ eople and attention to the “imponderabilia of
­actual life” remains, for us, the indispensable foundation of anthropological
thought and inquiry,76 we are not out to reiterate a problematically anthropo-

16 | joão biehl and peter locke

centric humanism that cuts off ­people’s becomings from ­those of other species
and our living and material environments. Quite the contrary, the humanism
that grounds the anthropology of becoming assumes that the very bound­aries
and meanings of ­ “human being” are porous and changeable, made and remade
through eco-­bio-­social relations within po­liti­cal economies.77 As Naisargi
Dave shows us in her exploration in chapter 5 of the ambivalent and often ex-
cruciating journeys of con­temporary animal rights activists in India, her sub-
jects’ becomings happen precisely through a vulnerability to other beings that
explodes rather than reinforces a bounded conception of the h­ uman or the
self—­a vulnerability that thickens relationality by painfully “exfoliat[ing]
the social skin,” in the words of the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli.78 Can
we, as Dave puts it, “become something other than the safely encased h­ uman
self?” Citing Deleuze and Guattari,79 the anthropologist reminds us that be-
coming turns the self “not into another kind of self, but only into a ‘question-­
machine.’ ” This question-­machine, in turn, is a part of social movements; they
“are full of becomings: they are defined and made by them.”
From social movements full of becomings to emergent ecologies in blasted
landscapes, ­there is something about the concept of becoming that lends it-
self to snatching glimmers of hope from bleak horizons. Yet the anthropology
of becoming may equally illuminate trajectories of loss and stagnation, grief
and decay, and worlds on the verge of—or already enveloped in—­ruin and
disaster. Catarina/Catkine’s writing, in the end, could not take her back home
to the life she wanted. Postcontact Ayoreos’ radical rejection of former ways
of life, Lucas Bessire shows in chapter 7, might lead both to further destitu-
tion and misery and to “novel vital experiments and unsettling kinds of imma-
nence.” Becoming cannot be mea­sured by outcome, nor is it necessarily about
pro­gress or even hope. In responding to unlivable conditions, experimenta-
tion with the limited resources of life is just as likely to lead to a deadly end-
point as to “actionable critique” and a liberating swerve. Understanding the
fine nuances of t­hese strug­gles, terms of transformation, and contradictions
demands, above all, methods that immerse us in the worlds of our subjects
over extended periods of time.
It is by holding onto close engagement with ­people that we cultivate new
ways of understanding and relating to worlds and ecologies, social structures
and biologies. In this way, ethnographic fieldwork can make vis­i­ble the ide-
ologies, maneuverings, and fabulations of power in which life chances are
foreclosed and can highlight the ways desires can break open if not alterna-
tive pathways, then at least the possibility of imagining ­things other­wise as

introduction | 17
one lives on. As Deleuze so poignantly comments in an interview with Antonio
Negri in the early 1990s: “What we most lack is a belief in the world, w
­ e’ve quite
80
lost the world, it’s been taken from us.” Fieldwork and the encounters, texts,
and modes of expression it engenders offer us a way back into worldliness.

worlds on the edge

What are the worlds, then, that fieldwork attuned to becomings draws us into
­today?
Two de­cades ago, scholars ­were preoccupied with the post–­Cold War
“world in pieces,” in which nation-­states ­were fragmenting along resurgent
ethnic divisions.81 Clifford Geertz ended his classic essay on the topic with
mea­sured hope in the capacity of Western po­liti­cal liberalism to adapt to this
“splintered world,” suggesting that liberal princi­ples w
­ ere still “our best guides
82
to law, government, and public deportment.”
Yet this faith in the politics of liberal democracy has been hard to main-
tain. ­After the turn of the millennium, the specter of terrorism in the United
States propelled an unanticipated intersection of new technologies with the
antidemo­cratic surveillance concerns of the post-9/11 security state.83 Late
liberal rearrangements of state and capital have both dismantled regulatory re-
gimes and implemented new ones, as well as strengthened older power forma-
tions, and traditional demo­cratic politics have become increasingly oligarchical
and divorced from the needs of the governed, even as public infrastructures and
ser­vices crumble.84 With the rise and increasing electoral success of right-­wing
populist movements across the world—­from the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote
to leave the Eu­ro­pean Union in June 2016, to the election of the xenophobic
demagogue Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency a few months ­later—we
see anxious, resentful electorates embracing a hauntingly familiar politics of
chauvinism and scapegoating.
What science and critical thinking could have anticipated ­today’s acute
strug­gles over inclusion and exclusion; white supremacy, race, and polic-
ing; gender and sexuality; socioeconomic in­equality; chronic warfare; data
and surveillance; and abrupt environmental change, so often addressed in
rhe­torics of recovery even as conditions stagnate or worsen? What entangle-
ments of wishful thinking, denial, and privilege have marginalized voices of
warning and amplified fantasies of linear pro­gress?
Uncannily, the late American pragmatist phi­los­o­pher Richard Rorty seems
to have anticipated the toxicity of ­today’s growing backlash against progressive

18 | joão biehl and peter locke

agendas of diversity and inclusion, entangled as they have been with neoliberal
globalization. Writing in 1998 and drawing on the fears of socioeconomic ana-
lysts of the day, Rorty cautioned that “fascism may be the American ­future. . . . ​
The nonsuburban electorate ­will decide that the system has failed and start
looking around for a strongman to vote for—­someone willing to assure them
that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky ­lawyers, overpaid bond
salesmen, and postmodernist professors w ­ ill no longer be calling the shots. . . . ​
One ­thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty
years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, ­will be wiped out.
Jocular contempt for w ­ omen w­ ill come back into fashion.”85
The pres­ent moment profoundly defies teleologies of pro­gress: if in the 1990s,
the fall of the Soviet Union allowed some to judge Euro-­American democracy
and capitalism as “the end of history,”86 ­today faith in t­ hese systems as eventual
guarantors of a good life for all is faltering. Austerity-­based approaches remain
dominant despite ever-­accumulating evidence of their failure to resolve states
of crisis and their contribution to exacerbating in­equality. Progressives in the
United States continue to fight—­and surely face a period of heightened adver-
sity and strug­gle—­for the basic rights of ­women and racial and sexual minorities,
highlighting the unfinishedness and precarity of the civil rights achievements of
the 1960s.87 Rubrics such as religion, long assumed to be falling away, have re-
emerged in the public sphere as enduring sites of politics and identity.88
From increasing doubts about the viability and efficacy of the Eu­ro­pean Union
to the World Health Organ­ization’s bungling of the initial response to the
2014–15 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the innovations in international
po­liti­cal cooperation and accountability that once seemed to embody the high-
est promises of a liberal demo­cratic globalism have come to appear toothless
and inept, si­mul­ta­neously revealing the exclusionary interests that have driven
them all along.89 While the continuing failure of major world powers and insti-
tutions to adequately confront the realities of climate change grows ever more
alarming, affluent socie­ties themselves—­comfortable in their established pat-
terns of consumption and waste and cynical about the possibility of change—­
fail to extend their sense of empathy and imagination to the impoverished
communities who ­will feel the effects of environmental shifts most acutely.90
The notion of crisis has been a tempting, if problematic, lens through
which to understand ­today’s historically rooted forms of precarity and re-
actionary politics of othering.91 Scholarly diagnoses of the pres­ent moment
often, and understandably, convey a sense of dwindling possibilities. In Undo-
ing the Demos, for example, the po­liti­cal theorist Wendy Brown argues that the

introduction | 19
encroachment of neoliberalism into all spheres of life is destroying democracy
and the broader po­liti­cal realm.92 Her assessment is bleak: “neoliberalism is
the rationality through which capitalism fi­nally swallows humanity.”93
The splash made by the French economist Thomas Piketty’s ambitious
work Capital in the Twenty-­First ­Century is another sign of the times.94 For
Piketty, expanding in­equality is inherent to the logic of an underregulated
capitalism in which assets ­matter more than ­labor. Absent significant inter-
vention, he argues, the ratio of wealth to income ­will continue to rise, steadily
expanding gaps between rich and poor. Widely read and discussed in both
academic and public spheres, the book has struck a chord in a post–­financial
crisis, post-­Occupy Amer­i­ca where income in­equality remains a central fact of
lived experience and, increasingly, a critical feature in public discourse.95 If the
American dream was premised on equal opportunity for class advancement
through hard work, Piketty’s demonstration that returns on capital ­matter far
more than earned income from ­labor highlights the extent to which the sys-
tem itself was rigged from the beginning.
The failure of this system is experienced both materially and affectively.
In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant explores the textures of fantasy and at-
tachment in con­temporary Euro-­American capitalism. Concerned with the
fraying of the so-­called normative good life that promises upward mobility,
stability, intimacy, and equality, she discusses the vari­ous ways in which ­these
aspirations are si­mul­ta­neously life-­sustaining and self-­defeating. This is the
double bind that Berlant calls “cruel optimism”: a relation in which the very
object you desire is, in her words, “an obstacle to your flourishing” and “ac-
tively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”96 ­These attachments
represent the very possibility of happiness even as they render happiness im-
possible; yet ­because they sustain us and anchor us to the world in ways that
seem livable, losing them or letting them go is as much a threat as the destruc-
tion that holding onto them precipitates.
In Berlant’s account, desire and the possibility of imagining alternative
­futures are somehow already in the ser­vice of—or only thinkable within—­
the logics of failed social systems. Yet might even the cruelest of optimisms
open out onto something e­ lse? Is ­there also a kind of power in fabulation that
tethers us to life in ways that are not only self-­defeating but also generative, in
small and often unexpected ways—­through new configurations of thoughts,
affective states, and solidarities, even in the face of futility? For Brown, we
are “only and everywhere homo oeconomicus,” and demo­cratic citizenship
has been thoroughly “hollowed out,”97 but perhaps t­here is something too

20 | joão biehl and peter locke

totalizing in this account that begs for deeper specificity about what social
life is becoming in present-­day capitalism. What kinds of counterideologies
and counterconduct might be at work that do not rest on an imaginary out-
side of capital? How can we make sense of the ways p­ eople are mobilizing in
the pres­ent, making demands on the streets or online for equality and work-
able infrastructures, and forging tenuous and often subversive links between
themselves, the state, and the marketplace?98
By engaging the granularity of t­ hese “dramas of adjustment”99 and “pub-
lic appearances”100 in messy social worlds and par­tic­u­lar lives, what might
come into view within and beyond the impasse? In other words, how might
close-up ethnographic attention restore our capacity to perceive the becom-
ings of our subjects, even amid dire situations and against darkening po­liti­cal
horizons, and how might it enlarge our sense of ethics and politics in crucial
ways?
Where Brown, Piketty, and Berlant all rightfully highlight the very real ways
in which our systems—­and the hopes we invested in them—­have failed us,
attentiveness to becomings helps us see what e­ lse is emerging in everyday
strug­gles, foregrounding the microdynamics of ­people’s lives in a way that il-
luminates rifts, dangers, and possibilities, however minor, in macrolevel social
and po­liti­cal realities.101 While ­these openings may ultimately lead nowhere,
and futurity always strug­gles with futility and a sense of the inevitable, ­people
can si­mul­ta­neously be stuck and do ­things, and this is not nothing.
The work of the French phi­los­o­pher Jacques Rancière offers a helpful per-
spective. He defines a po­liti­cal sphere that resonates with the realities anthro-
pologists encounter in the field: worlds peopled by the uncounted and the
excluded, ambiguous po­liti­cal subjects who, as they “assert dissensus,” dog-
gedly resist the total triumph of any form of governmentality and sustain op-
portunities for change.102 As João Biehl shows in his work on right-­to-­health
litigation in Brazil, for example, low-­income ­people are using available l­egal
mechanisms to claim access to medical technologies and care and, in the pro­
cess, turning the judiciary into a critical site of politics and state accountabil-
ity.103 In chapter 4, Bridget Purcell tracks the “overlapping normative ­orders
that constitute ­people’s lives” in Turkey, attentive to how “bodies, spaces, and
subjects seem not to submit to the linear trajectory of discipline.” A ­mother
mourns on the over-­policed streets of Chicago’s inner city, and in chapter 2
Ralph learns how ­people in low-­income communities “invert popu­lar expec-
tations of mourning, thereby developing a concept of ‘becoming aggrieved’
that does not merely lament death but also affirms life.” Unlike Brown’s homo

introduction | 21
oeconomicus, who has lost even the barest capacity for demo­cratic dreams, or
Berlant’s duped optimists, doomed by the pursuit of middle-­class stability,
­these ethnographers of becomings perceive subjects who continue to resist
normative regimes and to imagine alternative possibilities, performing dissen-
sus and affirming the value of their chosen social worlds.
Politics and antipolitics continue to play out in the pres­ent in a range of
vital forms, and the ups and downs of recent social movements (from the
Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives ­Matter to their conserva-
tive counter­parts) highlight the deeply felt tensions of the moment and point
to the ongoing, creative ways that p­ eople mobilize against inequalities of all
kinds and for the conditions of a livable life.104 As economic injustice, racial
vio­lence, and the failed promises of democracy push ­people to precarious
limits—­including u­ nder the thrall of charismatic demagoguery—­attending to
the ethics of their exhausted bodies along with the pro­cesses of mobilization
and the diverse kinds of politics being enacted in dif­fer­ent forms of assembly,
time frames, and scales helps us identify the edges where con­temporary socie­
ties find themselves.105
While it is easy to write off failed social movements for their perceived
lack of revolutionary outcomes, such denunciations miss something crucial,
ignoring the vitality and experimentalism of new collectives as they assem­ble
and disperse or transform themselves. Long-­standing social grievances sud-
denly fuel mass protests and hopes for a “Bosnian Spring” of sorts, and then
dissipate, though not without revealing possibilities for a more demo­cratic
and accountable po­liti­cal pro­cess; ongoing investigations of the missing in
Cyprus both freeze time and restructure it, generating po­liti­cally potent soli-
darities around grief and loss. Such plural embodied actions engender shifts
for ­people and local worlds, if not in obvious ways, building new critical per-
spectives and understandings of the broader political-­economic realities and
scaling proj­ects that they challenge.
The ethnographic sensorium produced by attention to becomings illumi-
nates not only the plasticity of our subjects, but also the ways in which systems
and forces that appear intractable ­were not always inevitable. Although capital-
ism has an inherent tendency t­oward spiraling in­equality, the abstract, unim-
peded free-­market economy is a fantasy, and the system as it exists has been
propelled and shored up by intermediate pro­cesses, ideologies, and po­liti­cal
choices linked to par­tic­u­lar values and interests. Restoring this intermediate
analytic zone allows us to demystify the workings of capital and power, attend-
ing to destructive plasticities without assuming the machines and abstractions

22 | joão biehl and peter locke

to be natu­ral or self-­evident. This analytical move si­mul­ta­neously brings us
closer to worlds in flux, sheds light on what sustains entrenched systems, and
maintains space for po­liti­cal engagement.

a ­h uman science of the uncertain

In the early 1990s, Deleuze proposed that we ­were witnessing a shift to what
he called “control socie­ties.”106 Where Michel Foucault had famously illustrated
a transition from sovereign to disciplinary socie­ties,107 Deleuze predicted a col-
lapse of emblematic sites of confinement and biopo­liti­cal governance—­prisons,
hospitals, and factories—­and foresaw the emergence of a new, dispersive,
modulatory form of power. In this vision of the ­future in formation, the cen-
tralized panoptic gaze and the spatial confinement of bodies give way to flexible
yet omnipresent tracking, normalized surveillance, and increased technological,
digital, and market involvement in the regulation of life and ­labor. This break-
down of older institutions and familiar disciplinary modes heralds not libera-
tion but another transformation in their hold on us: “it’s not a question of ask-
ing ­whether the old or new system is harsher or more bearable, b­ ecause ­there’s
a conflict in each between the ways they f­ree and enslave us.”108 Subjects are
no longer individuals but “have become ‘dividuals.’ ”109 The walls, so to speak,
have fallen away, and discipline itself is no longer confined to its former insti-
tutional homes.
A quarter of a c­ entury ­later, Deleuze’s brief account feels remarkably pre-
scient in many ways. The explosion of the Internet—­not yet a major social
force in the early 1990s—­and the wide range of new technologies, markets,
and data it has generated have become crucial features in con­temporary con-
sumption, production, and sociality, enabling unpre­ce­dented tracking of both
individual be­hav­ior and macrolevel patterns. The ongoing flexibilization and
growing contingency of ­labor (itself linked to the decay of employee rights,
benefits, and job security) and our increasing imbrication in diffuse, invisible
systems of tracking (through our smart phones, online activity, and the no-­
longer-­futuristic presence of wearable devices and facial-­recognition technolo-
gies) have indeed left us subject to new, dispersed modes of control within and
beyond virtual spaces. Analysts and policy makers have staked their hopes on
the predictive capacities of quantitative and positivist sciences, even as ­these
methods so often fail to anticipate coming challenges and to render the inde-
terminacies of our invisible pres­ents and ever-­shifting horizons knowable or
manipulable. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden’s revelations remind us of the

introduction | 23
dark side of “big data,” highlighting its mobilization as an instrument of con-
trol and surveillance underpinned by rhe­torics of security.110
Critical for anthropology ­today is Deleuze’s alertness to the canny work-
ings of techno-­capitalism and the plasticity of power, as well as his acknowl­
edgment of the existence of counterknowledge—­that is, understanding and
critique that grows with being governed in a par­tic­u­lar way, which has the
potential to turn into an act of re­sis­tance or of making t­ hings other­wise.111 Yet
while much of Deleuze’s description rings true, his brief sketch of a society to
come does not answer the question of how social transformation happens;
how ­people reckon with it; and what kinds of social spheres, sensibilities, and
forms of self-­fashioning come into being as changes take hold and forms of
governance rework themselves.
An anthropology attuned to becomings asks how ­people engage with this
modulation of their desires, this tracking of their be­hav­iors and consumptions,
and this imperative to continually craft and recraft their digital selves.112 From
clinics and courtrooms in Brazil where medical technologies and shifting ­legal
configurations offer new possibilities for gender-­affirming care,113 to online
platforms where new forms of community and solidarity emerge for t­hose
previously excluded from the mainstream public sphere, technology is never
only controlling.114 Recent work by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp in the
anthropology of disability,115 for example, highlights how digital technologies
create “counterdiscursive sites of repre­sen­ta­tion” for marginalized subjects,
providing unexpected opportunities for “­people with disabilities to engage in
a first-­person discussion of their world and experiences.”116
In other words, ­people are actively deploying new technologies for their own
ends, waging politics and challenging entrenched assumptions. Gabriella Cole-
man’s work on the hacker collective Anonymous highlights a dif­fer­ent form
of counterdiscursivity playing out in con­temporary digital worlds. “Their
po­liti­cal tools,” she writes, “emerge from the concrete experiences of their
craft.”117 Coleman characterizes t­hese “radical tech warriors,” who are armed
with technological savvy and computing skills, as revolutionary rogues,118 si­
mul­ta­neously subversive and principled—­a new kind of po­liti­cal subject facing
the machineries of power in the twenty-­first ­century.119 More broadly, the cor-
porate capture and commodification of the expansive data exhaust produced
by social media activity raises questions for activists and social scientists alike
about what unforeseen potentials—­beyond surveillance, security, and person-
alized marketing—­all ­these data might have.

24 | joão biehl and peter locke

 If Deleuze’s vision for the dawning control society overlooked the possi-
bility that new digital media might become tools for social mobilization as
well as for the management of criminality and po­liti­cal dissent, it also did not
anticipate how old sites of confinement and punishment would not truly dis­
appear.120 Spaces of abandonment like Vita emerged as part and parcel of the
dismantling and transformation of more centralized institutions of control
and care in Brazil, and deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill engendered
similar translocations from the asylum to streets and jails in the United States.
Public hospitals, prisons, and schools have become private, profit-­generating
institutions that increasingly are embedded in other social domains and the
domestic sphere and, as Garcia’s work on Mexican anexos shows (see chap-
ter 3), vio­lence and religion are increasingly folded together in new regimes
of care and security.
Such reconfigurations of power, discipline, and profit are apparent across do-
mains. ­After the era of so-­called white flight, for example, gentrification, housing
and foreclosure crises, and debates over policing are all reshaping cities and
their neighborhoods, both spatially and socially. In education, shady online uni-
versities and degree programs proliferate to mine profits and personal data by
delivering the classroom to the laptop. In the United States, the enormous expan-
sion of standardized testing in primary and secondary education—­supported
by a booming industry of for-­profit exam production—­monitors and modu-
lates, ever more intensively and intrusively, the learning of new generations, con-
ditioning young ­people for new forms of anxiety-­driven self-­governance. The
privatization of prisons and the development of new technologies for monitor-
ing offenders beyond the jail cell all seem to consolidate rather than disperse
the brutal edifice of American mass incarceration,121 still the default tool for
containing the excesses and re­sis­tances produced by systemic racism and socio-
economic in­equality; and in the meantime, new communities of grievance take
root where the families of the incarcerated s­ ettle in to wait and hope.122 In health
care, the faltering or collapse of public systems in the era of neoliberalism has
made way for worlds in which families become proxies for biomedical power
and triage, nongovernmental organ­izations make up patchwork landscapes of
care delivery, and patients must create new and agonistic forms of citizenship
and medical self-­management to live with the biosocial illnesses and vulnerabili-
ties generated by severe in­equality and toxic environments.123
If disciplinary society in the past was characterized by bodies known and
governed by nation-­states, ­today, as public infrastructures and institutions

introduction | 25
falter, it is an assemblage of clandestine security agencies and multinational
corporations that track (and profit from) our bodies and ­labor. In ways of
which we are only dimly aware, our digital activity constantly produces value
for corporations as they become ever more integrated with larger virtual sys-
tems that extract from us a new kind of alienated ­labor. All the while, new
forms of high-­tech profiling risk exacerbating disparities along lines of race,
class, and gender. Yet the question of who can participate in this new form
of society is intimately linked to the production of value. As Deleuze noted,
“capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor
to have debts and too numerous to be confined.”124
What can be learned about social order and the po­liti­cal moment by
closely attending to this impoverished “three quarters”? In contexts s­ haped
by arbitrary neoliberal economic policies, myopic cultural politics, and un-
forgiving humanitarianisms, p­ eople like the Ayoreo of the Gran Chaco live in
the dizzying, fraught spaces of postcolonial and neo­co­lo­nial vio­lence, over-
whelming our assumptions of what counts as indigeneity and what modes of
existence and transformation are conjured up in the ruptures of contact. How
are ­today’s poor entangled in the opaque and alarming realignments of gov-
ernance, market, security, and citizenship, driven along altered trajectories of
hypermarginality and survival that, in turn, may generate new dangers, sen-
sibilities, and landscapes of possibility?125 “Hunger, nothing, void,” Garcia
writes in chapter 3: “­these are the negative forces that have the potential to
move one forward, and to be able to find in chains something e­ lse.” Broad-
ening our view of con­temporary society draws us into shifting dynamics of
market inclusion, indebtedness, and dissensus. Such dynamics are linked to
both emerging consumer desires and the “dreams and schemes”126 of develop-
ment and re­distribution proj­ects,127 affecting ideas of equality, solidarity, and
circuit-­breaking and world-­making capacities.
Deleuze’s almost casual aside that the astonishing scope and severity of
global poverty is connected to the shape and ­futures of evolving modes of
control is an essential insight that calls for granular, daring, cross-­disciplinary
work. As ever, in exploring pro­cesses of social transformation we find power,
interests, and domination. Only by insisting on a space where precarity is
actually a mobilizing force and where t­hose of no account are counted can
we restore the place of the poor and most vulnerable in the po­liti­cal com-
munity.128 Yet the metastories flowing from centers of thought and research
­today are often depoliticizing. From game theory, mathematical modeling,
and randomization to the hype of big data’s predictive potential, quantitative

26 | joão biehl and peter locke

approaches all too often treat socie­ties like deterministic machines and as-
sume that all we lack to anticipate their vulnerabilities and implement solu-
tions are the right methods for generating and interpreting data—­methods
­imagined to be just around the corner.129
Yet the very possibility of politics depends on scrutinizing the bound­aries
of inclusion and exclusion in preposterous social o­ rders, examining shared un-
certainties about how best to confront looming challenges, and creating space
for collective actions.130 Perfectly predictive quantitative approaches would
cast po­liti­cal action as the inevitable outcome of calculation (and therefore
not ­really po­liti­cal at all), rather than a product of debate, discernment, and
ethical reasoning informed by partial knowledges, mediated by plural acts of
re­sis­tance, and oriented ­toward ­futures not yet anticipated. What would it
take, as Petryna puts it in chapter 9, “to open up a conversation about what it
means when we look into the ­future and say we ­don’t know?” Exploring “the
disconnects and ambiguities that characterize abrupt ecosystem dynamics for
scientists and the rest of us,” she shows how the making of imperfect scientific
knowledge in contexts of radical uncertainty and “inexorable threat” is part of
a “new kind of intellectual ­labor.” As we grapple with “a complex ­future that is
right at hand,” Petryna asks, “how do temporal horizons themselves become
po­liti­cal, or how do they demarcate (or dissolve) a space of po­liti­cal action?”
If we are reluctant to offer h­ ere a pithy name to label the transformed work-
ings of power and in­equality ­after “control socie­ties,”131 this hesitance to hurriedly
abstract and simplify carries its own epistemic force insofar as it challenges—or
altogether dismantles—­the blinders imposed by more rigid, technical, or phil-
osophical methods of knowledge production. Rather than establishing a final
paradigm of knowing, the anthropology of becoming helps us track how the
social itself is unmoored, and the shape of collectives and the right course of
action remain undetermined. As Petryna suggests, the current moment seems
to call less for the all-­knowing hubris of totalizing analytical schemes than for a
­human science (and politics) of the uncertain and the unknown.
In the meantime, however, the dominant voices of economists and quan-
titative modelers acquire power, scientific authority, and resources by claim-
ing to represent empirical real­ity with their opaque mea­sure­ments and faulty
predictions.132 They alter social dynamics and po­liti­cal possibilities as they put
communities in the ser­vice of evidence production—­rather than the other
way around.133 Where in ­these calculations, polls, models, randomized ­trials,
and projections is ­there room for the contingent po­liti­cal decision or policy
swerve, the unexpected social movement or upheaval that sets events on an

introduction | 27
unforeseen course? What algorithms and predictions generate insight about
the moral and po­liti­cal dimensions of coming challenges or help navigate
questions of accountability and responsibility—or, as Donna Haraway might
put it, our ethical “response-­ability”?134

fieldwork and storytelling

Exploring tangles of microdynamics and macroforces in the pres­ent day, the

anthropology of becoming resists the binaries of inner/outer, individual/​
collective, human/nonhuman, and local/global, instead choosing to look at
how lives, rationalities, social fields, and power relations are inflected in one
another and in the enclosures, impasses, thresholds, and breakthroughs that
are the materials of lifeworld and subject construction. The precariousness
of our lives is not merely happy or sad happenstance; it is part and parcel of
small-­and large-­scale assemblages and shifts that color our ­every experience.
Yet desire is immersed in and ­shaped by world-­historical trajectories; in facing
the arbitrary and the contingent, p­ eople carve out footholds and surprising
escapes, and we must find ways of attending to them.
Ethnographically attuned to the interdependence and plasticity of live
forms across scales,135 we can weave together the affective trajectories of
singular lives and “tiny solidarities” with planetary-­level political-­economic,
technological, and environmental dynamics.136 As Judith Butler poignantly puts
it, “perhaps the ­human is the name we give to this very negotiation that emerges
from a living creature among creatures and in the midst of forms of living that
exceed us.”137
Tracking such negotiations is never only the prerogative of the anthropolo-
gist. Attuned to asymmetries of all kinds, we remain committed to speaking
and writing with ­people and their worlds, learning how they understand and
conceptualize their conditions and do the work of scaling and invention in
their everyday lives. As Bridget Purcell shows in the attention she pays in
chapter 4 to the “tentative, nonlinear ways that individuals orient themselves
in a ritual landscape that exceeds their full control,” ­people inhabit and negoti-
ate “multiple, overlapping” realities in their material and moral lives. Open to
won­der and to the vari­ous derailments that come with fieldwork, the anthro-
pology of becoming is marked by this animated, worldly multiplicity “even in
the person that speaks or acts.”138
­People and the worlds they navigate and the outlooks they articulate are
more confounding, incomplete, and multiplying than dominant analytical

28 | joão biehl and peter locke

schemes tend to account for. Drawn to the unsettling of rationalities and in-
grained commonsense, the anthropology of becoming thus eschews a sense
of theory as a totalizing enterprise or as the privileged domain of elite knowl-
edge makers self-­appointed to speak for or on behalf of benighted populations.
Upholding an equality of intelligences and rejecting the division between
­those who “truly” or “critically” know the world and t­ hose who merely pos-
sess the pragmatic know-how needed to survive in it, this book’s ethnographic
essays chronicle lived tensions between theory and practice. They invoke both
alternative conceptual frameworks and new kinds of imagination, in the spirit
of what the po­liti­cal economist Albert Hirschman might call “a l­ ittle less strait-
jacketing of the ­future.”139
Like our subjects, we tell stories to grapple with the world, and to under-
stand and intervene in it.140 While phi­los­o­phers tell stories with concepts, the
stories we tell in this book are crafted from instances of becomings.
In Ralph’s inner-­city Eastwood (see chapter 2), Mrs. Lana’s screams are at
once the shattering thrum of death and a means of creating “a public sphere in
which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded, or dismissed but valued for
the productive reflections they inspire.” Affirmed by the anthropologist, ­these
unforeseen “collective practices of care” speak to “locally salient ways of inter-
preting the ­human condition,” evincing the worldliness and creativity of ethno-
graphic theory. Such inventiveness also occurs at the level of the self. As Naisargi
Dave illustrates in chapter 5 regarding animal activism in India, bearing witness
to the suffering of ­others (in this case, animals) “might best be understood as
a radical interpenetration of life and death” that “opens up a death” and “then
compels a new kind of responsible life in a previously unimaginable skin.” Field-
work, theorizing, and writing thus emerge from and in conversation with this
hard-­to-­pin-­down multiplicity—­practical and theoretical, real and virtual, and
in bits and pieces—­that places ­people, worlds, and thinking in motion.
The subjects of our ethnographies are themselves concept makers and cre-
ators. From Petryna’s climate scientists, who navigate imperfect knowledge
and an inexorable threat, to Schwarcz’s cannibalizing artist, they actively in-
terfere in real­ity, crafting ways of knowing and translating across scales and
domains.141 Petryna tells us in chapter 9 that scientists grappling with uncer-
tainty carve “a space of decision making out of a line of inevitability,” creating
“new projective possibilities” while “sustaining space for action even in dire
conditions.” Such open-­ended concept work grows out of the demands of the
times and, as Schwarcz writes of  Varejão’s artistic reworking of the racial classi­
fication schemas she uncovered, may be “a tribute to the dif­fer­ent possibilities

introduction | 29
of discourse, the multiplicity that is a kind of common foundation of depic-
tion in art”—­and in world making.
Theories play a part in the realities they describe and imagine. They have
traction in the world, becoming integrated into (for better or for worse) p­ eople’s
bodies, values, relationships, and the possibilities they envision for themselves
and o­ thers. Ethnography can capture this active embroiling of reason, life, and
ethics, and the anthropologist can learn to think with circulating theories, how-
ever fully articulated, that concern both large-­scale social dynamics and ­people’s
immediate conditions, travails, and anticipations. It can also offer entry points
into the plasticity of systems, theorizers, and norm makers themselves, making it
pos­si­ble to pursue new forms of anthropological thought and research.
As Catarina/Catkine told Biehl in Vita, “I began to disentangle the facts
with you. . . . ​I began to disentangle the science and the wisdom. It is good
to disentangle oneself, and thought as well.” Through Biehl’s work with Cata-
rina, vari­ous forms of reason (psychiatric, familial, gendered, economic, and
phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal) came into view, complicating the very concept of the ­human:
“They want my body, my body as medi­cation . . . ​Catkine rots.” Still, Catarina
crafted her own lines of flight: “When men throw me into the air, I am already
far away” (see chapter 1). This work of detaching oneself from what is accepted
as true is “philosophy in activity,” as Foucault would have said: “the displace-
ment and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received
values and all the work that has been done to think other­wise, to do something
­else, to become other than what one is—­that, too, is philosophy.”142
Meanwhile, as Sarajevans confront the effects of the neoliberal rationalities
implemented by international institutions of aid and governance—­theories of
reconciliation and democracy, market economics and the public good, trauma
and humanitarianism, and dealing with the past and building anew—­they work
to craft their own temporalities of change and ways of navigating the vicissitudes
of politics, both local and global. As the short-­lived but explosive experiments
in direct democracy that spread across Bosnia-­Herzegovina in 2014 seem to at-
test, p­ eople often perceive both the forces that constrain them and the ways
­things might (or should) be other­wise. Amid the making and remaking of a
divided postwar country, their becomings—­narrated by Peter Locke in chap-
ter 10—­suggest alternative possibilities for living with difficult pasts and the un-
certainties of rapid social transformation.
It is not only the ideas of po­liti­cal scientists, economists, biologists, and
psychiatrists that shape the becomings of individuals and collectives in this
book’s geography of becomings; anthropology’s own key terms and theories

30 | joão biehl and peter locke

travel and are taken up in unpredictable ways. In this regard, Bessire’s critical
approach to indigeneity in chapter  7 highlights the deep—­and even deadly—­
afterlives of anthropological concepts as they become part of larger exclusion-
ary and violent proj­ects: “a politics whereby cultural legitimacy is increasingly
used to distinguish who is worthy of exceptional protection and who is allowed
to die.” In contrast, he argues, the anthropology of indigenous becomings “chal-
lenges the sense of inevitability implied by many analytic tools and allows indig-
enous subjects to reappear not as ideal types known in advance but as always
unfinished, incomplete, and open-­ended.”
Certainly, to carry out our analyses, we need models, types, and theories—­
abstractions of vari­ous kinds—­and ­there is a rich and impor­tant history of en-
gagement between anthropology and philosophy.143 Yet can philosophy r­ eally
transform the characters and realities we engage with and the stories we tell
into figures of thought?
Our engagements with texts, theories, and philosophies occur in par­tic­u­lar
times and spaces, woven into our experiences in the field and in the world at
large, and find their ways into our thinking and writing in a relationship that
might be productively seen as one of creative tension and cross-­pollination.
The authors in this book draw from and participate in multiple intellectual
lineages, opening up ways in which we might, in Davis’s words in chapter 8, both
“coexist and fruitfully interact with other dispositions to knowledge.” “In step
with the intensifying vio­lence in Mexico,” Garcia writes in chapter 3 that she
“found [herself] turning to [Ernst] Bloch’s mystical and revolutionary writings,”
while for Davis, William Connolly’s vision of complex time in a world of be-
coming offered “a vitalizing complement to the paranoid hermeneutics in which
the violent history of Cyprus seems so deeply entrenched.” Similarly, in making
sense of the Ayoreos’ senseless expenditure amid world-­ending vio­lence, Bes-
sire draws from the work of Georges Bataille to highlight the subversive powers
of life beyond utility. Meanings and concepts flow freely across fuzzy academic
bound­aries and change in the pro­cess, and ­these ethnographers further displace
becoming from its philosophical origins and uptake.
Ethnographic theory emerges from and in conversation with unfinished
subjects and lifeworlds, as well as books and vari­ous ways of knowing and
relating. It is a way of staying connected to open-­ended, even mysterious, so-
cial pro­cesses and uncertainties—­a way of counterbalancing the generation
of certainties and foreclosures by other disciplines. Keeping interrelatedness,
uncertainty, and curiosity in focus, our theorizing is never detached from
praxis but instead directly shapes and channels anthropology’s entanglements

introduction | 31
in pro­cesses of transformation. In this way, theory is multiple and multiplies,
a “tool box” that can be actionable, in the world and in our writing: “it has to
be used, it has to work.”144
Marked by returns, ongoingness, and the meantimes that unfold while the an-
thropologist is in the field and afterward, ethnography also brings subjects into
contact with each other in lasting, unpredictable, and transformative ways.145
Through fieldwork, we become a part of ethnographic open systems and are
folded into lives, relationships, and swerves across time and space.146 ­These
systems hold us in a kind of unfinished proximity with one another, retreating
and reemerging, engendering unanticipated connections and reconfigurations,
never definitively closed off nor decisively transformational. Ethnographic open
systems tether us to other selves and worlds and destabilize the temporal and
spatial bound­aries of an ­imagined field we leave ­behind.
Like art, ethnographic theorizing and writing can push the limits of lan-
guage and imagination as it seeks to bear witness to life in a manner that does
not bound, reduce, or make caricatures of p­ eople and their lifeworlds but lib-
erates, if always only partially, some of the epistemological, po­liti­cal, and aes-
thetic force of their circuituous paths, interactions, and stories.
Becomings create holes in dominant theories and interventions and unleash
a vital plurality: being in motion, ambiguous, and contradictory; not reducible
to a single narrative; projected into the f­ uture; transformed by recognition; and
thus the very fabric of alternative world making. “We try to write about what is
missing,” as Schwarcz notes in chapter 6, “but in so ­doing we create new pos-
sibilities.” The life stories we compose do not simply begin and end. They are
stories of transformation: they link the pres­ent to the past and to a pos­si­ble or
impossible ­future, creating unexpected ties among subject, scribe, and reader.
For indeed the reader, too, is always implicated. And t­ here is much at stake
in dif­fer­ent forms of reading. If one takes a book “as a box with something
inside”—an ultimate meaning or truth—­one’s task is to interrogate and de-
construct what it contains.147 In our times, criticism has largely been natural-
ized as an act of judgment and indictment—­a habit of faultfinding, of reading
as jaded consumers of knowledge—in a way that reifies ideologies, ultimately
stifling curiosity and obscuring the realities we wish to better understand.148
But ­there are also other modes of reading, less audit-­like or prosecutorial.
“To have done with judgment,”149 as Deleuze puts it, allows us to move away
from criticism as condemnation t­ oward more in­ter­est­ing, constructive questions:
How do the stories and ideas and becomings that unfold in t­ hese pages work for

32 | joão biehl and peter locke

you, reader? What do they produce, open up, or foreclose? What possibilities—­
intellectual, relational, or political—do they illuminate and make available?
This form of engagement is “like plugging into an electric cir­cuit. . . . ​It re-
lates a book directly to what’s Outside.” A book, a­ fter all, “is a l­ ittle cog in much
more complicated external machinery.”150 What if we resisted the tendency to
know too much in advance, and the drab and deadly power to condemn and
exclude, and instead engaged in forms of reading that ­were productive and
enlivening, multiplying instead of stifling?
This active form of reading—­“reading with love”151—­frees us from critique
as combat in ­favor of critique as care: care of the self and ­others, of aspirations
for less violent and more just ways of inhabiting and sharing the planet, and of
the imagination and thought itself. It makes it pos­si­ble to engage in what texts
unleash, the forms of understanding that they open up, and the larger external
machineries of which they are part.
­There is an ethos of unfinishedness and an invitational quality to the ethno-
graphic writings that compose this book: an openness to the knowledge and
mystery of ­others, a curiosity toward how h­ uman ways of living are entwined
with nonhuman modes of life, a desire to bring us closer to ­people rather than
creating distance, a humility in relation to our own thinking. It is in this spirit
of open inquiry and won­der, of not being governed too much, of creating re-
lations and always probing their very natures and stakes, of becoming a mo-
bilizing force in this world, that Unfinished ends with blank pages—­after all,
readers and the distinct publics they make up are also part of the writing and
of how the story continues . . .

notes
1 Nietz­sche, The Use and Abuse of History, 10.
2 Connolly, A World of Becoming.
3 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 33.
4 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 2.
5 Deleuze and Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z.
6 See Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge; Das et al., The Ground Between;
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; Lambek et  al., Four Lectures on Ethics; Ma-
linowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific; Rabinow, Marking Time; Wolf, Eu­rope and
the ­People without History.
7 See Nietz­sche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The ­Will to Power; Deleuze, Nietz­sche and
Philosophy.

introduction | 33
 8 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 124.
9 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 128.
10 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 124.
11 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.
12 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 124.
13 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 124.
14 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 125.
15 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 128.
16 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
17 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
18 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
19 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
20 Rimbaud, Complete Works, 101.
21 Rimbaud, quoted in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 29.
22 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 63.
23 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 280.
24 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 170.
25 See Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination; Das, Life and
Words; Fassin, When Bodies Remember; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Stoler, Along the
Archival Grain and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
26 See M. Jackson, Life within Limits, and Lifeworlds; Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident.
27 Stewart, “Precarity’s Form,” 8.
28 Biehl, “Ethnography in the Way of Theory.”
29 M. Fischer, Comment on João Biehl and Peter Locke’s article “Deleuze and the An-
thropology of Becoming,” 338.
30 See Allison, Precarious Japan; Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Bessire, Behold the Black Cai-
man; Butler, Precarious Life; Davis, Bad Souls; Ralph, Renegade Dreams.
31 Haraway, Staying with the Trou­ble.
32 See Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Malabou, The Ontology
of the Accident; Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak?; Scott, “To Be a Won­der”; Spivak,
“Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Stewart, Ordinary Affects; Strathern, “Negative Strategies.”
33 Freud, Collected Papers, vol. 2, 279.
34 Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, 126.
35 Mauss, “The Notion of Body Techniques.” See also Garces and Jones, “Mauss Redux”;
Mauss, “L’expression obligatoire des sentiments (rituels oraux funéraires australiens).”
36 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 250.
37 Butler, Excitable Speech, Frames of War, and Precarious Life.
38 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 56.
39 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiii.
40 See Good, DelVecchio Good, Hyde, and Pinto, “Postcolonial Disorders: Reflections
on Subjectivity in the Con­temporary World,” 8.
41 M. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. See also Inhorn, Cos-
mopolitan Conceptions; Malkki, The Need to Help; Sharp, The Transplant Imaginary.

34 | joão biehl and peter locke

 42 M. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, 30.
43 See Briggs and Mantini-­Briggs, Tell Me Why My ­Children Died; Dumit, Drugs for Life and
Picturing Personhood; K. Fortun, Advocacy ­after Bhopal; Gusterson, Nuclear Rites; Haydn,
When Nature Goes Public; Helmreich, Alien Ocean; Kaufman, Ordinary Medicine; Jain,
Malignant; Lakoff, Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Reason; Lakoff and Collier, Biosecurity Interventions;
Livingston, Improvising Medicine; Lock and Nguyen, “Local Biologies and H ­ uman
Difference”; Martin, The ­Woman in the Body, and Bipolar Expeditions; Petryna, When
Experiments Travel, and Life Exposed; Prentice, Bodies in Formation; Rabinow, The Ac-
companiment and Marking Time; Sharp, The Transplant Imaginary.
44 Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene.”
45 Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth.”
46 Ingold and Palsson, Biosocial Becomings, 20.
47 Landecker and Panofsky, “From Social Structure to Gene Regulation and Back.”
48 For a discussion of  biosocial approaches, see Farmer, Infections and Inequalities and Pa-
thologies of Power.
49 For a discussion of ecosocial approaches, see Krieger, “Theories for Social Epidemiol-
ogy in the 21st ­Century.”
50 Lock and Scheper-­Hughes, “The Mindful Body.”
51 Lock and Nguyen, “Local Biologies and ­Human Difference.”
52 Lock, “The Epigenome and Nature/Nurture Reunification,” 292. See also Lock, “Com-
prehending the Body in the Era of the Epigenome.”
53 Ingold and Palsson, Biosocial Becomings.
54 Palsson, “Retrospect,” Biosocial Becomings, 244.
55 Kirskey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” See also
Deane-­Drummond and Fuentes, “­Human Being and Becoming”; Haraway, When Spe-
cies Meet; Raffles, Insectopedia; Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
56 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 2.
57 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 2.
58 Deleuze and Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z.
59 Kirksey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” 545.
60 Kirskey, Emergent Ecologies, 217.
61 Kirskey, Emergent Ecologies, 217, 219.
62 Kirskey, Emergent Ecologies, 5. See also Povinelli, Geontologies; Connolly, Facing the
Planetary.
63 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 22.
64 Ingold and Palsson, Biosocial Becomings.
65 Kohn, How Forests Think.
66 Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.”
67 See Cadena, Earth Beings; Gordillo, Rubble; Li, Land’s End; West, From Modern Coffee
Production to ­Imagined Primitive.
68 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 19. See also Stoler, Imperial Debris.
69 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 22.
70 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 23.

introduction | 35
 71 Bennett, Vibrant ­Matter.
72 Bennett, Vibrant ­Matter, vi.
73 Bennett, Vibrant ­Matter, vii.
74 Appadurai, “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity,” 221.
75 Appadurai, “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity,” 221.
76 Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 16.
77 See Cadena, Earth Beings; Kelly and Lezaun, “Urban Mosquitoes, Situational Publics,
and the Pursuit of Interspecies Separation in Dar es Salaam”; Nading, Mosquito Trails;
Povinelli, Geontologies.
78 Povinelli, The Empire of Love, 179.
79 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 259.
80 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 176.
81 Geertz, Available Light.
82 Geertz, Available Light, 221, 246.
83 Masco, The Theater of Operations.
84 Fennell, Last Proj­ect Standing.
85 Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 89–90. This passage circulated widely on social media
in the days following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Other seemingly prophetic
perspectives, in and beyond the acad­emy, are sure to be recognized as critical thinkers
and activists reckon with the election’s significance.
86 Fukuyama, “The End of History?”
87 See Glaude, Democracy in Black; John Jackson, Harlemworld and Real Black. See also
Dave, “Indian and Lesbian and What Came Next”; Green­house, The Paradox of Rel-
evance; and D. Thomas, Exceptional Vio­lence.
88 See Fernando, The Republic Unsettled; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape; Luhrmann,
When God Talks Back; Mahmood, Politics of Piety and Religious Difference in a Secular
Age; ­Sullivan et al., Politics of Religious Freedom. See also M. Fischer, “Receptions in the
Revolution” and Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice.
89 See Biehl and Petryna, When ­People Come First; Farrar and Piot, “The Ebola Emer-
gency”; Lakoff, Collier, and Kelty, “Ebola’s Ecologies.”
90 See Nixon, Slow Vio­lence and the Environmentalism of the Poor; Sheikh and Weizman,
The Conflict Shoreline.
91 Roitman, Anti-­Crisis. See also Fassin and Pandolfi, Con­temporary States of Emergency;
Redfield, Life in Crisis.
92 W. Brown, Undoing the Demos.
93 W. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 44.
94 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First ­Century.
95 Graeber, The Democracy Proj­ect and “Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical
Imagination.”
96 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1.
97 W. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 10 and 35.
98 Biehl, “The Judicialization of Biopolitics.”
99 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 3.

36 | joão biehl and peter locke

 100 Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 41.
101 See M. Fischer, Comment on João Biehl and Peter Locke’s Article “Deleuze and
the Anthropology of Becoming”; Livingston, Improvising Medicine; Mattingly, Moral
Laboratories.
102 Rancière, Moments Politiques, 75.
103 Biehl, “The Judicialization of Biopolitics: Claiming the Right to Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals in
Brazilian Courts” and “Patient-­Citizen-­Consumers: The Judicialization of Health and
the Metamorphosis of Biopolitics.”
104 See Graeber, Debt; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; Stevenson, Life Beside Itself; Taylor,
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
105 See Biehl, “The Postneoliberal Fabulation of Power”; Kleinman, What ­Really ­Matters;
Kleinman and Wilkinson, A Passion for Society; Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment
and Geontologies.
106 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 177.
107 Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
108 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 178.
109 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 180.
110 See Borneman and Masco, “Anthropology and the Security State”; Poitras, Citizen Four.
111 Povinelli, “The ­Will to be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance.”
112 Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation.
113 Biehl, “Patient-­Citizen-­Consumers.”
114 See Winslow, “Living Life Forward.”
115 Ginsburg and Rapp, “Disability Worlds.”
116 Ginsburg, “Disability in the Digital Age,” 102–3.
117 Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistle­blower, Spy, 280.
118 Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistle­blower, Spy, 280.
119 Biehl and Zucker, “The Masked Anthropologist.”
120 See Fassin, Enforcing Order and L’ombre du monde; Knight, addicted.pregnant.poor;
O’Neill, Secure the Soul; Rios, Punished.
121 See Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Murakawa, The First Civil Right.
122 H. Pearson, “The Prickly Skin of White Supremacy.”
123 See Han, Life in Debt; James, Demo­cratic Insecurities; Raikhel and Garriott, Addiction
Trajectories; Rouse, Uncertain Suffering; Scheper-­Hughes, “Parts Unknown”; Shapiro,
“Attuning to the Chemosphere”; Ticktin, Casualties of Care.
124 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 181.
125 See Bessire, Behold the Black Caiman; De Leon, The Land of Open Graves.
126 Tsing, Friction, 1.
127 See A. Escobar, Encountering Development; Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish; Piot, Remotely
Global and Nostalgia for the ­Future.
128 See Agier, On the Margins of the World; Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of
Assembly; Das, Affliction; Nelson, Who Counts?; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator;
L. Segal, No Place for Grief; Singh, Poverty and the Quest for Life; Walley, Exit Zero.
129 See Cartwright and Hardie, Evidence-­Based Policy; Deaton, “Instruments of Development.”

introduction | 37
 130 See Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly; Rancière, Moments Politiques.
131 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 177.
132 See Deaton, The ­Great Escape; Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts.
133 Adams, “Evidence-­Based Global Public Health: Subjects, Profits, Erasures” and Metrics.
134 Haraway, When Species Meet, 89.
135 Stewart, “Precarity’s Form.”
136 Lévi-­Strauss, The View from Afar, 287.
137 Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 43.
138 Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, 207.
139 Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 338.
140 Geertz, Works and Lives.
141 See Pandian, Reel World.
142 Foucault, Ethics, 327.
143 Das et al., The Ground Between.
144 Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, 210.
145 See K. Fortun, “Ethnography in/of/as open systems.”
146 See Biehl, “Ethnography in the Way of Theory”; De Leon, The Land of Open Graves;
Desjarlais, Subject to Death; M. Jackson, In Sierra Leone.
147 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 7.
148 Felski, The Limits of Critique.
149 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 126.
150 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 8.
151 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 9.

38 | joão biehl and peter locke

I
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 1

The Anthropology of Becoming

joão biehl and peter locke

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
—­ catarina inês gomes moraes, quoted in João Biehl, Vita, 2000

For how long ­will we have to live like it’s still the war? When ­will we start to live?
—­Marija (Maja) Šarič, Executive Director, Krila Nade/Wings of Hope

The ultimate aim of lit­er­a­ture is to set f­ ree, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this
invention of a ­people, that is, a possibility of life.
—­ gilles deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical

an empirical lantern

In the settings in which we work—­Brazil and Bosnia-­Herzegovina—­people

are at the mercy of volatile economies and faltering infrastructures. As indi-
viduals and communities scavenge for resources and care from broken public
institutions, they find themselves entangled in novel biomedical and phar­ma­
ceu­ti­cal rationalities and in altered forms of common sense. We find Gilles
Deleuze’s empiricist reflections on the person as a provisional outcome of
pro­cesses of subjectivation and his attention to the inventiveness of becoming
both provocative and helpful as we address lives in such contexts of political-­
economic, material, and clinical precariousness.
For Deleuze, the subject is not a fixed entity, but an assemblage of mul-
tiple heterogeneous ele­ments; not a given, but always ­under construction;
not a product of an i­ magined interiority, but a folding and bending of outside
forces: “it is a being-­multiple, instead of being-­one.”1 In asserting this “logic
of multiplications,” Deleuze upholds an allegiance to empiricism that strikes
us as deeply ethnographic.2 Subjects anticipate and invent—­and anticipate
­because they invent—in concrete circumstances, navigating between t­hings
and relations.3 In this way, the constitution of subjects is imbricated in world
and place making, and subjectivity is far more active and uncertain than the
search for an inside would assume.4
Together with his close collaborator Félix Guattari, Deleuze was particu-
larly concerned with the idea of becoming: ­those individual and collective
strug­gles to come to terms with m ­ atters of fact, contingencies, and intoler-
able conditions and to shake loose, to what­ever degree pos­si­ble, from deter-
minants and definitions—­“to grow both young and old [in them] at once.”5 In
becoming, according to Deleuze, one can achieve an ultimate existential stage
in which life is simply immanent and open to new relations—­camaraderies—­
and trajectories without predetermined telos or outcome.
In our ethnographic work, we are drawn to h­ uman efforts to live with,
subvert, or elude knowledge and power, and to express desires that might be
world altering. Our interlocutors in the field are more complex, strategic, and
inventive than hegemonic forces and philosophical theories of the subject are
able to capture. ­People are not stable or fixed entities, unidirectionally deter-
mined by history, power, and language, nor are they only cultural and social.
How can anthropology methodologically and conceptually engage p­ eople’s
becomings? And how could such work challenge dominant ethical and po­liti­
cal frameworks and technocratic or medical modes of intervention? It is time
to attribute to the ­people we study the kinds of ambiguities and complexities
we acknowledge in ourselves, and to bring t­ hese dimensions into the critical
knowledge we craft and circulate.
We have no ­grand philosophical aspirations, and we wish neither to reduce
Deleuze’s enormously complicated venture to a theoretical system or set of
practices to be applied normatively to anthropology, nor to suggest a new

42 | joão biehl and peter locke

dominant analytic or coin a new buzzword. In this essay, we limit ourselves
to thinking through Deleuze’s insights on the relationships between power,
desire, and the virtual and his cartographic approach to lives, social fields, and
the unconscious. ­These insights help us grasp what is at stake for individuals,
affects, and relations in the context of new rational-­technical interventions,
and vis-­à-­vis ingrained inequalities of all kinds.6
Exploring Deleuze’s ideas in light of the ethnographic realities we study—­
mental illness, poverty, and the long aftermaths of war—­might offer openings
to par­tic­u­lar kinds of thinking, writing, and theorizing. It can, for example,
highlight the limits of psychiatric models of symptoms, recovery, and h­ uman
agency.7 It can also provide a helpful supplement to prevailing applications of
Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality in anthropol-
ogy8 and to neo-­Marxist theories of structural vio­lence.9 We aim to honor
and contribute to anthropology’s long and productive history of exploring
­human ­matters that dominant epistemologies do not routinely account for,
keeping theory unsettled and in motion.10 As Gregory Bateson put it over
half a ­century ago in his classic Naven, “my fieldwork was scrappy and dis-
connected . . . ​my own theoretical approaches proved too vague to be of any
use in the field.”11
In emphasizing the potentials of desire (both creative and destructive),
the ways in which social fields leak and transform (power and knowledge
notwithstanding), and the in-­between, plastic, and ever-­unfinished nature of
lives, much of Deleuze’s writing can inspire ethnographic efforts to illuminate
the dynamism of the everyday and the literality and singularity of ­human be-
comings. By paying close attention to concrete circumstances, and with care-
ful observation always complicating the a priori assumptions of universalizing
theory, ethnographic work can explore both the modes of power that con-
strain life chances and the ways p­ eople’s desires reveal alternative possibilities.
In learning to know ­people, with care and an “empirical lantern,”12 we have a
responsibility to think of life in terms of both limits and crossroads—­where
new intersections of technology, interpersonal relations, desire, and imagina-
tion can sometimes, against all odds, result in surprising swerves and ­futures,
even when our liberal proj­ects of the good life writ large have turned into
“cruel optimism.”13
This is not to recommend giving up on attempts to discern relationships
of causality and affinity in social and medical phenomena, or to deny the
often deadly force of social realities and inequalities. Rather, it is to urge

the anthropology of becoming | 43

increased focus on our receptivity to o­ thers, the kinds of evidence we assem­
ble and use—­the voices we listen to, the silences we notice, and the experi-
ences and turns we account for—­and how we craft our explanations. Our an-
alytics must remain attuned to the intricacy, uncertainty, and unfinishedness
of individual and collective lives. Just as medical know-­how, international
po­liti­cal dynamics, and social realities change, p­ eople’s lives (biological and
po­liti­cal) are in flux.
Remaining open to surprise and the deployment of categories impor­tant
to h­ uman experience can make anthropological work more realistic and, we
hope, better. As the po­liti­cal economist Albert Hirschman, an ethnographer
at heart, put it, “I like to understand how ­things happen, how change actually
takes place.”14 ­People’s everyday strug­gles for survival, belonging, and imagina-
tion exceed the categories informing experimental and statistical approaches
and demand in-­depth listening, dynamic mutual attunement, and a readiness
to make bold analytical swerves. Ethnographic work engaged with becom-
ings thus takes on conceptual force by building multidimensional figures of
thought from the stories and trajectories of the ­people we engage with in the
field. Tracking the intertwining of shifting material structures, uncharted so-
cial territories, and the formed and deformed bodies and senses of our field
sites helps us empirically grasp what is actually happening in our radically
unequal worlds and how power relations are being newly reinforced, always
with an eye to how bodies also escape their figurations and forge unanticipated
space-­times.

problematics of living

In our reflections, we draw from Biehl’s work with Catarina Inês Gomes
Moraes, a young ­woman abandoned by her ­family and left to die in an asylum
called Vita in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.15 Largely incapaci-
tated and said to be mad, Catarina spent her days in Vita assembling words in
what she called “my dictionary.” She wrote: “The characters in this notebook
turn and un-­turn. This is my world ­after all.”
Catarina’s puzzling language required intense listening, suspending diag-
nosis, and an open reading. Since Biehl first encountered her, he thought of
her not as someone who was mentally ill but as an abandoned person who
was claiming existence on her own terms. Catarina knew what had made her
a “maimed statue” and a void in the social sphere—­“I am like this ­because of
life”—­and she or­ga­nized this knowledge for herself and her anthropologist,

44 | joão biehl and peter locke

thus bringing the public into Vita. “I give you what is missing.” Her f­amily,
she claimed, thought of her as a failed medi­cation regimen. “Why is it only
me who has to be medicated?” The f­ amily used this explanation as an excuse
for abandoning her. Her condition highlighted the pharmaceuticalization of
­mental health care in Brazil and the social side effects that come with the en-
croachment of new medical technologies in urban-­poor settings.
Catarina’s life tells a larger story about shifting h­ uman values and the fate
of social bonds in ­today’s dominant mode of subjectivation in the ser­vice of
science and capitalism. She suggests that one can become a medical or scien-
tific t­hing and an ex-­human for the con­ve­nience of ­others. At the merciless
interface of cap­i­tal­ist and scientific discourses, we are all part of a new kind of
proletariat: hyperindividualized psychobiologies doomed to consume diag-
nostics and treatments (for ourselves and for o­ thers) as we seek fast success
in economies without empathy.16 But Catarina fought the disconnections that
psychiatric drugs introduced in her life and clung to her desires. She worked
through the many layers of (mis)treatment and chemical changes that now
composed her body, knowing all too well that “­people forgot me.”
Catarina wrote to sublimate not only her own desires for reconnection
and recognition but also the social forces—­familial, medical and scientific,
and economic—­aligned against her. While she integrated her experience
with drugs into writing and a new self-­perception (the drug biperiden, sold
­under brand names including Akineton, is literally part of the new name Ca-
tarina gives herself in the dictionary: Catkine), she kept seeking camaraderie
and another chance at life. Biehl discusses Catarina’s creative capacity for living
through ­things in dialogue with Deleuze’s idea of “a delicate and incomplete
health that stems from efforts to carve out life chances from ­things too big,
strong and suffocating.”17 In anticipating and imagining the possibility of an
exit from Vita, Catkine’s minor lit­er­a­ture thus grounds an ethnographic ethics
and gives us a sense of becoming and a style of reasoning that other analytic
approaches might foreclose.
We also draw on Locke’s fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia-­Herzegovina (here-
after, following the standard local abbreviation, BiH), to consider collective
pro­cesses of becoming and to highlight Deleuze’s intriguing suggestion that
one should write for the benefit of a “missing ­people.”18 The collaborative na-
ture of this coauthored chapter serves as a method of thought and an experi-
ment in grappling with patterns across cases and scales. In the two de­cades
since Yugo­slavia’s collapse and the long siege of Sarajevo, the symptoms and
consequences—­individual, social, and political—of the city’s ordeals have

the anthropology of becoming | 45

been apparent. War­time and postwar proj­ects of humanitarian psychiatry and
psychosocial support have made psychiatric diagnostics (specifically, collective
depression and post-­traumatic stress disorder) available for use in interpreting
frustrating and per­sis­tent social ills. Such clinical-­sounding assessments have
the effect of emphasizing damage over possibility, painting the city primar-
ily in terms of its wounds (which are indeed deep and still bleeding) while
disregarding the hopes and desires—­and re­sis­tances to neoliberal economic
forms—­that suffering also communicates.
Just as psychiatry helps silence Catarina’s strug­gle to understand and re-
claim her experience, in BiH, the psychologization of war’s aftermath can
sometimes “vitiate the moral and po­liti­cal meaning of subjective complaints
and protests.”19 In this way, each of our cases addresses a strug­gle (individual
and collective, respectively) to navigate public and private imperatives that
have been remade by intersecting scientific and economic rationalities. In
each case, a void is engineered in place of older modes of self-­assessment—­
which nevertheless, and by circuitous paths, continue to thrive.
The strict application of a Foucauldian theoretical sensibility—­seeking
out, for example, the ways that fear-­mongering nationalist politics, neolib-
eral market reforms and concomitant corruption, and years of humanitar-
ian ser­vices and international supervision have newly disciplined bodies and
normalized subjectivity and social relations—­would miss the anxious un-
certainty and open-­endedness that inflect life in Sarajevo. Symptoms are, at
times, a necessary condition or resource for the afflicted to articulate a new
relationship to the world and to ­others. Catarina’s ­family used her supposed
madness to excuse themselves for her abandonment—­even as she assimilated
her experience of psychiatric treatment into a new identity in her strug­gle to
anticipate a more livable real­ity. By the same token, Locke’s work in Sarajevo
suggests how the availability of psychiatric drugs and psychosocial ser­vices
has enabled hybrid ways of remaking lives, families, and social roles.
Psychiatric rationality is enmeshed, to varying degrees, in the worlds we
engage with, and it alters p­ eople’s lives and desires—­sometimes deleteri-
ously, cementing foreclosures, and at other times allowing for new open-
ings and forms of care. Anthropological work is well qualified to understand
this tension, bringing us closer to the politics and ethics involved in the on-­
the-­ground deployment of psychiatric categories and treatments—­which
increasingly takes place outside the clinic, in homes and ­people’s solitary
relationships to technology.20

46 | joão biehl and peter locke

 Both anguish and vitality simmer beneath Sarajevo’s scarred—­but slowly
brightening, rejuvenating—­surfaces, and the work of Deleuze is helpful in
finding an analytic approach that can illuminate the interdependence of ­these
twin intensities: the ways symptoms may si­mul­ta­neously index darknesses
and dominations past and pres­ent and the minor voices of a “missing ­people”
that speak within alternative “universes of reference,” capable, perhaps, of one
day unleashing unforeseen social transformations in BiH.21 While aspirations
for a better life and widespread frustrations with the status quo harbor the
kinds of destructive potentials unleashed in the 1990s—­the ethnic fear and
vio­lence, politics of scapegoating, and paranoia that come with chronic eco-
nomic insecurity—­they may also fuel unexpected solidarities and reveal alter-
native po­liti­cal pathways.
Sarajevo’s “missing p­ eople” is composed of layers, each with its own inter-
twined vio­lence, grief, and aspiration. The war­time dead (thousands of whom
remain literally missing) continue to inhabit po­liti­cal claims and keenly felt
grievances.22 Who one was before the war (what one believed and whom one
loved) no longer has the same value in new economies and forms of gover-
nance, but persists in p­ eople’s anger and hope. And lived experience con-
tinually escapes the social categories—­competing ethnic and/or victim
identities—­that dominate the public sphere.23 In such a context of routinized
urgency, the social sciences are challenged to re­spect and incorporate, without
reduction, the ambiguity of po­liti­cal subjects, the uncertain roots and produc-
tivities of vio­lence, and the passion for the pos­si­ble that life holds in its passages
through and beyond technical assessments. Performing this task is what
ethnography does best.

moving in the direction of the unfinished

We read Deleuze together with our ethnographic cases to reassert the symbi-
otic relationship between close empirical engagement with ­people and their
worlds and theoretical inventiveness in anthropology. We recognize that
“nobody needs philosophy for reflecting,” as Deleuze himself noted, and are
certainly not advocating for another philosophical scheme to be confirmed
by the figures encountered in the field.24 As John Borneman and Abdellah
Hammoudi argue, the “tendency for anthropologists to deploy their work
only as illustrative cases for philosophical trends or concepts threatens to
make anthropology into a sterile intellectual exercise.”25 The point is well
taken. In their relentless drive to theorize, anthropologists run the danger

the anthropology of becoming | 47

of caricaturing complex realities; neglecting key realms of experience; and
missing lived figurations, ironies, and singularities that might complicate and
enrich their analyses.
We thus return to ethnographic encounters and episodes not only to ad-
dress their specificities, but also to make a case for allowing our engagements
with ­others to determine the course of our thinking about them, and to reflect
more broadly on the agonistic and reflexive relations between anthropology
and philosophy.26 We do so to suggest that through ethnographic rendering,
­people’s own theorizing of their conditions may challenge present-­day re-
gimes of veridiction, including philosophical universals and anthropology’s
subjugation to philosophy. This is not to naively assume the ethnographic to
be metonymic with a bounded ethnos, but rather to consider what is at stake
in the ways that anthropologists chronicle and write about the knowledge
emerging from our work with ­people.
Long-­term engagement with ­people is a vital antidote to what Hirschman
identifies as “compulsive and mindless theorizing.”27 The quick theoretical fix
has taken its place in con­temporary culture alongside the quick technical fix.
For Hirschman, as for us, p­ eople in all their multiplicity must come first.28
This re­spect for ­people and this attention both to how po­liti­cal discourses are
manufactured and to the sheer materiality of life’s necessities make a ­great deal
of difference in the kind of knowledge anthropologists produce. Throughout
this chapter, we are concerned with the conceptual fecundity of ­people’s own
practical theorizing. All too readily disqualified by both scholars and policy
makers, this knowledge may well yield new or countertheories of h­ uman
agency and of the shifting nature of social formations and re­sis­tance, for exam-
ple, as well as new approaches to politics and more effective policy solutions.29
In an assessment of anthropology’s intellectual health in the first de­cade
of the new millennium, George Marcus worried that since the publication of
the path-­breaking Writing Culture, which he edited with James Clifford,30 the
discipline had been “suspended”: “­There are no new ideas and none on the
horizon.”31 Marcus looked to innovations in the anthropology of science and
science studies as pos­si­ble inspirations.32 Such scholarly attention to how
knowledges and technologies are fabricated, and how they affect ­people and
their worlds, has been productive.33 Yet much of this field has given a privi-
leged place to the official makers of expertise, technology, and policy.34 While
this side of the story is undoubtedly essential, it cannot encompass the full
range of subjects, approaches, and methods with which anthropologists have
continued to productively and innovatively engage. Marcus acknowledged

48 | joão biehl and peter locke

that since the 1980s, anthropologists have played a useful role in studying
emerging global po­liti­cal economies, but he did not think that was enough
for “anthropologists to stimulate themselves intellectually.”35 Investment in
and enthusiasm for public anthropology, for example, is in Marcus’s view a
“symptom” of a “weak center” and disciplinary disor­ga­ni­za­tion, rather than an
indicator of professional vitality and theoretical innovation.36
For Marcus, “what’s left to do” while anthropology awaits the renewal or
transformation of the “ideas that move and stimulate it . . . ​is to follow events, to
engage ethnographically with history unfolding in the pres­ent, or to anticipate
what is emerging.”37 Marcus seems to designate the core work of anthropology
as a remainder: a m­ atter of rec­ord building and knowledge accumulation that (at
least) can occupy us productively as we await the development of a new guiding
theory to “motivate” research or anticipate the f­ uture.38 It seems to us, however,
that anthropology has (and has always had) a theoretical force as it charts and
engages the generativity of ­people navigating con­temporary po­liti­cal, economic,
and technological configurations, and that it is stronger for the multiplicity of
philosophical ideas with which it engages in any given period. As Paul Rabinow
puts it, “the prob­lem for an anthropology of the con­temporary is to inquire into
what is taking place without deducing it beforehand. And that requires sus-
tained research, patience, and new concepts, or modified old ones.”39
What if we broadened our sense of what counts as theoretical innovation
and let go of the need for central discursive engines—­the modus operandi
that ­shaped much of anthropology in the twentieth ­century? Epistemological
breakthroughs do not belong only to analysts. The cumulative experiences
of “the unpredictability of the po­liti­cal and social effects of technological
inventions”—­borne by ­people traversing con­temporary entanglements of power
and knowledge—­are also epistemological breaks that demand anthropological
recognition.40 Simply engaging with the complexity of lives and desires—­that
is, ­people’s intensities, constraints, subjectivities, ­things, relationships, and
proj­ects—in changing material and social worlds constantly necessitates the
rethinking of our theoretical apparatuses. What would it mean for our research
methodologies and ways of writing if we consistently embraced this unfinished-
ness, seeking ways to analyze the general, structural, and pro­cessual while main-
taining an acute awareness of the inevitable incompleteness of our theories?
Paying attention to the sociology and politics of knowledge production
helps contextualize current explorations at the frontiers of anthropological the-
ory: ontological and multispecies approaches, posthumanisms and new materi-
alisms, and postsuffering slot anthropologies of the good.41 ­These explorations

the anthropology of becoming | 49

are ­doing impor­tant work in interrogating taken-­for-­granted objects of in-
quiry and categories of analy­sis; mobilizing new generations of scholars; and
opening up new possibilities for fieldwork, collaboration, and expression. Yet
their reception and deployment as so-­called turns might be read as symptom-
atic of a continued longing for comprehensive paradigms, orthodoxies, or the
next big ­thing for our academic vanguard theaters, in which more and more
seems to be said, while increasingly less is truly heard or read. Meanwhile,
the attention to everyday h­ uman social life and the diversity of approaches
that, for many of us, make anthropology so exciting in the first place are passed
over, and theorizing becomes experience-­distant and ultimately impaired.42
New and useful ideas do not have to look like overarching paradigms, nor do
we have to attribute unconditional authority to them. It is impor­tant to be mind-
ful of the moral and po­liti­cal stakes of widespread criticisms of ­human excep-
tionalism in anthropology: it is clear that the inequities of ­human socie­ties—­and
their dif­fer­ent valuation of h­ uman lives and the differential impacts of their
classificatory systems—­still ­matter enormously. We need not brush aside our
discipline’s ­great strengths in working with ­people to consider the mutual be-
comings of ­humans, other species, and our shared environments.
Ethnographic realities are never fully explained by the books and theories
we bring to the field. What does it take for the “life in ­things”—­the minor
voices, missing ­peoples, and “ill-­formed” and tentative “collective enuncia-
tions” that seem to Deleuze to carry so much transformative potential—to
attain recognition and po­liti­cal purchase?43 What role can anthropology play
in this pro­cess, and how can we write in a way that unleashes something of this
“plastic power” instead of containing, reducing, or simplifying it?44 In what
follows, we begin to explore ­these questions and their implications for ethno-
graphic research and writing.
It is often a nemesis that compels us to work, a politics of writing against.
From Bronislaw Malinowski’s critique of the universalizing claims of West-
ern psychoanalytic and economic theories45 to Clifford Geertz’s suspicion
of functionalist and structuralist approaches,46 anthropologists have always
fought against reductionist and hegemonic analytical frames, even as we
strug­gle to articulate and theorize the conditions of our subjects’ ways and
forms of life. Yet academic debates can become suffocatingly polarizing. In
writing against, do we not risk being consumed by our nemeses, producing
ever more monstrous abstractions?
In this chapter, we are more interested in writing for a certain ethnographic
multirealism, and for the anthropologist’s relationship to ­people and their

50 | joão biehl and peter locke

worlds, than we are in writing against a set of simplified foils. This is one of
the reasons that we work through two ethnographic cases. Where Biehl’s work
with Catarina focuses on the literary force of an individual life in her disfigured
domesticity, Locke’s discussion of Sarajevo considers collective and po­liti­cal
dimensions of becoming. In this way, we attempt to provide complementary
­angles from which to think with Deleuze’s ideas and expand con­temporary
configurations of the ­human. Individual biography is replete with collective
inflections and implications, just as collective categories and alternative soli-
darities are suffused by individual lives and stories. Thus, ­actual ­people and
their lives, words, materialities, and affects are at the core of both cases.
­There is an improvisatory quality to our collaboration as we shift between
individual narrators and a unified voice. Throughout, we hope to convey the
messiness of the social world and the real strug­gles in which our in­for­mants
and their loved ones are involved. In the field and at each juncture, a new va-
lence of meaning is added, and a new incident illuminates each of the lives
and assemblages in play. In addition to indicating the institutional and clinical
pro­cesses that bear on our interlocutors, we try to evoke the domestic, coun-
terpublic, and provisional spaces in which lives are also ­shaped, turbulent af-
fects are borne and shared, and difficult circumstances are imbued with partial
meanings. Details reveal nuanced fabrics of singularities and the institutional,
political-­economic, and scientific logics that, in their own provisionality, keep
inequality in place and problematic situations from dissolving or improving.
The ethnographic ethos of curiosity, ambiguity, and openness to relationality
inflects our own sensibilities in how we try to portray our characters: as liv-
ing ­people, with their own mediated subjectivities, whose actions are partly
overdetermined without being inevitable, and who are caught in a constricted
universe of choices that remains the only source from which they can craft their
lives.

­h uman body?

I (Biehl) first met Catarina in March 1997, and I saw her again when I returned
to Vita in January 2000. Vita had been founded in 1987 as a rehabilitation cen-
ter for drug addicts and alcoholics. Soon its mission was enlarged. An increas-
ing number of p­ eople who had been cut off from social life w ­ ere left t­here
by relatives, neighbors, hospitals, and the police. Vita’s team then opened an
infirmary where the abandoned, like Catarina, waited with death. Catarina
was in her midthirties, and her health had deteriorated considerably. Seated

the anthropology of becoming | 51

in a wheelchair, she insisted that she suffered from “rheumatism.” Catarina
seemed dazed and spoke with ­great difficulty. But she was adamant: “I speak
my mind. I have no gates in my mouth.”
Although her external functions w ­ ere almost dead, she retained a puzzling
life within her body. Her “dictionary” was a sea of words, references to all
kinds of illness, places and roles she no longer inhabited, and p­ eople she once
knew and lived for: “Documents, real­ity, tiresomeness, truth, saliva, voracious,
consumer, saving, economics, Catarina, spirit, pills, marriage, cancer, Catholic
church, separation of bodies, division of the state, the ­couple’s ­children.” Her
seemingly disaggregated words ­were in many ways an extension of the abject
figure she had become in f­amily life, medicine, and Brazil. “Medical rec­ords,
ready to go to heaven,” she wrote. “Dollars, Real, Brazil is bankrupted, I am not
to be blamed, without a ­future. ­Things out of justice. ­Human body?”
Some fifty million Brazilians (more than a quarter of the population) live
far below the poverty line, and twenty-­five million more are considered indi-
gent. Although Vita was in many ways a microcosm of such misery, it was dis-
tinctive in some re­spects. A number of its residents came from working-­and
middle-­class families and had once been workers with their own ­house­holds.
­Others had lived in medical or state institutions. As I learned from health
officials and ­human rights activists, despite appearing to be a no-­man’s-­land
cut adrift, Vita was in fact entangled with several public institutions through
its history and maintenance. Porto Alegre contained more than two hundred
such institutions, most of them euphemistically referred to as geriatric h­ ouses.
Some 70 ­percent of them operated as unlicensed businesses. ­These precarious
places h­ oused the unwanted in exchange for their welfare pensions; a good
number of them also received state funds or philanthropic donations and
­were used as platforms for clientelistic politics. Ethnographic work with Cata-
rina helped me to break open the totalizing frames of thought that made Vita
and other zones of abandonment into a common sense that ultimately left no
one accountable for the abandoned.
­These are some of the ­things Catarina told me during our conversations in
early 2000: “Maybe my ­family still remembers me, but they ­don’t miss me. . . . ​
My ex-­husband sent me to the psychiatric hospital. . . . ​The doctors said that
they wanted to heal me, but how could they if they did not know the illness? . . . ​
My sister-­in-­law went to the public clinic to get the medi­cation for me. . . . ​My
­brothers want to see production, pro­gress. They brought me h­ ere. . . . ​They say
that it is better to place us h­ ere so that we d­ on’t have to be left alone, at home,

52 | joão biehl and peter locke

in solitude . . . ​that ­there are more ­people like us ­here. And all of us together,
we form a society, a society of bodies.”
Caregivers at Vita told me that Catarina was louca (mad) and fora da casinha
(out of her mind; literally, “out of her l­ ittle home”). They gave her tranquilizers
and said that they knew nothing about her life outside of Vita. As for her grow-
ing paralysis, they reasoned that “it must have been from giving birth.” I was
fascinated by what she said and by the proliferation of her writing. Her words
did not seem otherworldly to me. They carried the force of literality.
“Even if it is a tragedy? A tragedy generated in life?” Th ­ ose w
­ ere Catarina’s
words when I asked her for the details of her story one day. “I remember it all.
My ex-­husband and I lived together and we had the c­ hildren. We lived as a
man and a w ­ oman. I worked in the shoe factory, but he said that I ­didn’t need
to work. He worked in the city hall. He used to drink a bit ­after work when he
played billiards in a bar. I had nothing against that. One day, however, we had
a silly fight b­ ecause he thought that I should be complaining about his habits
and I ­wasn’t. That fight led to nothing. Afterward, he picked another topic to
fight about. Fi­nally, one day he said that he had gotten another ­woman and
moved in with her. Her name was Rosa. What could I do?”
I remembered the phrase “the separation of bodies” in Catarina’s dictionary,
and it seemed to me that her pathology resided in that split and in her strug­gles
to reestablish social ties. In Vita, out of that lived fragmentation, the h­ ouse and
the ­family ­were remembered: “I behaved like a ­woman. Since I was a ­house­wife,
I did all my duties, like any other w ­ oman. I cooked, and I did the laundry. My
ex-­husband and his ­family got suspicious of me ­because sometimes I left the
­house and attended to other callings. They ­were not in agreement with what I
thought. My ex-­husband thought that I had a nightmare in my head. He wanted
to take that out of me, to make me a normal person. They wanted to lock me
in the hospital. I escaped so as not to go to the hospital. I hid myself; I went far.
But the police and my ex-­husband found me. They took my ­children.”
She was constantly recalling the domestic events that led to her abandon-
ment: “When my thoughts agreed with my ex-­husband and his ­family, every­
thing was fine. But when I disagreed with them, I was mad. It was like a side
of me had to be forgotten. The side of wisdom. They ­wouldn’t dialogue, and
the science of the illness was forgotten. Science is our consciousness, heavy at
times, burdened by a knot that you cannot untie.”
“­After my ex-­husband left me, he came back to the h­ ouse and told me he
needed me. He threw me onto the bed saying, ‘I w ­ ill eat you now.’ I told him

the anthropology of becoming | 53

that that was the last time. . . . ​I did not feel plea­sure, though. I only felt desire.
Desire to be talked to, to be ­gently talked to.”
In abandonment, Catarina recalled sex. ­There was no love, simply a male
body enjoying itself. No more social links, no more speaking beings. Out of
the world of the living, her desire was for language, to be talked to. I reminded
Catarina that she had once told me that the worst part of Vita was the night-
time, when she was left alone with her desire.
She kept ­silent for a while and then made it clear that seduction was not at
stake in our conversation: “I am not asking a fin­ger from you.” She was not
asking me for sex, she meant. Catarina looked exhausted, though she claimed
not to be tired. At any rate, it seemed that she had brought the conversation
to a fecund point, and I also felt like I could no longer listen. No countertrans-
ference, no sexual attraction, I thought, but enough of all t­hese ­things. The
anthropologist is not immune. I promised to return the next day to continue,
and I suggested that she begin to write again.
My re­sis­tance did not deter her from recalling her earliest memory, and
I marveled at the power of what I heard—an image that in its simplicity ap-
peared to concentrate the entire psyche:

I remember something that happened when I was three years old. I was at
home with my ­brother Altamir. We ­were very poor. We ­were living in a ­little
­house in the plantation. Then a big animal came into the house—it was a
black lion. The animal rubbed itself against my body. I ran and hugged my
­brother. ­Mother had gone to get ­water from the well. That’s when I became
afraid. Fear of the animal. When m ­ other came back, I told her what had
happened. But she said that t­here was no fear, that t­here was no animal.
­Mother said nothing.

This could have been incest, sexual abuse, a first psychotic episode, the
memory of maternal and paternal abandonment, or simply a play of shadows
and imagination—we ­will never know.
The image of the ­house, wrote Gaston Bachelard, “would appear to have
become the topography of our intimate being. A h­ ouse constitutes a body
of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.”47 In this earliest
of Catarina’s recollections, nothing is protecting the I. It is in Vita that she
recalled the insecure ­house­hold and the animal so close to the I. This story
speaks to her abandonment as a valueless animal as well as to the work the
animal performs in ­human life. In this last sense, the animal is not a negation
of the ­human, I thought—it is a figure through which Catarina learned to

54 | joão biehl and peter locke

produce affect and that marks her singularity. When I told her it was time for
me to leave, Catarina replied, “You are the one who marks time.”

geographies of becoming

It was not enough to deconstruct Catarina’s classification as mad or her con-

finement in institutions of control. Claiming language and agency, she was
not reducible to “bare life,” and her knowledge revealed complicated realities
and the noninstitutionalized spaces in which life chances w ­ ere crystallized or
foreclosed.48
Deleuze, who did not share Foucault’s confidence in the determining force
of power, is helpful ­here. In a 1976 article called “Desire and Plea­sure,”49 De-
leuze reviewed Foucault’s then recently published History of Sexuality.50 In that
book, Foucault took a new step with regard to his earlier work in Discipline and
Punish:51 now power arrangements w ­ ere no longer simply normalizing, they
­were also constituents of sexuality. Attentive to historical preconditions and
singular efforts of becoming, Deleuze instead “emphasize[d] the primacy of
desire over power” and pursued “lines of flight.”52 For him “all organ­izations,
all the systems Michel [Foucault] calls biopower, in effect reterritorialize the
body.”53 But a social field, first and foremost, “leaks out on all sides.”54 “Desire,”
he wrote, “comes first and seems to be the ele­ment of a micro-­analysis.”55
According to Deleuze, desire is constantly undoing, or at least opening up,
forms of subjectivity and power. It is at the core of the concept of assem-
blage, used by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier to name emerging global
configurations of science, capital, and governance.56 For Deleuze and Guattari,
assemblages are contingent and shifting interrelations among “segments”—­
that is, institutions, powers, practices, and desires—­that constantly and si­
mul­ta­neously construct, entrench, and disaggregate their own constraints
and oppressions.57 An assemblage, they write, is “a concretization of power,
of desire, of territoriality or reterritorialization, regulated by the abstraction
of a transcendental law. But we must declare as well that an assemblage has
points of deterritorialization; or that it always has a line of escape by which
it . . . ​makes the segments melt and . . . ​liberates desire from all its concretiza-
tions in order to dissolve them.”58
This emphasis on desire and the ways—­humble, marginal, minor—­that
it cracks through “the concretization of power” and apparently rigid social
fields and serves as the engine of becoming figures centrally in Deleuze’s di-
vergences from both Foucault and Sigmund Freud. In Deleuze’s view, Freud

the anthropology of becoming | 55

and his followers offer a philosophy of top-­down penetration of depths—of
memory and memorialization—­that digs through the past for the core,
defining truths of a person’s being encapsulated in childhood mother-­father
oedipal dynamics.59 This is an archaeological conception of psychoanalysis,
according to Deleuze. His use of this term also evokes his critique of Fou-
cault, whose archaeology of the subject traces the ways in which he or she is
constituted and confined by, for example, the top-­down categories of expert
discourses.60 Freud and Foucault each define the subject through dependen-
cies and determinants—­by past traumas and unconscious complexes, and by
entangled regimes of power and knowledge, respectively.
In the essay “What ­Children Say,”61 Deleuze revisits Freud’s seminal case
study of ­Little Hans62 to develop the idea of cartography as an alternative to
oedipal archaeology. The objects of cartography, what the analyst maps, are
milieus (contexts that are at once material and social and are infused with
affects and intensities) and trajectories (the journeys p­ eople take through
milieus to address needs, pursue desires and curiosities, or to simply try to
find room to breathe u­ nder constraint): “The trajectory merges not only
with the subjectivity of t­ hose who travel through a milieu, but also with the
subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in t­ hose who travel
through it.”63
For Deleuze, the analytical challenge is to illuminate desire and possibil-
ity, not only structural determinants. Rather than focusing on origins or the
weight of memory, our analyses must reveal mobilization and flight. “From
one map to the next,” Deleuze suggests, “it is not a m ­ atter of searching for
an origin, but of evaluating displacements. E ­ very map is a re­distribution of
impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures, which necessarily
go from bottom to top.”64 In other words, it is “no longer an unconscious of
commemoration but one of mobilization.”65
Defining subjects in terms of the archaeology of their dependencies may
be less revealing than mapping out their movements through space, time, and
social fields: ­people’s lines of flight as well as their blocked passages, moments
when the libido is stuck or pushed backward. Done right, hints Deleuze, such
maps can show the Dionysian force of the libido as it breaks down forms and
constraints by investing the indefinite, which, he argues, “lacks nothing”: “It
is the determination of a becoming, its characteristic power, the power of an
impersonal that is not a generality but a singularity at its highest point.”66
This cartographic approach makes space for possibility (the other­w ise,
or what could be) as a crucial dimension of what is or what was. It brings

56 | joão biehl and peter locke

crossroads—­places where other choices might be made or other paths taken—­
out of the shadow of deterministic analytics. It brings alternatives within closer
reach. Ethnography, at its best, strives for the same achievements.
As Michael M. J. Fischer argues, subjectivities are now “raucous terrae in-
cognitae” for anthropological inquiry: “landscapes of explosions, noise, alienat-
ing silences, disconnects and dissociations, fears, terror machineries, plea­sure
princi­ples, illusions, fantasies, displacements, and secondary revisions, mixed
with reason, rationalizations, and paralogics—­all of which have power­ful
sociopo­liti­cal dimensions and effects.”67 In Fischer’s view, we need to attend
to more than the “enunciative function” of the subject: subjectivity does not
merely speak as re­sis­tance, nor is it simply spoken to or silenced by power.68 It
continually forms and reappears in the complex play of bodily, linguistic, po­
liti­cal, and psychological dimensions of ­human experience; and within and in
contrast to new infrastructures, value systems, and transforming injustices and
insecurities. Ethnography can help us chart paths across larger structures and
forces of repetition, technologies at play, and “the slippery slopes of unfore-
seeable consequences of action.”69 It can help us account for ­people, experi-
ences, and voices and silences that remain unaddressed and raise calls for new
ethics and politics. Ethnography ­matters.

the psychiatric aura of real­ity

Catarina’s speech and writing captured the messiness of what her world had
turned into—­filled with knots that she could not untie, although she desper-
ately wanted to ­because “if we ­don’t study it, the illness in the body worsens.”
Her words described real strug­gles, the ordinary world from which she had
been banished, and the multiple therapeutic itineraries that had altered her
body and become the life of her mind. With the on-­the-­ground study of a single
other comes an im­mense parceling out of the specific ways communities, fami-
lies, and personal lives are assembled and valued, and how they are embedded
in larger entrepreneurial pro­cesses and institutional rearrangements. But Cata-
rina was not simply trying to find a place for herself in history. By ­going through
the components and singularities of events, she was resuming her place in them
as in a becoming: “To make peace with time, the hours, minutes, and seconds,
with the clock and the calendar, to be well with all, but mainly with the pen.”
Writing helped her draw out the best of herself and make it all endurable
and somehow open: “From the letters I form words, and from the words I
form sentences, and from the sentences I form a story.” Catarina created a new

the anthropology of becoming | 57

letter character that resembled a K, as well as new names for herself such as
catakina, catkina, catieki, and catkine. She explained that “K is open
on both sides. If I w ­ ouldn’t open the character, my head would explode.” She
continued: “One needs to preserve oneself. I also know that plea­sure in life is
very impor­tant, the body of the other. I think that ­people fear their bodies. . . . ​
I have desire, I have desire.” As Catarina rethought the literal realities that had
led to her exclusion, she demanded one more chance in life. ­There was some-
thing in the way she moved from one register to the other—­past life, Vita, and
desire—­that eluded anthropological understanding. This movement was her
own language of abandonment.
From 2000 to 2003, I took numerous trips to southern Brazil to work with
Catarina. I studied all twenty-­one volumes of the dictionary she was compos-
ing and discussed the words and associations with her. In her recollections and
writing, I found clues to the p­ eople, sites, and interactions that constituted her
destiny. As an anthropologist, I was challenged to reconstruct the world of her
words, to illuminate self-­world entanglements. I wanted to directly address
the vari­ous cir­cuits in which her intractability and silence or voice gained
form, cir­cuits that seemed in­de­pen­dent of both laws and norms—­the in-­
betweenness through which social life and ethics are empirically worked out.
With Catarina’s consent, I retrieved her rec­ords from psychiatric hospitals and
local branches of the country’s universal health-­care system. On a detective-­
like journey, I also located her f­amily members in the nearby city of Novo
Hamburgo. Every­thing she had told me about the familial and medical path-
ways that had led her to Vita was consistent with the information I found in
the archives and in the field—­a field that was not self-­evident, but that became
manifest through ethnographic returns, diligence, and care.
Catarina was born in 1966 and grew up in the very poor western region of
the state of Rio Grande do Sul. ­After finishing fourth grade, she was taken out
of school and became the ­house­keeper, while her youn­gest siblings aided their
­mother in agricultural work. The ­father had abandoned the ­family. In the mid-
1980s, two of her b­ rothers migrated to find jobs in the booming shoe industry
in Novo Hamburgo. At the age of eigh­teen, Catarina married Nilson Moraes,
and a year ­later she gave birth to her first child. Shady deals, per­sis­tent bad
harvests, and indebtedness to local vendors forced Nilson and Catarina to sell
the land they had inherited to take care of Catarina’s ailing ­mother, and in the
mid-1980s, the young ­couple deci­ded to join her ­brothers in Novo Hamburgo
and the shoe industry. In the coming years, Catarina had two more ­children.
As her illness progressed and her marriage disintegrated, her older son and

58 | joão biehl and peter locke

d­ aughter went to her husband’s ­family, and her younger ­daughter was given
up for adoption.
Catarina had become too much of a burden for her ­family; caught up in
webs of disease, poverty, and fear, she was frequently hospitalized and over-
medicated with power­ful antipsychotics. Yet exploring her medical rec­ords, I
uncovered something more. Catarina suffered from a rare neurodegenerative
disorder called Machado-­Joseph Disease, which caused her to lose her ability
to walk and, over time, shut her body down almost entirely.70 It was an illness
that had afflicted Catarina’s ­mother, and in both of their cases it presented itself
­after childbirth. Reaching this diagnosis took me through a maze of medical
hoops, and as the picture of her illness became clearer, I took her to a ge­ne­ticist
and neurologist who fi­nally made the correct diagnosis and provided the best
pos­si­ble care.
In many ways, Catarina was caught in a period of po­liti­cal and cultural
transition: politicians ­were implementing a state reform to make Brazil ­viable
within a supposedly inescapable economic globalization and fostering alterna-
tive partnerships with civil society to maximize the public interest within the
state.71 In Vita, I show how such large-­scale change and re­distribution of re-
sources, power, and responsibility take place locally, as over­burdened families
and individuals are left to negotiate ­these pro­cesses alone.72 In this context, the
­family is increasingly the medical agent of the state (providing and at times
triaging care), and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals become a tool for such deliberate action.
­Free distribution of drugs is a central component of Brazil’s universal
health-­care system, a demo­cratic success of the late 1980s. Increasing calls for
the decentralization of ser­vices and the individualization of treatment, exem-
plified by the ­mental health movement, coincided with dramatic cuts in fund-
ing for health-­care infrastructure and with the proliferation of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal
treatments. Data from the government’s database for health resource use in
the period 1995–2005 show that the country’s reform of psychiatric care was
accompanied by a significant fall in the percentage of resources dedicated to
that care.73 Meanwhile, t­ here has been a dramatic increase in resource alloca-
tion for community ser­vices and medicines, particularly second-­generation
antipsychotic drugs. The increased allocation of funds for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals
was followed by a relative decrease in the number of public psychiatrists hired,
with psychiatrists replaced in large part by social workers and psychologists.
In engaging with this new regime of public health and in allocating their
own overstretched and meager resources, families become proxy psychia-
trists. They can dispose of unwanted and unproductive members, sometimes

the anthropology of becoming | 59

without sanction, on the basis of individuals’ noncompliance with their treat-
ment regimens. Psychopharmaceuticals are thus central to how personal lives
are recast in this par­tic­u­lar moment of socioeconomic change, and to how
­people create life chances vis-­à-­vis what is bureaucratically and medically
available to them.74 Such negotiations are entangled with market exploitation,
gender domination, and a managerial-­style state that is increasingly distant
from the ­people it governs. The fabric of this domestic activity of evaluating
which life is worth living remains largely unexamined, not only in everyday life
but also in the lit­er­a­ture of transforming economies, states, and civil socie­ties
in contexts of democ­ratization and social in­equality. As this study unfolded,
I was challenged to devise ways to approach this unconsidered infrastructure
of decision making that operates, in Catarina’s own words, “out of justice,” or
outside the bounds of the judiciary and the public ministry—­that is, close to
home. “I know,” she said, “­because I passed through it. I learned the truth and
I try to divulge what real­ity is.”
Ethnography makes vis­i­ble the intermingling of colloquial practices and
relations, institutional histories, and discursive structures that—in categories
of madness, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, mi­grant ­house­holds, and disintegrating state
services—­have defined normalcy and displaced Catarina onto the register of
social death, where her condition appears to have been “self-­generated.” Cata-
rina knew that the verb “to kill” was being conjugated—­“dead alive, dead out-
side, alive inside”—­and I was challenged to chart this pro­cess and to reflect
on what made it not only pos­si­ble, but ordinary. This is also, then, a story of
the methodological, ethical, and conceptual limits of anthropology and its own
becoming as the ethnographer goes to the field to verify the sources of a life ex-
cluded from f­ amily and society and to capture the density of a locality without
leaving the individual person and her subjectivity ­behind.

to live is expensive

As I listened to what had made Catarina’s voice posthumous, a life force

emerged that reworked ideas of the person and the value of social ties. While
trying to speak, Catarina was overwhelmed by the chemical alterations of
drugs: layers of chemical compounds and the side effects that ­were her body
and identity now. To speak the unspeakable, she resorted to meta­phors and
writing. In the following dictionary entry, for example, she tried to break
open the reader’s blindness, bringing a Greek tragic figure together with her
­brothers, ­children, and renamed self: “Look at Catarina without blindness,

60 | joão biehl and peter locke

pray, prayer, Jocastka, ­there is no tonic for catkine, ­there is no doctor for any
one, Altamir, Ademar, Armando, Anderson, Alessandra, Ana.”
Marked by paradoxes and impossibilities, she continued: “I need to
change my blood with a tonic. Medi­cation from the pharmacy costs money,
to live is expensive.” Medical science was indeed part and parcel of Catarina’s
existence—­the truths, half-­truths, and misunderstandings that brought her
to die in Vita, and on which she nonetheless subsisted. “Pharmacy, laboratory,
marriage, identity, army, rheumatism, complication of l­abor, loss of physical
equilibrium, total loss of control, govern, goalkeeper, evil eye, spasm, nerves. . . . ​
In the United States, not ­here in Brazil, ­there is a cure, for half of the disease.”
In writing, as in speech, Catarina often referred to her condition as “rheu-
matism”: “­People think that they have the right to put their hands in the man-
gled threads and to mess with it. Rheumatism. They use my name for good
and for evil. They use it ­because of the rheumatism.” A pos­si­ble reading is
that her rheumatism tied vari­ous life threads together. It is an untidy knot, a
real m
­ atter that makes social exchange pos­si­ble. It gives the body its stature
and is the conduit of a morality. Catarina’s bodily affection, not her name, is
exchanged in that world: “What I was in the past does not ­matter.” Catarina
dis­appears, and a religious image stands in her place: “Rheumatism, spasm,
crucified Jesus.” In another fragment, she writes: “Acute spasm, secret spasm.
Rheumatic ­woman. The word of the rheumatic is of no value.”
Catarina knew that t­ here is a rationality and a bureaucracy to symptom man-
agement: “Chronic spasm, rheumatism, must be stamped, registered.” All of this
happens in a demo­cratic context, “vote by vote.” We must consider side by side
the acute pain Catarina described and the authoritative story she became in
medicine and in common sense—as being mad and ultimately of no value. The
antipsychotic drugs Haldol and Neozine are also words in Catarina’s dictionary.
In a fragment, she defiantly writes that her pain reveals the experimental ways
science is embodied: “The dance of science. Pain broadcasts sick science, the
sick study. Brain, illness. Buscopan, Haldol, Neozine. Invoked spirit.”
An individual history of science is being written h­ ere. Catarina’s lived ex-
perience and ailments are the pathos of a certain science, a science that is itself
sick. The goods of psychiatric science have become as ordinary as Buscopan
(hyoscine, an over-­the-­counter antispasmodic medi­cation) and have become
a part of familial practices. As her experience shows, the use of such drugs
produces ­mental and physical effects apart from ­those related to her illness.
In Catarina’s thinking and writing, global phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals are not simply
taken as new material for old patterns of self-­fashioning but are entangled in

the anthropology of becoming | 61

and act as vectors for new mechanisms of sociomedical and subjective con-
trol that have both a deadly and a generative force. Seen from the perspective
of Vita, the illnesses Catarina experienced ­were the outcome of events and
practices that annulled the person she had learned to become. Abandoned
in Vita to die, Catarina nonetheless has ties to pharmakons, which also work
as kernels of a fugitive lifeworld. Her desire, she writes, is now a phar­ma­ceu­
ti­cal ­thing with no ­human exchange value: “Catarina cries and wants to leave.
Desire, watered, prayed, wept. Tearful feeling, fearful, diabolic, betrayed. My
desire is of no value. Desire is phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal. It is not good for the circus.”

lit­e r­a­ture and health

Catarina also writes to remain alive, I thought. In the dictionary, she constantly
places her new names in relation to ­those of o­ thers she meets in Vita, such as
Clóvis and Luis Carlos, or ­people she knew in the past, such as Valmir. She
creatively redirects disciplinary clinical ele­ments into a literary and therapeutic
line of flight and contact.
Deleuze says that writing is “a question of becoming, always incomplete,
always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the ­matter of any liv-
able or lived experience. It is a pro­cess, that is, a passage of Life that traverses
both the livable and the lived.”75 He thinks of language as a system that can be
disturbed, attacked, and reconstructed: the very gate through which limits of
all kinds are crossed and the energy of the “delirium” unleashed.76
The delirium suggests alternative visions of existence and of a f­ uture that
clinical definitions tend to foreclose. Language in its clinical state has already
attained a form, says Deleuze: “We ­don’t write with our neuroses. Neuroses
or psychoses are not passages of life, but states into which we fall when the
pro­cess is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up. Illness is not a pro­cess but a
stopping of the pro­cess.”77 The radical work of lit­er­a­ture, however, moves away
from truths and forms (­because truth itself is a form) and ­toward interme-
diate, pro­cessual, even virtual stages. Writing, he insists, is inseparable from
becoming.
While I tried to cartographize her lived experience of abandonment, Ca-
tarina was herself producing, in her dictionary, an ethnographic theory of the
leftover subject, the it she had become. Consider this stanza:

Catarina is subjected
To be a nation in poverty
Porto Alegre

62 | joão biehl and peter locke

 Without an heir
Enough
I end

Catarina places the individual and the collective in the same space of analy­
sis, just as the country and the city collide in Vita. Subjection has to do with
having no money and being part of a nation gone awry. The subject is a body
left in Vita without ties to her life 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, Catarina still has her subjectivity—­the medium through which a
collectivity is ordered in terms of lack, and in which she finds a way to disen-
tangle herself from the mess the world has become. In her writing, she ­faces
the concrete limits of what a ­human being can bear and makes polysemy out
of ­those limits—­“I, who am where I go, am who am so.” In her words, real and
imaginary voyages compose a set of intertwined routes: “I am a ­free ­woman, to
fly, bionic ­woman, separated. . . . ​W hen men throw me into the air, I am already
far away.” ­These trajectories are inseparable from becoming: “I ­will leave the
door of the cage open. You can fly wherever you want to.”
Actualized by lit­er­a­ture is the power of an impersonal that, says Deleuze,
“is not a generality but singularity at the highest point: a man, a ­woman, a
beast, a child. . . . ​It is not the first two persons that function as the condition
for literary enunciation; lit­er­a­ture begins only when a third person is born in
us that strips us of the power to say ‘I.’ ”78 The shift to the indefinite—­from I
to a or it—­leads to the ultimate existential stage in which life is simply im-
manent, a transcendental field where man and w ­ oman and other men and
­women or animals or landscapes can achieve a web of variable relations and
situated connectedness, call it camaraderie.
“­There, in Novo Hamburgo it is Catarina. H ­ ere it is catkine,” she told me
when I asked her why she in­ven­ted this name: “I ­will be called this now. For
I d­ on’t want to be a tool for men to use, for men to cut. A tool is innocent.
You dig, you cut, you do what­ever you want with it. . . . ​It ­doesn’t know if it
hurts or d­ oesn’t. But the man who uses it to cut the other knows what he is
­doing.” She continued with the most forceful words: “I d­ on’t want to be a
tool. ­Because Catarina is not the name of a person . . . ​truly not. It is the name
of a tool, of an object. A person is an other.”
Psychopharmaceuticals mediated Catarina’s expulsion from the world
of exchanges and ­were now the means through which she recounted bodily
fragmentation and withering. This was what she was left with—­“enjoyment

the anthropology of becoming | 63

enjoying itself ” (se goza gozo), as she wrote in the dictionary: “Plea­sure and
desire are not sold, cannot be bought. But have choice.”
The opportunity to “restart” and a ­human choice ­were all she wanted. This
was what Catarina affirmed in her love stories in Vita. “I dated a man who
volunteered as a security guard h­ ere,” she told me. “He bought me a ring and a
bracelet, shampoo, many ­things. We met at night and had sex in the bathroom.
But ­people ­were trying to separate us. Vera began to say that he was her boy-
friend, too. So I gave him the ring back. He refused to take it back. I said, ‘I ­will
not throw this into the garbage,’ so I put it in my suitcase. ­After we split, he had
other w­ omen ­here. . . . ​But as far as I am concerned, I was not his prey. I d­ idn’t
fall to him. I wanted it. I have desire, I have desire. I am with Clóvis now.”
Catarina refused to depict herself as a victim. Along with hunger, spasms,
and pain, her body experienced uncontrollable desires, an overflow unthinkable
in terms of common sense. While exposing Vita as a place of total annihilation,
she also spoke of the vitality of sexuality and affirmed her agency. She spoke
openly of having sex “in the bathroom and in the pharmacy” with Clóvis, a
man who, ­after passing through the rehabilitation areas, became the infirmary’s
“nurse” and “pharmacist.” For Catarina, desire and plea­sure ­were gratifying, “a
gift that one feels.” During sex, she said, “I ­don’t lose my head, and I ­don’t let
my partner lose his head. If it is good for me, I want to make it good for him,
too.” She was, in her own words, “a true ­woman” (mulher de verdade): “Female
reproducer, reproduces, lubrification, anonymous reproducer, to fondle the ag-
gressive lust, and manias. Scientific de­cadence, kiss, electricity, wet, mouth kiss,
dry kiss, kiss in the neck, to start from zero, it is always time, to begin again, for
me it is time to convert, this is salvation day, Clóvis Gama, catkine, Catakina
Gama, Ikeni Gama, Alessandra Gomes, Ana G., to restart a home, a ­family, the
spirit of love, the spirit of God, the spirit becomes flesh inside.”
Catarina remarked that other p­ eople 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 merely an object of understand-
ing for o­ thers, yet she challenges us to inquire into the benefits that can come
from ethnographic knowledge making, especially in the ways care can be re-
directed: “Nobody ­will decipher the words for me. With the pen, only I can
do it. . . . ​In the ink, I decipher. . . . ​I am writing for myself to understand, but,
of course, if you all understand I ­will be very content.” And she anticipated an
exit from Vita. It was as difficult as it was impor­tant to sustain this anticipa-

64 | joão biehl and peter locke

tion: to find ways to support Catarina’s search for ties to t­ hings, ­people, and
the world and her demand for continuity, or at least its possibility.

to write for the ­people who are missing

Where Biehl’s work with Catarina probes the significance of Deleuze’s thought
in understanding a life, I (Locke) explore Deleuze’s insights for understanding
collective becomings in Sarajevo. ­Here, what is held in common (who one cares
for, identifies with, supports, or is supported by in the course of the fraught
unfolding of a postwar everyday) does not always correspond to official divi-
sions and categories—­that is, ethnoreligious divisions (Croat, Serb, and Bos-
niac) and competing victim identifications (veteran, ­widow, camp survivor,
rape victim, displaced person, and returnee, e.g.).79 The collective is an open
space of ambivalence and contestation, where t­ here is room for difference to
be affirmed, tentative bonds to be formed, and shared frustrations to cross en-
trenched bound­aries and mark out new ones.
Although the specificities of the cases are dif­fer­ent in crucial ways, my
Sarajevan interlocutors, like Catarina, negotiate an evolving interface of psy-
chiatric and neoliberal economic rationalities. ­Here clinical diagnoses applied
to ­whole populations can obscure the many po­liti­cal, economic, and social
discontents ­behind their shared symptoms. Sustained ethnographic engage-
ment produces a counterinterpretation that, by taking seriously local desires,
strug­gles, and dissent, evokes the potential for alternative solidarities and po­
liti­cal life in the region—­“a ­people to come.”80
On a hot morning in July 2007, I took a taxi to Sarajevo’s Koševo Hospital
to visit Senadin Ljubović. A psychiatrist with de­cades of experience, he had
worked extensively with traumatized ex-­soldiers and rape victims since the war.
On my way into his office, I passed a gaunt, expressionless ­woman on her way
out. Ljubović told me, without prompting, that she was from Srebrenica; that
she had spent months in a concentration camp where she had been subjected
to sexual vio­lence; and that many of her male f­amily members ­were killed in
the July 1995 genocide. She had no job, no friends, and no f­amily in Sarajevo.
She received only meager assistance from the government and was about to be
evicted from her apartment.
Calm and resigned in his white coat, Ljubović asked me what a psychiatrist
could do for someone like her. Her prob­lems ­were social: the extreme vio­
lence of the early 1990s had shattered her networks of support, and in a city
still resentful of villa­gers and refugees, she had found ­little in the way of new

the anthropology of becoming | 65

h­ uman warmth and connection. And her prob­lems w ­ ere financial: more than
a de­cade ­after the war, the Bosnian economy remained (and remains ­today)
weak, and ­there ­were few prospects for formal employment or further educa-
tion. The trauma of her terrible losses and violations was evident, Ljubović
said, in her crippled capacity to trust, connect, and hope. But Ljubović—­one
of Bosnia-­Herzegovina’s relatively few ­mental health professionals81—­hardly
had the time or resources to address this particularly ­bitter facet of her pre-
dicament. He could only prescribe medi­cation, offer a few words of advice,
and let her go, admitting the next client in line.
A few months earlier, I sat at the long t­ able in the common area of the offices
of Wings of Hope (often referred to by ­those in its orbit simply as “Wings”),
a local psychosocial support nongovernmental organ­ization (ngo) focused
on ser­vices for ­children and their families. Three m ­ others waited in a cloud of
cigarette smoke, while elsewhere in the office staff members worked with their
­children. The m ­ others ­were angry and frustrated. Their husbands w ­ ere gone
(some lost in the war) or unemployed; their ­children ­were struggling in school;
and government was ­doing little to help them. Neighbors and friends ­were too
preoccupied with their own daily strug­gles to take much interest. ngos such
as Wings of Hope, limited in capacity b­ ecause of donor fatigue and the de-
clining interest of the international community, fill in where they can in the
absence of government ser­vices. “Politicians do not care about us,” the w ­ omen
agreed. One said: “They just use their positions to get rich. . . . ​My husband
died in the war and I live off his soldier’s pension. But it is not enough! And
­there are no jobs for me.” As they exchanged ­bitter complaints, the ­mothers
began remembering together what the system was like before the war they
did not want, when material security, employment, and health care w ­ ere all
(ostensibly) guaranteed by the state: “Every­thing was better before. The war was
for nothing.” They ­were grateful for the assistance they had found at Wings, but
they resented the fact that it was their only apparent option.
Ljubović and the ­mothers at Wings of Hope both criticized painful failures
of postwar governance (local and international) and an absence of ser­vices and
assistance; and they expressed a general sense of social dysfunction, stagnancy,
and disconnection. Despite bloated, redundant layers of bureaucracy that at
the time drained an estimated 70  ­percent of Bosnia’s yearly gross domestic
product, government felt to my interlocutors in Sarajevo less like a weight than
a lack of care, support, and opportunity. Local politics—­dominated by zero-­
sum, angry, fear-­inducing debates between ethnic nationalists on all sides—­

66 | joão biehl and peter locke

unfolded in a b­ ubble of compulsive repetition disconnected from concrete
socioeconomic prob­lems.
­People ­were left to fend for themselves. What care and opportunities they
could obtain often required personal or po­liti­cal connections or bribery. Stu-
dents, I was often told, w ­ ere paying to pass exams; gradu­ates ­were paying to
be employed; a patient needing stitches would hand the nurse a ­little extra
to receive local anesthetic. And with the steady withdrawal of international
aid proj­ects, leaving local ngos scrambling for meager resources, the limited
ser­vices provided by civil society (including ­those addressing ­mental health)
could only scratch the surface of ­actual need.
During the war in BiH (whose population was roughly four million), ap-
proximately a hundred thousand ­people ­were killed, and at least two million
­were displaced.82 Legacies of the conflict continue to compromise Bosnia’s in-
frastructure, economy, and civic institutions. The Dayton Accords, which ended
hostilities in 1995, brought to BiH an enormous international apparatus of
governance, monitoring, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid—­what the
anthropologist Mariella Pandolfi, in the context of Kosovo, has called a kind
of “mi­grant sovereignty.”83 Renewed warfare has been held at bay, but major
reforms have been spotty and fitful. Nationalist politicians who depend on the
electorate’s fear and insecurity frequently stymie the efforts of both interna-
tional authorities and local activist movements to stimulate po­liti­cal change. It
does not help that the Dayton Accords entrenched the role of divisive ethnic
identifications in the po­liti­cal pro­cess.84 Since 1995 BiH has remained a kind
of international protectorate, and the high representative (an unelected po­
liti­cal appointee who jointly represents the United Nations and the Eu­ro­pean
Union, and whose mandate was originally intended to last only one year) re-
tains the capacity to exercise significant po­liti­cal authority, though this rarely
happens. In economic domains, international organ­izations’ neoliberal mar-
ket ideology and structural adjustment policies have led to by now familiar
outcomes—­corrupt privatization, the auctioning off of once-­public assets,
and the dismantling of social welfare ser­vices.85
“It was international intervention in former Yugo­slavia, especially Bosnia,”
argues the po­liti­cal scientist Vanessa Pupavac, “that heralded ‘the triumph of the
therapeutic.’ ”86 Borrowing the quoted expression from Philip Rieff ’s87 study
of the integration of Freudian thought into modern culture, Pupavac argues
that over the course of the 1990s, international policy in postcrisis situations
created a form of power she calls “therapeutic governance.”88 Humanitarian

the anthropology of becoming | 67

organ­izations in the Balkans conducted psychosocial ­proj­ects—by some
accounts, thousands of such proj­ects w ­ ere implemented in the region dur-
ing and just a­ fter the war, collectively costing millions of dollars—to address
the trauma and m ­ ental health of war survivors.89 The psychosocial approach
emphasizes the link between trauma and recurring cycles of vio­lence. And,
as Fassin and Rechtman show in The Empire of Trauma, the emergent field
of humanitarian psychiatry has generally cast war survivors as psychologi-
cally damaged and therefore in danger of repeating the atrocities they have
witnessed or to which they have been subjected.90 According to Pupavac, this
set of assumptions has helped to justify the continuing supervision of BiH
by foreign overseers. Con­temporary therapeutic governance presumes that
postwar citizens can be trusted with neither their po­liti­cal rights nor their
own emotional well-­being. Symbolic justice is emphasized, while “substan-
tive social justice” is all but ignored.91
As my fieldwork began, I expected to watch the “triumph of the therapeu-
tic” in postwar remediation efforts play out in everyday life in Sarajevo.92 How-
ever, I quickly discovered that, notwithstanding the millions of aid dollars that
had been spent, the structural effect of international psychosocial proj­ects in
Bosnia-­Herzegovina has been relatively narrow. While vari­ous international
programs—­the once-­common seminars, workshops, trainings, and conferences
on themes such as conflict resolution, nonviolence, communication skills, and
trauma—­did shift the way a number of local civil society workers understood
the psychological effects of war, most ­people do not tend to see any form of
psychotherapy as a pos­si­ble remedy for their woes. Even if they did, m ­ ental
health care ser­vices in BiH, and public understanding of them, are limited.
While strong ­mental health care infrastructures and treatment-­seeking
cultures have not fully taken root in BiH, psychological language has seeped
into local common sense, confounding the way ­people understand the coun-
try’s social-­structural and political-­economic prob­lems. Interpretation of the
features of life in con­temporary BiH often takes place in a clinical-­sounding
register, through which Bosnian voices seem to emit only signs of lives blocked
by collective illness. What if we listened to Bosnian lives on a literary rather
than a clinical register, paying attention to a dif­fer­ent kind of agency that pulses
in a language of despair and refusal, of anger and abiding, a syntax of mourn-
ful waiting? Might we hear, between the lines, a tentative “collective enuncia-
tion” that points to alternatives for social solidarity and mobilization for public
accountability?93

68 | joão biehl and peter locke

diagnosing a city

The postwar flurry of international psychosocial work in BiH was short-­lived,

leaving ­behind a handful of small locally run ngos, whose staff members
­were more often than not trained by international ­mental health professionals
during and just ­after the war. ­These ngos try to adapt their sense of Western
­mental health science to what they perceive to be local prob­lems and needs,
often creating a disjuncture between mission statements and grant applica-
tions (couched in psychological terminology) and a­ ctual practices (which are
more eclectic, weaving a range of therapeutic modalities together with social
work and community organ­izing). The organ­izations’ beneficiaries are often
seeking material assistance as much as some form of emotional support; ngo
workers regularly told me stories of ­people appearing at psychosocial activi-
ties to ask for money or materials to rebuild damaged homes or buy food for a
few days. This is the sort of assistance that citizens might have reasonably ex-
pected of their prewar communist government, suggesting an impor­tant mi-
crohistory of the kinds of values and expectations that linger as philosophies
and infrastructures of governance transform.94
At Wings of Hope, what is billed as “psychodetraumatization” for ­children
has evolved into academic tutoring for young p­ eople struggling in school; as-
sistance in transitions from education to work; and pragmatic prob­lem solving,
counseling, and general support for families. On balance, it seemed that such
efforts address the effects of con­temporary socioeconomic pressures as much
as—or even more than—­those of extreme war­time experiences. Yet staff
members, volunteers, and beneficiaries talk in psychological terms, attributing
poor grades to transgenerational trauma, and c­ hildren are usually selected for
the program based on a checklist of traumatic indicators developed for Wings
several years ago by a psychologist from the University of Sarajevo. Marija Šarić
(hereafter Maja, at her request), the executive director of Wings, often told
me that Sarajevo is in the grip of “collective depression” and “mass trauma”—­
although when I interviewed staff members, some w ­ ere less certain about such
blanket diagnoses. If ideas about trauma only loosely guide ngo activities, they
nevertheless seem to inflect, to differing degrees, the explanations ­people at
Wings give about what they are ­doing.
­There is something ­here akin to pro­cesses of medicalization—­the tendency
to obscure the social etiology of affliction and reduce it to a biological real­ity
amenable to medical intervention.95 Yet without the presence of a power­ful

the anthropology of becoming | 69

medical or psychiatric infrastructure, this form of objectification works along
other lines: diagnostics from the private clinical encounter come to operate,
fluidly and ambivalently, in domestic and public spheres and collectively con-
structed narratives about postwar life. ­People do not simply become the di-
agnostic categories applied to them—­they inhabit them to greater or lesser
degrees, refuse them, redefine and redeploy them, or ignore them entirely.
Medical anthropologists including Margaret Lock have insisted on the limits
of philosophical categories and the indispensability of ethnographic meth-
ods of research and writing for understanding such complex appropriations
and redirections of medical rationality.96 As Ian Hacking acknowledged in his
essay on how new kinds of ­people can be “made up” by medical diagnostics,
“my concern is philosophical and abstract . . . ​and [I] reflect too l­ittle on the
ordinary dynamics of ­human interaction.”97
The legacy of therapeutic governance and humanitarian psychiatry in BiH
is mixed in many senses. In the same breath, Sarajevans can talk about psychi-
atric trauma as the source of socioeconomic challenges—­for example, say-
ing that when p­ eople are depressed, they lack the kind of individual initiative
required to make capitalism work—­and then reverse the formula, pointing
to economic prob­lems as the true traumatic experience. In late July 2008—­a
few days ­after Radovan Karadžić, the war­time Bosnian Serb leader, was fi­nally
captured (he had been practicing as a new age healer ­under a false identity
in Belgrade)—­I took a taxi to the city’s central bus station. The driver talked
about how difficult it was for him to see Karadžić in the media again—­the
erstwhile psychiatrist and poet was a key architect of the long siege of
Sarajevo—then he asked what I was ­doing t­ here. “I’m most interested in how
­people are thinking about and dealing with trauma,” I told him. He replied:
“That is very difficult. What you are looking for is hidden.”
The driver explained that at first glance, every­thing looks relatively “normal”
in Sarajevo: ­people socialize, work, spend time in cafes with their friends, study
at the university, and take buses to the Adriatic coast in July. U ­ nder the surface,
though, “something is not right.” ­People are “explosive” and “temperamental,”
he said, flying into a rage at the l­ittle irritations of daily life, in a way that they
had not done before the war. But war trauma is not the only reason for this half-­
buried malaise: “­There are no jobs.” He began to recite a familiar litany of so-
cial ills—­unemployment, corruption, poor social ser­vices, a country seemingly
emptied of compassion and solidarity. “This is not a normal society,” he told
me. “This is not what I fought for.”98 He had served in the militias that defended
Sarajevo during the siege.

70 | joão biehl and peter locke

 In 2003, Slobodan Loga, a psychiatrist then working at the University of
Sarajevo, told a reporter for Britain’s Daily Telegraph that every­one in Sarajevo
had posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd), and I heard him make similar pro-
nouncements at two separate conferences during my fieldwork in 2007. In the
Telegraph article (tellingly titled “The War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find
the Peace They Seek”), he rattled off the symptoms gripping the city: “violent
mood swings, excitability, flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbness, de-
pression, anxiety attacks and trying to find someone e­ lse to blame.”99 Suicide
has gone up by 40 ­percent, he said: “ptsd is part of our lives.”100 One of Loga’s
colleagues, a psychiatrist who has worked extensively with war veterans, simi-
larly suggested to me in an interview that “trauma ­here is so widespread that
it is banal.” And Alma Delić (a pseudonym), a psychiatrist turned homeopath
and a veteran of Médecins Sans Frontières’ psychosocial programs, told me
that “you ­can’t talk about m ­ ental health for p­ eople who suffered during the
war. They have no ­mental health. They are just ­human animals surviving day-­
to-­day with ­these horrible memories.”
However, Delić soon left the war ­behind, and designated the transition to
capitalism—­and the “passive” way Bosnians have responded to it—as the
true catastrophe. “Some of t­ hose who managed well during war just broke to
pieces at the end,” she said. “Lots of psychiatrists figured out that the more
challenging experience was the shift from socialism to some sort of capitalism.
That proved to be an even bigger source of stress than the war.”
As a ­matter of fact, she went on, ­people often said that they preferred
life during the siege to life ­under the new postwar economy: “Life then [in
the war] was more straightforward—­just stay alive, day to day.” Moreover,
Sarajevans w ­ ere connected by a shared sense of strug­gle and of persecu-
tion by a common ­enemy, and, in Delić’s words, “took better care of each
other.” She meant that they expressed sympathy and solidarity in common
suffering and shared supplies and survival strategies. Getting by in postwar
Sarajevo, and getting along with o­ thers, feels to many p­ eople like a dif­fer­ent,
lonelier, and more pointless kind of strug­gle. They always knew the war had to
end some day, even as it dragged on well past expectations. But an end to poi-
soned postwar politics and the infuriating inequalities of the new economy
is harder to perceive.
Seen from Delić’s perspective, Sarajevans are longing for lost collectivities
and solidarities—­not only ­those of prewar Yugo­slavia, but also ­those of war­
time. The social ties that they desire are not addressed in con­temporary Bosnian
politics. ­People recall connections anchored less by ethnicity than by a shared,

the anthropology of becoming | 71

against the odds “­will to live”101 and the need to preserve a familiar humanity
amid dire circumstances.102

the subjectivity of a milieu

As reminders of a difficult past jostle with ­people’s efforts to make the best of
­things, Sarajevo can produce contradictory impressions. During my fieldwork,
the city landscape featured largely gray, shrapnel-­scarred, and bullet-­holed
Austro-­Hungarian and communist-­era façades ­under perpetual restoration—­
leading a New York Times travel writer to remark wryly that “the predominant
color of Sarajevo is spackle”103—­but was increasingly punctuated by gleam-
ing new modern structures, such as the recently rebuilt Council of Ministers
building or the striking, if jarringly out-of-place, Avaz tower, now the highest
building in the Balkans. Small reminders of grief stood out to me in the urban
scenery: underfoot ­were the Sarajevo roses, mortar impact craters filled in
with red paint; and on trees, walls, and bus stop shelters ­were short obituaries
(smrtovnice), posted both at the time of the person’s passing and at repeated
intervals in subsequent years, printed on standard A4 paper, with pictures of
the deceased and short poems or expressions of loss.104
The everyday gestures of hospitality I observed ­were warm and enthusiastic,
and social relations always struck me as no more or less affable or strained
than anywhere e­ lse. Yet Sarajevans often complained to me about the incon-
siderateness of ­others, recalling better manners and more gentle dispositions
before the war, and they worried about what they saw as p­ eople’s increasingly
limited patience with daily irritations and rudeness. Tempers everywhere
seemed short. In February 2008, three teen­agers stabbed a fourth to death on
a tram for (apparently) looking at them the wrong way, prompting thousands
of citizens to take to the streets in a rare display of coordinated outrage against
city officials.
The anger expressed by psychosocial ser­vice providers like Maja and Delić
drove them to action, and they w ­ ere upset with p­ eople whose frustration led
to apparent immobility or self-­indulgence. Delić railed about the “inertia” of
her fellow Sarajevans—­many of the unemployed spent much of their time in
cafes venting their anger about the state of ­things in their world. Delić mocked
their supposed dependence: “The world should help us, give us this, no one is
taking care of us. . . . ​I say no, cut the crap, go and clean the street and do what­
ever, you ­can’t just sit back and wait. . . . ​This ­whole inertia . . . ​it was always
­there, it’s just that now it has emerged as the mode of living.”

72 | joão biehl and peter locke

 Delić suggested that “­people who lived in [ Josip Broz] Tito’s time” w ­ ere the
most guilty of this kind of passive inertia. In light of the hardships and horrors
of the intervening years, many ­people in Sarajevo—­especially ­those in ­middle
or advanced age—­express longings for prewar life u­ nder communism. This
is a phenomenon known (affectionately or dismissively, depending on who
is speaking) as “Yugo-­nostalgia.”105 The complaints of older generations thus
emerge in part from the values and dreams of Tito-­era Yugo­slavia, when many
saw neighborliness, tolerance, the Yugo­slav ideal of brotherhood and unity, and
a strong welfare state as key ideals guiding individual and collective striving.
­After diagnosing all of Sarajevo with ptsd, Loga pinned the blame not on war
trauma but on “economic and social prob­lems.”106 His further comments are
revealing. “We had a good life before the war,” he said. “Why ­can’t we go back
to that? Our communism ­wasn’t like Rus­sia or Hungary. I ­don’t mind democ-
racy but this privatization is just a mafia. I d­ on’t know why the international
community wants us to be in this mess.”107
Tito’s stated ideals ­were only imperfectly achieved.108 Zlatko Hurtić, the for-
mer director of BiH’s poverty reduction strategy and a one-­time World Bank
employee, complained a few years ago that Bosnians “expect to live like they
used to before the war—­going abroad, buying Italian clothes. But it ­wasn’t real;
the economy was funded by Tito’s foreign borrowing, and they ­won’t believe
that.”109 But ­whether or not the prewar economy rested on a “real” base—­
Yugoslavia had foreign debts of nearly $20 billion by the early 1980s, and other
systemic prob­lems suggest that its economy was wobbly at best110—­the values,
ethics, and expectations of the time w ­ ere not illusions. The fact that a­ fter the
war many Sarajevans ­were still holding onto them in private and invoking them
as they strug­gled to make sense of their milieu indicates the potential for alter-
native po­liti­cal hopes and subjectivities that run ­counter to the visions of both
local and international elites.
Observers like Hurtić and Delić, as well as Western policy makers heavi­ly
enculturated into ideologies of individual initiative and cap­i­tal­ist risk taking,
have often condemned t­ hese Yugo­slav yearnings as another kind of pathology of
memory parallel to or part of the complex of mass ptsd. In this view, Bosnians—­
rendered passive, entitled, and dependent by de­cades of socialism and humani-
tarian handouts, and traumatized by the violent disintegration of Yugoslav-­era
dreams—­are unable to accept their losses and move on. It is a clinical-­sounding
diagnosis (for example, a United Nations Development Program report diag-
nosed Bosnia-­Herzegovina as having “a huge de­pen­dency syndrome”),111 blam-
ing social prob­lems on the accumulated individual psychological injuries of

the anthropology of becoming | 73

the past fifty years of Balkan history. Such perspectives empty Sarajevo’s af-
fects and intensities—­what Deleuze112 might call its subjectivity as a milieu,
the set of trajectories, landscapes, and socialities that comprise its own painful
becoming as a community—of content, meaning, and context. They obscure
the locatedness of p­ eople’s complaints and frustrations by calling them indica-
tors of a universal psychiatric disorder and, in the pro­cess, fail to perceive the
haunted generativity of living amid and through destruction.

the interpretation of symptoms

Deleuze’s distinction113 between language in a clinical state and language as lit­

er­a­ture suggests intriguing possibilities for listening. My interlocutors w ­ ere navi-
gating both the continuing force and legacy of a shattered world and the partial
unfolding of new powers and knowledges. I came to see the care and l­abor of
Wings of Hope staff members and their beneficiaries as a way of opening up
spaces between the Yugo­slav past and neoliberal imperatives, where creative
survival, desire, and grief could intersect to illuminate alternative ­futures. Inertia
and waiting, as well as anger and nostalgia, may carry meanings other than col-
lective illness.114 What possibilities does seeing the language of refusal, waiting,
or nostalgia as a “collective depression” foreclose, for analyst and interlocutor
alike? If I posit that in this refusal ­there is an agency, in this “Yugo-­nostalgia” the
seeds of an alternative ­future, in this waiting a set of becomings, ­will my listening
attune me to something else—­a nascent “life in t­ hings,” as Deleuze would put it,
growing in the “necessary detours” of syntax?115
Deleuze articulates a key divergence with psychoanalysis in how to approach
and interpret symptoms. He quotes Guattari, who argued that “lapses, para-
praxes and symptoms are like birds that strike their beaks against the win­dow. It
is not a question of interpreting them. . . . ​It is a question instead of identifying
their trajectory to see if they can serve as indicators of new universes of refer-
ence capable of acquiring a consistency sufficient for turning a situation upside
down.”116 In other words, a symptom is not necessarily or only an indicator of
pathology structured by a memorializing unconscious. It is also, as in Guattari’s
haunting image, a bird beating its beak against the win­dow; it is a potentiality for
becoming, breaking f­ree of forms, and sublimating the vio­lence of both every-
day and world-­historical forces. In this vision, symptoms express a desire or life
force trapped at an impasse, waiting for a chance to break through.
Sarajevans are not just waiting for “someone to come fix their lives,” as Delić
and many ­others put it. They have much more specific expectations, as a range

74 | joão biehl and peter locke

of ethnographic work in Bosnia-­Herzegovina continues to show.117 They wait
for politics to improve, to move beyond nationalist fear mongering and dead-
lock and again provide the kind of social protections and safety nets they recall
from the communist era. They wait for p­ eople to become kinder, warmer, more
neighborly—­the way they ­were before the war shattered trust.118 They wait for
new industries to provide jobs and an economic base. They wait in Sarajevo’s
abundant cafes, endlessly drinking coffee with friends and complaining about
the government, about the fecklessness of Bosnia’s foreign supervisors, and
about unemployment. They wait for war criminals to be brought to justice.
Their waiting is something other than a passive depression: it is a holding
pattern, an abiding of barely tolerable circumstances, a new kind of day-­to-­day
survival that echoes the remarkable ways Sarajevans survived the siege, when
they waited more than three brutal years for foreign intervention.119 It connects
them with each other in an unnamed, unrecognized collectivity, a “tissue of
shifting relations” woven by the shared experience of a meantime (between de-
struction and renewal) of grieving, anger, and anticipation.120 And it is a kind of
politics, a refusal to take on a social form—­capitalism as a privatization mafia;
government as corrupt and heartless bureaucracy; and neighborliness as com-
petition, mutual suspicion, and carelessness—­that bears ­little resemblance to
the prewar values they continue to hold in reserve for better days.
­People are not just the sum of the forces—­however overwhelming—­that
construct and constrain them. To trace the trajectories, the ever-­deferred de-
sires and expectations, and the symptoms of Sarajevans is to map a shared
desperation for flight: anger and inertia have evolved from so many failed es-
cape attempts and disappointed dreams. Where obstacles block passages of
life, some trajectories dead-­end: the war veteran, unable to find steady em-
ployment ­after many years, fi­nally only travels a daily path between home
and a neighborhood bar; and the university student, unable to afford the cost
of passing grades, takes the same exams over and over into her late twenties,
caught in a limbo of extended adolescence. But just as often, ­people move
around impasses or push through them, carving out small life chances against
the odds.

a sarajevo becoming

Claude Lévi-­Strauss suggested that bricolage, the kind of thinking character-

istic of the “untamed mind,” works via a swerve away from defined and con-
ventional paths: “a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a ­horse swerving from

the anthropology of becoming | 75

its direct course.”121 Maja, the executive director of Wings of Hope, has made a
life out of such swerves. She survived the sieges of both Mostar and Sarajevo,
working where and when she could to support humanitarian efforts. Coming
from an ethnically mixed background, as many Bosnians do,122 and compelled
to choose a Croat identity as the war broke out, she now picks none of the
official choices available—­Croat, Bosniac (Muslim), or Serb—­and is one of a
minority in BiH to choose a civic Bosnian identity. Director of a psychosocial
organ­ization, she is neither psychologist nor psychiatrist; during my fieldwork
she was studying philosophy and sociology, and before the war pursued de-
grees in mechanical engineering and economics.
Maja relied on diagnoses including collective depression and ptsd to in-
terpret the needs of her beneficiaries and life in postwar Sarajevo in general,
and she considered the young ­people at Wings to have at least partly absorbed
the trauma of their parents. Yet in her work she fought against feelings of futility,
militantly communicating a sense of power and possibility to her clients. She
considered herself as effective as psychologists in helping ­children ­because, as
she would tell them, she is a “professional friend” and not a therapist. She tu-
tored them in math and took a consistent, active interest in the details of their
day-­to-­day lives. For a week each January, she and her colleagues still lead about
twenty ­children to a snowboarding camp on Mount Igman (a former Olympic
ski slope just above Sarajevo) where, in learning to master an extremely difficult
sport, they develop a greater sense of possibility and confidence.
Maja was just as angry, disappointed, and discouraged as any other
­Sarajevan—if not more so. One of the first ­things she said to me was, “I am
always angry.” Her strug­gle to overcome feelings of overwhelming frustration
was obvious, and she tried to channel her anger into providing the small, prac-
tical forms of social assistance offered by Wings. She may have tended to speak
of Bosnia in clinical terms, but her trajectory tells a more complicated story,
evoking the possibilities of what Deleuze calls “missing” p­ eople123 and the un-
expected ­futures that remain latent and minor, sidelined by dominant po­liti­cal
patterns and compulsive repetition. Maja’s frustration and short temper are
more than symptoms of trauma: they are the flip side of a set of positive aspi-
rations and values—­ever-­thwarted but never-­extinguished desires for a dif­fer­
ent world, the par­ameters of “a ­people to come still ensconced in its betrayals
and repudiations.”124
Maja’s agency radiates across social and institutional domains and through
kinship ties. She has a young cousin named Milan, born in September 1992—­

76 | joão biehl and peter locke

just ­after the war began—in the town of Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia, now
part of the Republika Srpska. I met him for the first time at Wings of Hope’s
snowboarding camp in early January 2007. Maja brought Milan down from
Prijedor ­every year and paid his way at the camp.
Milan has had a very difficult life, though you would not know it from his
charismatic and positive demeanor. His m ­ other is a Catholic, and his f­ather is
a Serb who fought for the Republika Srpska during the war. Milan’s maternal
grand­mother helped take care of him for a while, but she died when he was eight;
­after that, he stayed with his parents. His ­mother is intellectually disabled and
makes very ­little money as a seamstress for a com­pany in nearby Banja Luka.
His f­ ather strug­gles with alcoholism. At the time of my fieldwork, Maja’s m­ other
was sending Milan money regularly: the cash went directly to him instead of to
his parents, whom Maja did not trust to manage it. Milan’s misshapen nose is
the result of having been hit by a car while crossing the street. He is uninsured,
and no one in his f­ amily could afford the operation to repair the broken bones,
so Maja was saving up to pay for it, and for the braces Milan needed to straighten
his jumbled mouthful of teeth. The only way that Milan could get in­de­pen­dent
health insurance at his age was by dropping out of school and registering at the
unemployment bureau, and Maja would not allow this.
Milan took care of himself and his parents. He cooked and cleaned the
­family apartment in Prijedor. ­After school each day, he went from apartment
to apartment in his neighborhood, offering to do small errands or chores; he
earned more in a day than his ­father did through his meager veteran’s pension.
Milan had amazing survival skills, but at least initially he was not a ­great stu-
dent. He was naturally curious about how t­ hings work, but Maja was the only
person in his life who seemed to take the time to engage him and encourage
his interests, mostly over the phone.
Milan did not seem to harbor any resentment about his circumstances. At
the snowboarding camp, he was unfailingly sunny and kept an eye out for his
friends. He told me that “every­thing ­will be fine,” in spite of so much evidence
to the contrary. Many of the young p­ eople I met in Sarajevo told stories about
having taken on adult responsibilities too early, having had to become the
grown-­ups in families mired in hardship, depression, and drunkenness. It was
Milan’s optimism that seemed rare. I wondered w ­ hether it would last, and how
much it depended on his relationship with Maja. Most of my young Sarajevan
friends had become cynical about their prospects in BiH and just wanted to
leave the country.

the anthropology of becoming | 77

memory and mobilization

­ ere was no money or insurance to repair Milan’s nose; in a way, he embod-

Th
ied the constraints of postwar ­house­hold economies. Yet as a figure in Maja’s
economy and redirection of therapeutic governance, he remained oriented
­toward ­future possibilities. Milan had no direct experience of any world other
than the postwar society into which he was born, and he made the best he
could of it. Parents and grandparents whom I interviewed at Wings, on the
other hand, regularly resorted to the past to evaluate their pres­ent.
“Yugo-­nostalgia,” as I came to understand it over time, is something other
than a pathological burden, a symptom of depression or mass ptsd. ­Here,
memory is not only about obsessive commemoration of, or unfinished
mourning for, a lost era. Older generations perform acts of remembering that
are as much about the pres­ent and the ­future as the past. ­These acts of mem-
ory play a role in mobilizations for alternative trajectories. The invocation of
Yugoslav-­era dreams and values by my in­for­mants in Sarajevo—­whether or
not the past to which they refer actually existed in the shape in which they cur-
rently cast it—­participates in the construction of postwar solidarities, minor
becomings125 on the margins of Bosnian society.
Wings of Hope, though inevitably limited in capacity and, like its beneficia-
ries, often forced to survive month to month by patching together short-­term
sources of funding, tries to weave social relationships on dif­fer­ent terms than
­those that seem to prevail in Bosnian politics. The organ­ization’s work implic-
itly draws on Yugoslav-­era po­liti­cal ideals to renegotiate the terms of solidarity
and the common good: the community its staff members strive for is not one
of individual entrepreneurship and the pulling up of bootstraps, of strict eth-
nic segregation, or of clientelism and corruption, but of institutionalized, f­ ree
social support that disregards ethnic divisions and social status and attempts,
in some small way, to compensate for the state’s abandonment of the vulner-
able. Wings is one of the few places Sarajevans can go for help where a bribe
or personal connection is not required, and where assistance comes without
months of trying to overcome bewildering bureaucratic obstacles. For staff
members and their beneficiaries, healing the wounds of war is sociopo­liti­
cal rather than simply individual and is accomplished less through personal
therapeutics than through a small-­scale, tentative restoration of ties of trust
and support.
The force of the past is evident not only in backward-­looking nostalgia but
also in critical comparisons allowing a reimagining of the pos­si­ble and the pos-

78 | joão biehl and peter locke

ing of an alternative ethics of postwar social life. The m
­ others first connected
with each other around the meeting t­ able at Wings by exchanging b­ itter griev-
ances about the lack of social ser­vices or any apparent sense of compassion
and responsibility from the state, but then their conversation shifted. They
began to build a shared understanding—­still frustrated and b­ itter, but tinged
with longing—of how ­things should be, firmly rooted in what they recalled of
the Yugoslav-­era social contract and the feeling of communal life and support
that it produced. Now and again at Wings, in other words, connections based
on an angry sense of victimization turned into (or at least gestured ­toward)
solidarity based on shared values, aspirations, and morally weighted memo-
ries of prewar national life and politics.
We can find in Sarajevan lives and words a frozen form and call it collective
depression; see their waiting and lack of initiative as a blocked passage of life;
or see them as stuck, mired in nostalgia and dysfunctional politics, as many ob-
servers do. But even in seemingly backward-­looking melancholy and longings
for times past, ­there is a component of flight that escapes this form by stub-
bornly alluding to and sometimes living, in seedling stage, hope for something
dif­fer­ent. They yearn for a reality beyond nationalism and competing victim-
hood claims, beyond corrupt and compassionless capitalism, and beyond
trauma—­a ­sociality that might reassemble, together with lessons learned in
the crucible of war, fragments of prewar Sarajevan and Yugo­slav values.
Such a sociality might correspond to a dif­fer­ent—­and for Sarajevans, more
legitimate—­configuration of governance and economic policies, a dif­fer­ent
relationship to foreign powers and humanitarian organ­izations, and a broader
understanding of the effects of trauma and loss and concomitant pro­cesses of
healing. Careful and open listening, via sustained ethnography, can allow us to
hear the voice of this p­ eople to come, this possibility of another lifeworld.126
It can reveal Bosnia-­Herzegovina as an assemblage of places, ­peoples, desires,
hopes, and grievances, situated at a crossroads of alternative pathways rather
than trapped in a dead end of collective psychiatric disorder or doomed to the
anomie and in­equality of unchecked capitalism.
Anthropology attuned to becomings—to ­people’s aspirations, however
frustrated or futile, and to what they make of the world and themselves in pur-
suing ­those aspirations—is critical for illuminating ­these crossroads and the
agonistic, everyday strug­gles waged to keep alternative routes open. At stake,
broadly speaking, is how anthropology can contribute to opening up opportu-
nities for progressive transformation in forms of care, politics, and economy, and
­whether it takes the additional step beyond explaining dark realities to the work

the anthropology of becoming | 79

of imagining, in collaboration with its interlocutors, concrete ways in which
­things could be other­wise.

a ­people to come

In their study of Franz Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “the expres-
sions of the solitary researcher tend ­toward the assemblage of a collective
enunciation . . . ​even if this collectivity is no longer or not yet given. Th­ ere is
not a subject; ­there are only collective assemblages of enunciation, and lit­er­
a­ture expresses ­these acts insofar . . . ​as they exist only as diabolical powers to
come or revolutionary forces to be constructed.”127 This vision for lit­er­a­ture can
also inspire ethnography: when we listen as readers and cocreators, rather than
clinicians, our own sensibility and openness become instrumental in spurring
social recognition of the ways ordinary ­people think through their conditions.
In the ethnographic cases discussed in this essay, p­ eople strug­gle to survive
and belong through and against the intersecting psychiatric, humanitarian,
and neoliberal rationalities that diagnose and depoliticize their proj­ects and
desires as forms of nonsense or madness, e­ ither individual or collective. An-
thropologists can render publicly intelligible the value of what p­ eople, amid
new rational-­technical and political-­economic machineries, are left to resolve
alone. ­People’s practices of inquiry and searches for symbolic authority chal-
lenge the analytic approaches we bring to the field, forcing us to articulate
more immediately relevant and experience-­near conceptual work. Theory is
embattled and unfinished on both sides of the conversation and the text.
Ultimately, it is the subjects of fieldwork who, through and beyond their re-
lationships with us, are the true creative wellsprings of anthropological think-
ing. The point is not to move our interlocutors in the field up to our (or the
Eu­ro­pean white male phi­los­o­pher’s) level in the hierarchy of epistemological
authority, but to argue for an “equality of intelligences,” and to find novel pub-
lic and scholarly ways to harness the creative conceptual and relational work
activated amid the unfathomably complex and layered entanglements of the
field.128
Large-­scale pro­cesses are not abstract machines that overdetermine the
­whole social field. Personal actions and social mobilization have a key role in
the stories we tell ­here. Neither can the microarrangements of individual and
collective existence be described solely in terms of power or rational choice.
Both Catarina’s writings and p­ eople’s strug­gles to get by in postwar Sarajevo
evince an everyday life force seeking to break through forms and foreclosures

80 | joão biehl and peter locke

and to define a kind of subjectivity that is as much about swerves and escapes
as about determinants. Freud’s oedipal theorizing, con­temporary psychiatric
common sense, and even Foucault-­inspired anthropological analytics all tend
to disregard this plasticity. Such a disavowal, we believe, has significant real-­
world consequences for ideas and forms of care and for social intervention (“a
tragedy generated in life,” as Catarina put it).
By reading our cases in dialogue with some of Deleuze’s ideas, we attempt
to strongly reaffirm the value of ethnographic microanalysis, bringing into
view the immanent fields that ­people, in all their ambiguity, invent and live by.
Such fields of action and significance are porous and mediated by power and
knowledge, but they are also animated by desires and claims to basic rights.
In making public a nuanced understanding of t­ hese fields—­which are always
at risk of disappearing—­anthropologists can help make larger structural and
institutional pro­cesses vis­i­ble and their true influence known.
In our research, we have seen novel subjectivities and so­cio­log­i­cal phenom-
ena emerge: unanticipated relationships to medical technology and discourse
outside clinical settings, forms of transcendence woven into everyday ­labor
and community, and the making of agency via psychopharmaceuticals and
of po­liti­cal sensibilities via a reconfigured language of psychiatric diagnostics.
Lines between public and private, and between institutions and other more
fluid and open-­ended social milieus, routinely blur and transform. A ­ ctual po­
liti­cal subjects are ambivalent about public institutions and infrastructures.
Traversing worlds of danger and inequality, constrained without being totally
overdetermined, they create small and fleeting spaces through and beyond
apparatuses of governance and control in which to perform a kind of life bri-
colage with the limited choices and materials at hand. Such becomings, we
believe, are a fundamental entry point to the work of capturing the fabric of
the times and ­people’s everyday inventiveness and resolve. Placing becomings
at the center of ethnographic thought can help circumvent agonizing over
academic fads and allow us to linger, more creatively, with the agonistic and
uncertain dimensions of our field engagements.
From an ethnographic perspective, both social theory and politics can appear
limited and often impoverished, restricted in imagination, and out of touch with
intricate and shifting realities that carry the potential to become vital and/or
deadly. P ­ eople have an understanding of their worlds, the social prob­lems they
must circumvent or transcend, and the kind of politics that would actually serve
their aspirations that is not taken into account in policy discussions and decisions.
This is not a subjugated social knowledge, constituted as a reaction to power,

the anthropology of becoming | 81

but something personal that bears traces of singularity not easily framed or
contained. Even when institutionally ignored, it persists, and it merits more
attention in the public sphere. By more actively cultivating this kind of rec-
ognition, ethnography has the potential to trou­ble the in­equality that has,
in Didier Fassin’s words, “insinuated itself into the humanitarian politics of
life . . . ​­there are ­those who can tell stories and ­those whose stories can only be
told by ­others.”129 In the meantime, however, interventions of governance—in
postwar and resource-­poor settings alike—­remain epistemologically myopic
and are not systematically structured to work with p­ eople, notice how they
belong in varying degrees to multiple systems, and incorporate the insights of
their real-­world knowledge into policy and care.
The pro­cess of communicating and disseminating evidence of becomings
to other disciplines, and to public debates more generally, can reveal the limits
of dominant or currently operational concepts of justice, social welfare, ethics,
and crisis intervention (among ­others). Anthropology retains and can continue
to build on its capacity to challenge orthodoxies. Take ­human rights, for ex-
ample: typically conceptualized as primarily po­liti­cal, involving mainly demo­
cratic rights to ­free speech and voting, the ­human rights our interlocutors the
world over consistently seek—to social, economic, and health security—­are
largely neglected.130 Or consider what evidence of becomings might do to or-
thodoxies of care, social work, and postcrisis remediation: interventions are
often individualized, biomedical, and psychotherapeutic or phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal,
neglecting the need to rebuild relations of trust and support or even to ensure
basic requirements for health and day-­to-­day survival, not to mention social
mobility. Our field cases compel a return to the enduring question of what the
complicated and empirical grit of ethnographic evidence can and should do to
the con­temporary nature of politics and policy. How can we find ways to bring
our material to technocrats, policy makers, and caregivers in a way that truly
challenges their evidence-­making practices and assumptions?
We work to understand ­people in a dif­fer­ent kind of temporality—­“the
time is out of joint”131—as they endure and try to escape constraints and ar-
ticulate new systems of perception and action. Attentive to what could have
been and dwelling in the meantime of individual lives and social worlds, we
strive to produce a knowledge that is not obsolete in the moment of its for-
mulation. In this regard, the time of anthropological knowing runs c­ ounter
to that of po­liti­cal and economic rationalities and to the reason of policy and
governance, which makes ­people the objects of technical fixes with specific,
temporally limited stages of pro­gress and measurement.132 Our knowledge, in

82 | joão biehl and peter locke

contrast, has a tentativeness and an open-­endedness that can make it si­mul­ta­
neously historically attuned and untimely,133 defying historical circumstances
and constraints in the ser­vice of the unexpected and in defense of “the right
to a nonprojected ­future as one of the truly inalienable rights of ­every person
and nation.”134
This tentativeness and receptivity to dif­fer­ent temporalities is not always
easily borne: with an eye to the possibilities and noninevitability of p­ eople’s
lives, social scientists must also recognize the thresholds where liberating
flights and creative actions can become deadly rather than vital forms of ex-
perimentation, opening up not to new webs of care and empathy but to sys-
tematic disconnection. In our work, we have become mindful of the dangers
of romantically projecting agency and hope onto desperate situations. Biehl
recalls how startled he was when on one occasion Catarina became enraged
and threw her dictionary to the ground. She had just heard that Biehl had been
unable to convince her f­amily to schedule a visit. Writing, in the end, could
not take her back home—­which is what she wanted most.
Becoming is not always heroic. Solidarities formed in reaction to the alien-
ations of capitalism can become exclusionary, founded less on expanded empa-
thy than on shared rage and competitive claims to victimhood; dreams of the past
can turn reactionary; new institutions of care can be co-­opted and twisted into
instruments of power, vio­lence, or abandonment; and mobilization for rights
can culminate in atomized and highly privatized po­liti­cal subjectivities. In all
this, market ideologies and practices may work as a hidden engine, reconfigur-
ing and relocating social and administrative functions, as if ­behind the scenes:
social work shifts from government to civil society, medi­cation from clinic to
­family, and diagnosis from medical practice to the public sphere. How can we
empirically pinpoint and hold accountable the workings of the market? How
do we disentangle our agencies and modes of thought from those workings?
Fi­nally, our anthropological engagements challenge us to maintain a sense
of where assemblages—­complicated new configurations of global, po­liti­cal,
technical, biological, and other segments—­touch ground, how they take on
institutional grip and individual, ­human valence. It is not enough to simply ob-
serve that assemblages exist; we must pay attention to the ways that they are
constantly constructed, undone, and redone by the desires and becomings of
­actual p­ eople who are caught up in the messiness, desperation, and aspirations
of life in idiosyncratic milieus. Nor is ours necessarily a choice between global
assemblages135 and local “splinters” of a “world in pieces.”136 At the horizon of
local dramas; in the course of each event; and in the ups, downs, and arounds

the anthropology of becoming | 83

of each individual life, we can see the reflection of larger systems in the making
(or unmaking).
Engaging ­people’s plasticity and becomings may be key to anticipating,
and thereby making available for assessment and transformation, the modes
of existence and ­futures of emerging communities. Both ethnography and
the becomings it explores can have the power of art—to invoke neglected ­human
potentials and expand the limits of understanding, imagination, and empathy—­
and we believe that it is not just literary giants like Franz Kafka, James Joyce,
and Marcel Proust who can “invent a new language within language.”137 “­There
is no work of art,” as Deleuze wrote, “that does not call on a p­ eople who does
not yet exist.”138 This proj­ect includes the active participation of readers. Thus
also at stake is our capacity to generate a we, an engaged audience and po­liti­cal
community that has not previously existed: our craft’s potential to become a
mobilizing force in this world.
Moving away from the overdetermined and ­toward the unfinished, ­human
becomings intrude into real­ity, enlarging our sense of what is socially pos­
si­ble and desirable. Any endeavor to engage with this mobile dimension of
­human experience is, by its very nature, fraught, and ­will undoubtedly require
increasing professional freedom and bold experiments in anthropological ex-
pression. But even if the outcomes are limited and incomplete, it would be a
moral and intellectual failure not to try to represent ­people’s in-­betweenness
and multiplicity and sustain their sense of anticipation, even in the darkest of
circumstances. Th­ ese tensions should not paralyze our storytelling but should
find expression so that the reader can grow closer to ­people.

notes
1 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, viii.
2 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, viii.
3 See Boundas, Gilles Deleuze; Connolly, A World of Becoming; Massumi, Parables for the
Virtual.
4 See Bessire, Behold the Black Caiman; Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, Subjectivity; Garcia,
The Pastoral Clinic; Han, Life in Debt; Navaro-­Yashin, The Make-­Believe Space; Stoler,
Along the Archival Grain and Race and the Education of Desire.
5 Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, 170. See also Deleuze, Pure Immanence.
6 See Allison, Precarious Japan; Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Livingston, Improvising Medi-
cine; Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment; Ralph, Renegade Dreams; Stewart, Ordinary
Affects.

84 | joão biehl and peter locke

 7 See Abramowitz, Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War; Biehl and
Moran-­Thomas, “Symptom”; Davis, Bad Souls; DelVecchio Good et  al., Postcolonial
Disorders; Jenkins, Extraordinary Conditions; Jenkins and Barrett, Schizo­phre­nia, Cul-
ture, and Subjectivity.
8 See Fassin, When Bodies Remember; Ferguson, Global Shadows; Foucault, Security, Ter-
ritory, Population; Lovell, “Addiction Markets”; Ong and Collier, Global Assemblages;
Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower ­Today.”
9 See Bourgois, In Search of Re­spect; Bourgois and Schonberg, Righ­teous Dopefiend; Farmer,
Infections and Inequalities and Pathologies of Power; Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies;
Scheper-­Hughes, Death without Weeping.
10 See Bateson, Steps to an Ecol­ogy of Mind; Benedict, Patterns of Culture; Boaz, Race,
Language and Culture; Clastres, Society Against the State; Geertz, The Interpretation of
Cultures; Trouillot, Global Transformations.
11 Bateson, Naven, 257.
12 Hirschman, Crossing Bound­aries, 88.
13 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
14 Hirschman, Crossing Bound­aries, 67.
15 Biehl, Vita.
16 See Martin, Bipolar Expeditions.
17 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 3.
18 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4.
19 Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, “Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity,” 3.
20 See Biehl and Moran-­Thomas, “Symptom”; Sanal, New Organs within Us.
21 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 64.
22 See Nettelfield and Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide; Wagner, To Know
Where He Lies.
23 See Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings, The New Bosnian Mosaic.
24 Deleuze, “Having an Idea in Cinema,” 4.
25 Borneman and Hammoudi, “The Fieldwork Encounter, Experience, and the Making of
Truth: An Introduction,” 17.
26 See Das et al., The Ground Between; M. Jackson, “Where Thought Belongs.”
27 Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 329.
28 Biehl and Petryna, When ­People Come First.
29 See Ortner, “Dark Anthropology and Its ­Others.”
30 Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture.
31 Marcus, “The End(s) of Ethnography,” 3.
32 See Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and ­Women; Rabinow, Making pcr.
33 See M. Fischer, Anthropological ­Futures and Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropo-
logical Voice; K. Fortun, Advocacy ­after Bhopal; M. Fortun, Promising Genomics; Martin,
Bipolar Expeditions; Rapp, Testing ­Women, Testing the Fetus.
34 See Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch; Lakoff, Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Reason; Latour and Woolgar,
Laboratory Life.

the anthropology of becoming | 85

 35 Marcus, “The End(s) of Ethnography,” 2–3.
36 Marcus, “The End(s) of Ethnography,” 1.
37 Marcus, “The End(s) of Ethnography,” 3.
38 Marcus, “The End(s) of Ethnography,” 3.
39 Rabinow, Marking Time, xxiii.
40 Canguilhem, “The Decline of the Idea of Pro­gress,” 318.
41 See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture; Kirskey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of
Multispecies Ethnography”; Kohn, How Forests Think; Mol, The Body Multiple; Peder-
son, Not Quite Shamans; Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject”; Viveiros de Castro,
Métaphysiques cannibales.
42 See Bessire and Bond, “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique”; M. Fischer,
“The Lightness of Existence and the Origami of ‘French’ Anthropology.”
43 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1–4.
44 Nietz­sche, The Use and Abuse of History, 10.
45 Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society.
46 Geertz, ­After the Fact, Available Light, and Local Knowledge.
47 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxxvi.
48 Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
49 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 122–34.
50 Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
51 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
52 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 126.
53 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 131.
54 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 127.
55 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 126.
56 Ong and Collier, Global Assemblages.
57 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 86.
58 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 86.
59 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 86. See also Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-­Analysis.
60 Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
61 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 61–67.
62 Freud, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 10: Two Case Histories
(­Little Hans and The Rat Man).
63 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 61.
64 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 61.
65 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 61.
66 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 65.
67 M. Fischer, “To Live with What Would Other­wise Be Unendurable,” 442.
68 M. Fischer, “To Live with What Would Other­wise Be Unendurable,” 436.
69 M. Fischer, “To Live with What Would Other­wise Be Unendurable,” 426.
70 Jardim et al., “Machado-­Joseph Disease in South Brazil.”
71 See Biehl, ­Will to Live; Cardoso, “Notas Sobre a Reforma do Estado.”
72 Biehl, Vita.

86 | joão biehl and peter locke

 73 Andreoli et  al., “Is Psychiatric Reform a Strategy for Reducing the M ­ ental Health
Bud­get?”
74 Petryna, Lakoff, and Kleinman, Global Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.
75 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
76 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1. See also Deleuze, Pure Immanence; Didion, The
Year of Magical Thinking.
77 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 3.
78 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 3.
79 Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings, The New Bosnian Mosaic; Jansen, “On Not Moving
Well Enough”; M. Markowitz, Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope; Hayden, “Moral ­Vision
and Impaired Insight.”
80 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4. See also Rasza, Bastards of Utopia.
81 World Health Organ­ization, ­Mental Health Atlas 2011.
82 See Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings, The New Bosnian Mosaic.
83 Pandolfi, “Contract of Mutual (In)difference,” 369. See also Fassin and Pandolfi, Con­
temporary States of Emergency; Good et al., A Reader in Medical Anthropology.
84 See Chandler, Bosnia; Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic
of the Yugo­slav Conflicts.
85 Donais, The Po­liti­cal Economy of Peacebuilding in Post-­Dayton Bosnia.
86 Pupavac, “International Therapeutic Peace and Justice in Bosnia,” 377.
87 Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
88 Pupavac, “International Therapeutic Peace and Justice in Bosnia.”
89 See Pupavac, “Securing the Community?,” 163; Summerfield, “A Critique of Seven As-
sumptions ­behind Psychological Trauma Programmes in War-­Affected Areas,” 1452.
90 See Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma. A comprehensive survey of the rich and
growing lit­er­a­ture on the politics of psychological trauma in medicine, humanitarianism,
and global health is beyond the scope of this essay. See, for example, Abramowitz, Searching
for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War; James, Demo­cratic Insecurities; Kienzler, “The
Social Life of Psychiatric Practice”; and Kirmayer et al., “Trauma and Disasters in So-
cial and Cultural Context.”
91 Pupavac, “International Therapeutic Peace and Justice in Bosnia,” 392.
92 Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
93 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4.
94 Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime.
95 See Kleinman, The Illness Narratives; Kleinman and Good, Culture and Depression;
Lock, Encounters with Aging; Scheper-­Hughes, Death without Weeping; Young, The
Harmony of Illusions.
96 Margaret Lock, in reviewing the lit­er­a­ture on medicalization across disciplines, con-
cludes with a call for an understanding of the pro­cess as less deterministic and more
open-­ended and context dependent: “Medicalization, understood as enforced surveil-
lance, is misleading. So too is an argument that emphasizes the social construction of
disease at the expense of recognizing the very real, debilitating condition of individuals
who seek out medical help. Rather, an investigation of the forms taken by po­liti­cal

the anthropology of becoming | 87

 economies, technological complexes, and the values embedded in biomedical dis-
course and practice and in popu­lar knowledge about the body, health, and illness that
situate vari­ous states and conditions as residing within the purview of medicine better
indicates the complexity at work” (“Medicalization and the Naturalization of Social
Control,” 123). See also Biehl and Petryna, When ­People Come First; Lock, “Medical-
ization and the Naturalization of Social Control”; Nguyen, The Republic of Therapy;
Whyte, Second Chances.
97 Hacking, “Making Up ­People,” 162.
98 On the importance of notions of “normality” in the cultures of Bosnia-­Herzegovina
and in relation to the war and its aftermaths, see Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime;
Maček, Sarajevo ­under Siege.
99 Quoted in E ­ ager, “The War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find the Peace They Seek.”
This passage was also quoted by Pupavac (“International Therapeutic Peace and Justice
in Bosnia,” 392).
100 Quoted in ­Eager, “The War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find the Peace They Seek.”
101 Biehl, ­Will to Live.
102 See Maček, Sarajevo ­under Siege; Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime; Sorabji, “Managing
Memories in Post-­War Sarajevo.”
103 Solomon, “Emerging from the Shadow of War, Sarajevo Slowly Reclaims Its Lost
Innocence.”
104 See Karaboeva, “Death and Memory in the Context of the Con­temporary Bulgarian
Street Posted Obituary”; Savić, “Diskursne osobine citulja.”
105 See Buric, “Dwelling on the Ruins of Socialist Yugo­slavia”; Jansen, Yearnings in the
Meantime; Lindstrom, “Yugonostalgia”; Volcic, “Yugo-­Nostalgia.”
106 Quoted in ­Eager, “The War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find the Peace They Seek.”
107 Quoted in ­Eager, “The War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find the Peace They Seek.”
108 See Ramet, Balkan Babel.
109 Quoted in ­Eager, “The War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find the Peace They Seek.”
110 Donais, The Po­liti­cal Economy of Peacebuilding in Post-­Dayton Bosnia, 6.
111 United Nations Development Program, Social Inclusion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2.
112 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 64.
113 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1–6.
114 M. Fischer, Anthropological ­Futures.
115 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 2.
116 Quoted in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 63.
117 See Helms, Innocence and Victimhood; Hromadžić, “Bathroom Mixing” and “Once We
Had a House”; Jansen, “The Privatisation of Home and Hope” and “Troubled Locations.”
118 See Sorabji, “Bosnian Neighborhoods Revisited: Tolerance, Commitment, and Komšiluk
in Sarajevo.”
119 See Maček, Sarajevo ­under Siege.
120 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 59. See also Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime.
121 Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind, 16.
122 Burić, “Becoming Mixed.”

88 | joão biehl and peter locke

 123 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4.
124 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4.
125 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19.
126 See Borneman, “Reconciliation ­after Ethnic Cleansing”; A. Gilbert et al., “Reconsider-
ing Postsocialism from the Margins of Eu­rope.”
127 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18.
128 Ranciére, The Emancipated Spectator, 1.
129 Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” 518.
130 Farmer, “Challenging Orthodoxies.”
131 This line is spoken by Hamlet to Horatio: “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/
That ever I was born to set it right!” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.189–90).
132 See Connolly, A World of Becoming; Green­house, A Moment’s Notice.
133 Rabinow, Marking Time.
134 Hirschman, A Bias for Hope, 37.
135 Ong and Collier, Global Assemblages.
136 Geertz, Available Light, 221, 218.
137 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, lv.
138 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 329.

the anthropology of becoming | 89

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II
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 2

Becoming Aggrieved

An Alternative Framework of Care in Black Chicago

laurence ralph

“Man, ­every other block in Chicago has a crazy lady,” a friend, Justin, once told
me when we heard the piercing screams of our neighbor, Mrs. Lana. Accord-
ing to Justin, Mrs. Lana had been addicted to drugs and he reasoned: “that’s
why she followed p­ eople down the street and yelled at them from her porch.”
But when I met Mrs. Lana’s d­ aughter, a young w ­ oman named Marla, she com-
plicated Justin’s characterization. Marla never knew her m ­ other as an addict
but did confirm that heroin had once been her main vice. Still, she offered
another explanation for Mrs. Lana’s be­hav­ior: “My m ­ other’s just mad.”
“Mad,” in Marla’s usage, refers to an aspect of m ­ ental illness that had as
much to do with anger as apparitions. According to Marla, her ­mother could
see ­people walking down the street, minding their own business, and before
they knew it an invisible but deadly bullet was lodged in their skull. If she
could just get your attention, if she could just warn you, then maybe you had a
chance to survive. If not, you ­were done for.
Jo Jo Thomas ­didn’t get the warning. One after­noon he was eating in a res-
taurant with Marla while waiting for their ­mother to give them a ­ride home.
Mrs. Lana called Jo Jo on his cell phone to say that she was outside in her car
and Marla, still eating, asked her ­brother to go out to the car and return with
an umbrella—it was raining, and she ­didn’t want to get wet. Ever chivalric, Jo
Jo agreed. But when he stepped outside, gunfire rang out, and Jo Jo was in the
midst of it. From the driver’s seat, Mrs. Lana screamed so loud and long that
Marla swears she heard it from inside the restaurant. Jo Jo might have heard
it too, Marla says, b­ ecause he turned around and took two steps t­oward his
­mother’s car before collapsing. Mrs. Lana bolted from the car, dove onto the
ground, and cradled the back of her son’s head. Blood and brains spilled out,
mixing with rainwater and then swirling into the gutter.
­After Jo Jo’s death, Mrs. Lana kept screaming.

When it comes to the relationship between race and ­mental illness, social sci-
entists are often more concerned with explaining the lack of access to medical
resources in poor, urban communities than with exploring the indigenous strat-
egies that ­people in underresourced communities develop to cope with ­mental
illness.1 In Black Chicago, for example, one common way of understanding the
relationship between mourning and m ­ ental illness is a con­temporary version
of a very old psychological theory. It was, of course, Sigmund Freud who fa-
mously distinguished between “mourning and melancholia” in his 1917 essay of
that name.2 For Freud, the loss in mourning relates to literal death. Accordingly,
expressions of sadness in the mourner are viewed as appropriate and healthy,
maybe even cathartic. Still, the expectation is that the mourner ­will overcome
her grief over time. Melancholia, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from
mourning when the sadness begins, but the aggrieved person never overcomes
her loss. In fact, she may refuse to concede that the object of her affection
has been lost at all. She subsequently retreats within herself, disregarding the
norms and expectations of the outside world. If in mourning her son a m ­ other
is keenly aware of her loss, in melancholia she may also be aware, but she re-
mains uncertain about what this loss means in a larger existential sense.
In Chicago, the way doctors treat Mrs. Lana is based on this Freudian dis-
tinction. Even though mourning is considered normal, what makes Mrs. Lana
“mad” is a specific interpretation of her actions in relation to her loss—­
particularly the fact that she is deeply invested in Jo Jo’s death. However, what
I want to make clear is that, in contrast to doctors, p­ eople in Mrs. Lana’s neigh-
borhood, Eastwood, have come to view this w ­ oman’s madness (in all its glori-
ous aggression) as normal. They shun the societal expectation that her madness
should diminish ­after some time, and they seek to pin down the po­liti­cal (rather
than existential) meaning of Mrs. Lana’s screams.

94 | laurence ralph
 My argument is that Eastwoodians add a layer of depth to the common
medicalized interpretation of ­mental illness ­because, in this community,
a ­mother’s madness is not merely her own. It signifies the grief that all res-
idents may express for the many devalued black lives that have also been
prematurely extinguished. I should say that, in this chapter, grief is a superor-
dinate category that contains both a temporary sadness that can be overcome
(mourning) and a perpetual condition that cannot (madness). Thus, I w ­ ill
show that a collective framework of care is constituted in the reaffirmation of
humanity on behalf of the dead, and that by attending to her needs, residents
grieve their own losses alongside Mrs. Lana’s. That is, in occasioning p­ eople
to reflect on the countless young black ­people who have perished too soon,
Mrs. Lana enlists members of a community in becoming aggrieved.
Before we can fully grasp how an Eastwoodian understanding of the ­human
condition undermines the distinction between mourning and madness, we
must first examine how black life becomes devalued and thus dehumanized
in the American city. This dehumanization, we ­will see, has implications for
how grief is understood and expressed. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler turns
grief into a po­liti­cal resource by demonstrating that the failure to understand
the capacity to mourn amounts to a failure to understand the value of life it-
self.3 Drawing on Butler’s thesis, we can examine Mrs. Lana’s screams in light
of how the medical establishment continuously pushes the diagnostic reach of
illness outward to capture more and more of the population. Anthropologists
like Arthur Frank and Arthur Kleinman have regarded this capture as a form of
censorship that silences certain p­ eople’s voices under­neath the heavy weight
of a medicalized understanding of life.4 But at the same time that it silences
that which contradicts the medical perspective, the exclusion of the dissenting
voice also establishes the bound­aries of the public. This is how “normal” p­ eople
understand themselves as t­hose who do not yell and scream irately, even in
the face of the vio­lence they experience on an everyday basis. And this is why
communities that face a disproportionate amount of vio­lence must mask their
grief. Just as their lives and communities are devalued, their grief is likewise
illegitimated.
Focusing on “Eastwood,”5 a low-­income, African American community in
which I have conducted ethnographic research for the past de­cade, I ­will ex-
amine the coping mechanisms residents develop a­ fter Mrs. Lana suffers her
psychotic breakdown. ­Here, I build on Butler’s theory of grief to reconceptu-
alize madness as a sometimes productive force that allows scholars to see how
certain populations are systematically dehumanized. ­After presenting a brief

becoming aggrieved | 95
history of Mrs. Lana’s community, in which I discuss how it came to have the
socioeconomic markers of poverty it is known for ­today, I explore in further
detail the circumstances surrounding Mrs. Lana’s ­mental illness.6 Ultimately,
I argue that the story of Mrs. Lana’s madness is productive b­ ecause it gives us
valuable insight into the ways in which blacks, especially ­those living in low-­
income communities with a dearth of institutional resources, invert popu­lar
expectations of mourning, thereby developing a concept of “becoming ag-
grieved” that does not merely lament death but also affirms life.7

a city of scars: the dehumanization of black lives

I lived in Eastwood from 2006 to 2010, and have returned countless times since.
When I first moved to Eastwood, I learned that back in the 1970s, the commu-
nity was known by another name: Sacred City. In ­those Black Power days, this
place became sacred in the same way that “black” became proud and “nigger”
became a term of endearment. Local gangs still insist on the sacredness of this
place. But in Eastwood, p­ eople outside of the gangs believe that all the talk
of sanctity is nothing more than a pretext masking the profane. The statistics
seem to bolster this point. Eastwood is a community in which 42 ­percent of the
nearly 42,000 residents lived below the poverty line, and, as crime is heavi­ly im-
plicated in this climate of poverty, 57 ­percent of all Eastwoodians ­were in some
way involved in the criminal justice system—in jail, on parole, or u­ nder ­house
arrest. Months ­after moving into Eastwood, with my boxes still unpacked, I
heard an unfunny joke (at least, from the perspective of community residents)
that points to how black lives are dehumanized in Chicago.
When I was attending a community policing meeting, taking field notes, a
police officer named Thompson said: “­We’re ­doing our best to stop the vio­
lence. We feel terrible that you all have to live h­ ere.” Then, referring to the local
gang members, he continued, “They call it Sacred City. You know what we call
it?” He wrote “Sacred” in chalk and then, using his palm to wipe away a few
letters, he said, “We just call it Scarred.”
A few of the other officers pres­ent chuckled, including the precinct captain.
Meanwhile, the residents gave them blank stares. In an effort to diffuse the ten-
sion (which had become palpable at this point), another cop, named Kearns, stood
up and told every­one in the room his ­family’s story. Generations ago, his great-­
grandparents had immigrated from Poland and settled in Eastwood. “This neigh-
borhood has a special place in my heart,” Kearns said. “I could show you old
pictures we have at home. You w ­ ouldn’t believe how beautiful it was.”

96 | laurence ralph
 Ironically, immigrant families like his are implicated in Eastwood’s inglori-
ous history. The community’s wounds first began to fester in the 1970s, a­ fter
the local tractor com­pany closed. Then the major department store moved its
headquarters, causing 80 ­percent of the manufacturing jobs to vanish. Other
companies closed, taking with them 44 ­percent of the area’s retail jobs. This
pro­cess of deindustrialization was in full swing even before the assassination
of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked uprisings in Eastwood. A ­ fter the fires had
been extinguished, many storeowners left the neighborhood when insurance
companies canceled their policies or prohibitively increased premiums, mak-
ing it difficult to rebuild businesses in their previous locations. Disinvestment
peaked ­after King’s murder, but it had been steadily increasing since the 1950s.
­These economic woes plagued all of Eastwood’s retailers. By 1970, 75 ­percent
of the businesses that had buoyed the community just two de­cades earlier
­were boarded up and abandoned. ­There has not been a significant migration
of jobs or ­people into Eastwood since World War II.
Although Kearns did not mention ­these f­ actors to explain why, eventually,
immigrants from places like Poland, Ireland, Rus­sia, and Germany packed their
belongings and moved out of Eastwood, the lack of business opportunities was
certainly a f­ actor—­not to mention the unbridled racism that led many of them
to fear living alongside blacks. Ever since the early 1940s, when African Ameri-
cans began migrating to Chicago in droves, the city has been deeply segregated,
and this segregation has implications for how black lives are devalued ­today.
Twenty-­two of Chicago’s seventy neighborhoods account for 82 ­percent of the
city’s hom­i­cides. Indeed, statistics like ­these are what motivated Eastwoodians
to attend community policing meetings in the first place. Citing hom­i­cide rates
and contextualizing them through a history of deindustrialization may be a cir-
cuitous way of saying that the reason why the police officer’s joke fell flat for the
Eastwoodians in the room was that they did not need an expert to tell them that
their community was plagued with prob­lems.
They ­were fully aware of their scars. Yet they asserted their humanity,
nevertheless.

Mrs. Lana is a case in point. The fact that she is a ­mother who has been driven
mad ­after witnessing the shooting death of her son exemplifies the reaffirma-
tion of life in a context of death. I do not mean to suggest that this contention
is not controversial. On many occasions, I have shared her story with police

becoming aggrieved | 97
officers and doctors in Chicago as a way to talk about the relationship between
race, ­mental illness, and grinding poverty. When I have done so, my discus-
sion of Jo Jo’s death (and Mrs. Lana’s reaction to it) is often met with the fol-
lowing questions: How was Jo Jo raised? What did Jo Jo do? Was he a gang
member? I can only assume that, by way of ­these inquiries, ­these experts are
attempting to assess the amount of empathy they should feel for this ­family.
In the past I have replied that Jo Jo was, in fact, affiliated with a gang—­but
not in the way the experts might think. In Eastwood, even a teenager like Jo
Jo, who opts not to join a gang, ­will be cognizant of who belongs with which
group, as well as each group’s jurisdictional bound­aries. ­These bound­aries are
mapped onto neighborhoods, so that if a person is confronted by a member of a
rival gang and asked where he or she lives, the street name the person provides
­will signal a gang affiliation (­whether or not the person is a gang member) and
can result in injury. (Many teen­agers join gangs for protection ­after suffering in-
juries from rival gangs.) In Jo Jo’s case, it is not clear ­whether he was mistaken for
someone e­ lse, or if the ­people who shot him ­were operating ­under the logic that
anyone who lived in proximity to the rival gang had an allegiance with them
and therefore deserved to die. For our purposes, what is more impor­tant than
­whether or not Jo Jo officially belonged to the gang is how the logic of rivalry
between gangs mirrors attitudes ­toward black Americans in the larger society.
The social movement #BlackLivesMatter demonstrates this point. #Black-
LivesMatter began as a provocation on Twitter in 2013, a­ fter George Zimmer-
man, a self-­appointed neighborhood watchman in Samford, Florida, shot and
killed an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin. The movement grew even
more popu­lar in 2014 a­ fter the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked by
the shooting of Michael Brown, and the killing of Eric Garner, another un-
armed African American who was choked to death by a New York City police
officer. ­There are currently twenty-­three #BlackLivesMatter chapters in the
United States, Canada, and Ghana. Collectively, they have or­ga­nized at least
672 demonstrations so far.
Con­temporary movements like #BlackLivesMatter take as a point of de-
parture the premise that certain ­people’s lives—in this case, black lives—­are
devalued in American society. ­Because of this, the group focuses on the ef-
fort to make black lives count as ­those of normal ­human beings. Group mem-
bers’ protests speak against the notion that someone can be legitimately killed
­because his or her body was deemed threatening (regardless of w ­ hether the
person committed an act of vio­lence). The logic of a “justifiable hom­i­cide,”

98 | laurence ralph
they say, operates to produce and maintain an exclusionary idea of who is
fully ­human and who is not. The public is to believe that the black person (for
example, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, or Jo
Jo Thomas) deserved to die b­ ecause of his or her criminal associations. This
premise suggests that the alleged black criminal is less ­human than the upright
citizen, and therefore the black person’s killing is legitimate.
Mrs. Lana d­ idn’t agree that her son deserved such a fate. In fact, in her early
days of grief, she was riddled with survivors’ guilt, believing herself to be more
deserving of death than her son. Before Jo Jo’s shooting, Mrs. Lana had a rela-
tively well-­paying job as a postal worker. When she battled drug addiction, she
found religion and transformed her life, and she remained a devout Christian.
According to her neighbors, the only ­things she enjoyed talking about more
than her spiritual transformation ­were the activities of her three ­children: Jo
Jo, Marla, and Travis. In the eyes of many Eastwoodians, Mrs. Lana’s psychotic
breakdown marked her transition from a well-­respected community member
to an outcast—­albeit an outcast whom ­people eventually came to admire
greatly. What concerns us most is why Eastwoodians ­were drawn to her. This
was not merely ­because they recognized what she had experienced; more spe-
cifically, they saw her screams as an attempt to create a public sphere in which
oppositional voices are not feared, degraded, or dismissed but valued for the
productive reflections they inspire.
In the next section of the chapter, I discuss how becoming aggrieved can
be a productive force, since I see it as a kind of communal care that harbors
po­liti­cal potential.

a ­mother’s screams: the potential hidden in madness

Drawing on black urban life from a dif­fer­ent historical moment, Jonathan

Metzl attaches the same crucial importance to the po­liti­cal potentiality em-
bedded in ­mental illness as I do in this chapter.8 In The Protest Psychosis, he
shows that in the 1960s and 1970s, the diagnosis of schizo­phre­nia underwent a
striking shift in the United States. While the disease was originally associated
with white middle-­class ­women (such as ­those who ­were so bold as to commit
the offense of chastising their husbands in public), over time this par­tic­u­lar
brand of madness became linked to black males, and the hostility, anger, and
aggression that seemed to characterize their lives during the civil rights move-
ment. Citing examples such as ­these, Metzl argues that treatments for ­mental
illnesses are intrinsically po­liti­cal. For him, pointing to the po­liti­cal is not a

becoming aggrieved | 99
way to dismiss schizo­phre­nia by undermining its biological roots. Rather,
­these roots are given fertile soil in the social climate of the day.
The large body of lit­er­a­ture suggesting that experiences of racism and pov-
erty seem to increase a person’s risk for ­mental illness is bolstered by Metzl’s
account, in which the emphasis is on how the social and po­liti­cal climate in-
flect the ways illness is interpreted, understood, and enacted. In the hindsight
of history, it may seem strange that aggressive protests can be diagnosed as a
form of madness. But Metzl’s work attunes us to the fact that, although ­there
are many institutional mechanisms for determining what illness looks like, it
is much harder to say what should not be counted as part of the diagnosis. My
work fills this void by describing locally salient ways of understanding death in
which mourning (a loss that a person eventually overcomes) is not privileged
over madness (a refusal to overcome loss that consumes one’s existence). In
this regard, each of the ethnographic scenes I describe contain hidden poten-
tialities embedded within symbolic repre­sen­ta­tions of grief—of which dice
games, footwear, uncovered heads, and most importantly Mrs. Lana’s screams
are the most striking examples.

I learned about the local significance of symbols of grief while conducting

fieldwork in Eastwood, where I often began structured interviews with the
same three words: “Describe your neighborhood.”
Young or old, most ­people stated that Eastwood could be desolate for
hours on end and then, just as suddenly, b­ ubble over with block parties,
laughter, and life. But on “unfortunate nights,” as one resident called them, the
block could erupt with screaming and stampedes away from the unmistakable
sound that too often rang out: a dreadful alarm. The threat of that untimely
alarm—­other­wise known as a gun blast—­made one of my collaborators, Jus-
tin, insist on a prerequisite for helping me with my research: he said if I wanted
his help, I ­couldn’t stand on the “drug” corner. I could, however, stand on the
less dangerous “lunch money” corner, where the teen­agers shoot dice.
The “lunch money” corner was a recreational space more than anything
­else, a recess carved from concrete, where girls jumped rope and boys rode
bikes. Surrounded by low-­stakes games and laughter, this corner was a perch
where, on ordinary days, young ­people practiced a modern jitterbug called
“footworkin’.” They would bring iPods with portable speakers to mask the hol-
low sound of dice. Every­one’s eyes would grow big with anticipation of the

100 | laurence ralph
dots that would ­either win or lose them some pocket change. When ­those
dots revealed themselves in front of us on the pavement, the winners would
slap their knees and point their fin­gers at the ­others, now frowning, before
snatching up wrinkled dollar bills and swearing that t­ hey’d mastered a special
technique for tossing the plastic cubes against concrete and brick.
On this corner, it w
­ asn’t merely about the money. (Most days, the winners
bought every­one a large bag of chips and soda, or even a stuffed slice of deep-­
dish pizza from the nearby restaurant, Big Al’s.) It was about something far
graver. The roll of the dice came to represent the fragility of life—­the fact that,
at even at so tender an age, you could never tell when your number was up.9
It would be easy for a passerby to see young ­people posted on the corner
and not notice how the symbols of mourning could possess someone’s body.
On a winter day in 2008, for example, I watched as the dice rolled past the feet
of a teenager named Danny. I then noticed that Danny was wearing a pair of
boots that once belonged to Cook—­his best friend, who had been murdered
weeks before. Next, I realized something even more significant: Danny had
not taken off t­ hose boots since his best friend passed away.
If one compares Danny’s inherited boots to Mrs. Lana’s screams, ­there are
crucial differences. The boots might be a symbol of grief, but they do not nec-
essarily signal ­mental illness. The grief that took place on street corners was
subtle—­and had to be—­since even seemingly harmless scenes of mourning
tended to be viewed by older residents with caution. W ­ ere a black male teen-
ager to adopt Mrs. Lana’s method of grievance (following p­ eople down the
street while screaming), he would likely be seen as enacting the very forms of
vio­lence against which he was protesting. It was, in part, her role as a ­mother
that made it more difficult to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to Mrs.  Lana’s
screams. This is at least part of the reason that ­people ­were willing to make
room for her madness.
Some contextual information about the nature of Mrs. Lana’s screams w ­ ill
clarify this point.
Marla tells me, when driving past that intersection where Jo Jo was shot, she
sometimes pictures her ­mother as she was before her son died: beautiful and
not yet ravaged, wearing lipstick and a breezy dress, her head full of flowing
locks. Marla chronicles her ­mother’s life the same way Christians do Christ’s,
only in Mrs. Lana’s case A.D. referred to Jo Jo’s death, not the crucifixion.
Unlike the doctors and her Eastwood neighbors, at first Marla ­didn’t
think her ­mother’s condition was permanent. Her theory was that one day,
Mrs. Lana would not need to scream at ­people or follow them around, telling

becoming aggrieved | 101
them to keep their heads covered. One day, Marla thought, her m ­ other would
fi­nally accept Jo Jo’s demise. It took at least a year for Marla to abandon this
expectation.
A year a­ fter Jo Jo’s shooting, Mrs.  Lana could be seen standing on her
porch, yelling at passersby in a high-­pitched shrill. But this be­hav­ior started,
Marla told me, when Mrs. Lana stared at her youn­gest child, Travis, then nine
years old. Her glance at first was cautious. “What’s wrong?” Marla remembers
asking.
“Oh, nothing, baby,” Mrs.  Lana said, her eyes fixed on the back of her
young boy’s head.
This scene began to occur daily. Mrs.  Lana would call Travis over and
inspect him from head to toe. Once finished with her youn­gest, she would
inspect her d­ aughter, too. Though Marla was twelve years older than Travis,
Mrs. Lana found special comfort in giving her hair a reassuring stroke.
I asked Marla when she first began to worry about her ­mother’s safety.
In response she told me the drugstore story.
At the drugstore one day, Mrs. Lana knocked over the contents of shelves
in a search for duct tape. When an employee fi­nally handed her some tape,
hoping that the unruly customer might leave, Mrs. Lana ripped the packaging
open with her teeth and tried to use it right t­ here in the store. And by “use it,” I
mean that Mrs. Lana attempted to apply the tape to strangers’ heads.
Marla handed me a copy of the police report. ­After looking it over, I asked
her how she made sense of the official description.
Marla’s interpretation of this event was this: Her m ­ other could not bear to
see all ­those vulnerable bodies. Her ­mother “grew frightened” of the patrons
fleeing from her—­the unprotected who w ­ ere rejecting her efforts to save their
lives.
According to the report, Mrs. Lana’s head was already covered with duct
tape. She tried explaining to an employee the need for protective taping. The
employee notified the store man­ag­er, and Mrs. Lana tried to cover his head
as well. Fi­nally, the man­ag­er called the police. “And I was happy to see them,
too,” Mrs. Lana l­ater told her ­daughter. “At least they had the good sense to
keep their hats on.”
Unlike most patrons in the store, the man­ag­er reportedly told the police
that he ­didn’t believe Mrs.  Lana was on drugs. As Eastwood is nationally
known for heroin distribution, he claimed he could recognize an addict—­
usually, they ­were subdued and docile. In contrast, Mrs. Lana was frantic. She
was mad. Still, when the police officers checked her rec­ord, they found that

102 | laurence ralph
she had been arrested for possession of drugs. Even though that arrest had
occurred more than twenty years earlier, it was all the evidence they needed to
put her away.
Stapled to the report Marla handed me was another report. This second
document came from the county jail where Mrs. Lana was held and contained
the findings of a doctor’s visit during her incarceration. She was examined in
preparation for a hearing at the M ­ ental Health Court.10 ­There, her refusal to
accept her son’s death was codified into a diagnosis.
While incarcerated, Mrs. Lana’s picture of Jo Jo was taken from her. She
had carried it in an inside pocket ever since his death.
“That’s when she lost herself,” Marla said. The picture was a reminder to
Mrs. Lana of who she was, and without it, Marla explained, her m ­ other’s urge
to yell and scream and warn ­people to cover their heads became even harder
to control.
This is what Marla learned about her m ­ other’s three-­day stint in jail from
the two reports and eventual hearing at the M ­ ental Health Court. In jail,
Mrs. Lana was subdued with sedatives and eventually placed in a cell by her-
self. It’s impossible to say w­ hether or not Mrs. Lana, lying on her bunk with
drugs coursing through her veins, realized that her thoughts had become frag-
mented. Was she curious about when or if her mind, now scrambled, would
ever be put to rights? She might have feared that if ­things could come undone
like this, almost instantaneously, she could never hold every­thing in. Marla’s
theory is that this, her newfound real­ity, began to irritate her. And then that ir-
ritation transformed itself into rage, prompting Mrs. Lana to scream. “Scream-
ing is the only rational ­thing she could think of to do,” Marla said.
In contrast to Marla’s ac­cep­tance of her ­mother’s screams, Mrs. Lana’s out-
bursts while incarcerated confirmed a doctor’s determination that she had a
“delusional disorder, with obsessional features.” The court recommended that
she be released, and Mrs. Lana was prescribed drugs that would block the
neurotransmitter involved in developing her delusions. Additionally, ­family
therapy was encouraged. That’s where Marla deci­ded that she would not fight
her ­mother’s madness. She would go with the tide.
Months ­after Mrs. Lana was released from jail, I asked Marla if her m ­ other
seemed to be a changed person.
Marla explained that at first, being outside was simply too much for her
­mother to bear. Mrs. Lana stayed indoors, her ­family accommodating her ac-
cordingly. Travis, who ­didn’t like hats, wore his football helmet in the ­house.
He learned that when his ­mother’s eyes got big, he needed to buckle his

becoming aggrieved | 103
chinstrap. Marla wore silk scarves on her head. “­People in the neighborhood
thought I had converted to Islam,” she joked.
I asked her what the biggest challenge had been.
“­Mother grew tired of such a confined lifestyle,” Marla answered. “She
wanted to at least feel the sun on her skin.” But even sitting on the porch made
her uneasy, as we know from her therapy. During her sessions, Mrs. Lana
wondered how the Beverly twins across the street could jump rope like that,
so carefree. And where was Mrs. Beverly, anyway? Mrs. Lana fought the urge
to run across the road and grab ­those lighthearted ­children.
Mrs. Lana revealed other observations: She could see that the ­children and
teen­agers and grown folks around had parts or sometimes all of their heads
missing. The ­human sounds emanating from their necks disturbed her. She
wondered when t­ hese deformed p­ eople would fall to their knees, and when
their headless bodies would collapse in the street. With visions such as t­ hese, it
stands to reason that simply keeping her eyes open on the porch left Mrs. Lana
weak. She would shuffle her feet, shake her head, look again, and fi­nally close
her eyes. Sometimes with her eyes still closed, she would cry soundlessly. Ex-
hausted by her overloaded mind, she must have fought to tamp down the rage
she had felt in jail. In my reading, this anxiety was about more than remember-
ing who she was and how she used to live. It was born from a heartfelt need to
warn her neighbors about death, which required that she dwell in a perpetual
madness, a timeless space, where the urgency of the need to protect ­people
from vio­lence could never be forgotten, assuaged, or overcome.

becoming aggrieved: the alternative framework of care

So far we have seen Marla strug­gle to place her ­mother’s grief within a coherent
frame. The primary way she attempts to do so is by positioning mourning and
madness on an even social plane, so that the former is not deemed normal or
the latter branded pathological. Rather, in refusing to overcome loss, Mrs. Lana
is seen by her d­ aughter as displaying a justifiable anger. In this section we w
­ ill
see that Marla’s interpretation of her ­mother’s pain as reasonable provides in-
sights into the pro­cess by which Eastwoodians become aggrieved.
But before I describe a final ethnographic scene, which bolsters this point,
a brief digression is warranted.
I mentioned from the outset that in my analy­sis grief connotes mourning
as well as madness. It is now time to distinguish grief from the pro­cess of be-
coming aggrieved, which cannot merely be defined in terms of mourning the

104 | laurence ralph
past: it is also about developing a communal framework for care. I realize that
this relationship between becoming aggrieved and practicing care may strike
some readers as strange, or at least counterintuitive. If the term care connotes
safekeeping, consideration, and support, the term aggrieved connotes mistreat-
ment, resentfulness, and injury. The words are not quite antonyms, but they
are certainly distinct. Still, in what follows, I link the practice of care to the pro­
cess of becoming aggrieved b­ ecause to care for someone in an underresourced
community is precisely about keeping loved ones safe, considering their needs
and supporting them, while holding out hope that one’s injuries and resent-
ments may somehow prove productive in the end.

In the fall of 2009, Marla began to complain that whenever she had to leave the
house—­for school or work, or to go to the grocery store—­Mrs. Lana would
open her front door and walk through Eastwood with newspaper and duct
tape, warning ­people to cover their heads. In the block club meetings I attended
during this time, I noted that some of her neighbors initially expressed fear of
Mrs. Lana. At the same time, knowing what she had been through, they felt re-
morse. Mrs. Lana’s voice was so dreadfully sincere that they believed her shrill
cries spoke to a breathtaking trauma. Indeed, the first time I heard Mrs. Lana
scream I was as startled as if I had heard a gun blast. Like a bullet, her voice was
an intrusion that ruptured the pres­ent. Symbolically repeating the vio­lence that
had taken Jo Jo, she drew an audible line, ­every day, between life and death.
­After several worrisome confrontations, word began to spread about the
nature of Mrs. Lana’s madness. Soon Marla reluctantly confided in neighbors,
telling them that since Jo Jo’s death, her ­mother had been harboring a disquiet-
ing worry that e­ ither she or they w­ ere not real. At first Marla was ashamed to
share this private information. The young boys who identified with the local
gang might try to antagonize her ­mother, Marla feared. But she underesti-
mated the re­spect they had for Jo Jo, and the love they had for Travis. Marla
failed to recognize, in other words, that Jo Jo’s peers may have been coping
with their own grief through the care they expressed for Mrs. Lana.
Eventually, Marla invited her neighbors over. As they entered her home,
Marla observed that her m ­ other kept her eyes down, directly at their feet,
then slowly scanned up to see their f­aces. In Marla’s words, her m ­ other was
attempting to verify that they had a “head on their shoulders.” When she saw
their familiar f­ aces and covered heads, their warm presence was as undeniable

becoming aggrieved | 105
as it was reassuring, and this was the first step of a communal commitment to
see Mrs. Lana strip madness of its stigma.
Pastor Scott was the first neighbor to come over in the winter of 2009.
He kept his fedora on in the h­ ouse, although it was mandatory for all men in
his congregation to take their hats off when entering the sanctuary. A month
­later, it was Mrs. Beverly with her cashmere cowl and her twins with their
pink hoodies. Marla monitored who came and went and learned to scruti-
nize their bare heads as closely as her ­mother did. “You ­can’t step foot in
this h­ ouse ­unless you cover your head,” she told every­one. Only weeks ­later,
Mr. Gregory visited. He told me, “If you had to take your shirt off and fashion
it into a makeshift turban when visiting Mrs. Lana, that’s what you did.” Mar-
la’s concerns ­were fi­nally assuaged when, in early December, Travis’s football
team had a pizza party, and every­one ate slices at her ­mother’s ­table through
their helmets.
Flipping through her journal, Marla recounted her description of that day
with a smile. She told me that the night of the pizza party, she watched from
her ­mother’s bedroom doorway as Mrs. Lana fell into a still, deep sleep that
­didn’t require the aid of drugs—­a sleep that began and ended in Mrs. Lana’s
own bed rather than Travis’s, as had become the custom. Looking on as her
­mother slept, a yellow bandana affixed to her head, Marla came to realize
that the strug­gle to order and focus experience was not just her ­mother’s.
It was a collective fight that would have to elevate madness so that it was
not a devalued liminal state, but simply another response to vio­lence. In
this way, elevating madness—­making room for it, even valuing it—­was an
effort to develop an alternate framework of care that searched for therapy
through accommodation. It meant that ­people might be mad, but they ­were
still ­human.11
Once her neighbors began to accommodate Mrs. Lana’s voice, they could
understand their own lives and losses—­their own grief—in relation to it. East-
woodians stopped trying to hurry past Mrs. Lana’s porch or divert their eyes
when they saw her sitting unstill. This is not to say that as time went on they
took less notice of Mrs. Lana’s madness. Quite the opposite: every­one took a
­little more care. Passersby looked for Mrs. Lana on her porch, gang members
called her name and touched the brim of their caps (a personal salute), and
­women took their babies out of their strollers to show off their bonnets.
­Toward the end of 2009, I began jotting down passing references to Mrs.
Lana in my notebook. On the lunch money corner, adjacent to Mrs. Lana’s

106 | laurence ralph
h­ ouse, idle talk about her was plentiful. Tiko, ready to leave the dice game,
putting his sweater back over his R.I.P. T-­shirt, said to Danny: “You sure did
take a long time ­going to the store. I thought you ­were coming right back?”
Danny, brushing off his inherited boots, answered: “I had to walk the long
way past Mrs. Lana’s. I forgot my hat.”
Or when Justin said to his wife, Tina, “We should feed that baby before
we go to church.” Tina agreed: “If we d­ on’t, ­she’ll be screaming louder than
Mrs. Lana in a barber shop.”
And then Mrs. Pearl lent her grand­son, Pete, some money, and ­there he
was, standing on the corner with the hat he purchased, a suede cap with a
snakeskin brim.
“You wasted my hard-­earned money on that t­ hing,” Mrs. Pearl said. “That
hat is so ugly that even Mrs. Lana would tell you to take it off.”
Even Pastor Scott mentioned her in a sermon. “Mrs. Lana,” he said, “has
got more sense than any of the so-­called ‘antiviolence’ activists I know. She
­doesn’t hold a rally and then feel good about herself. She warns every­body,
­every day, about the consequences of the bullet.” How many in the congrega-
tion, the pastor wanted to know, could claim they did the same?
In this way, Eastwoodians promoted Mrs. Lana’s madness to the ranks of
respectability. And her scars gained a status that was no less than sacred for
­people in Eastwood.

Throughout this chapter, we have witnessed residents creating a space to

express grief in many dif­fer­ent places (for example, on the corner where a
teenage boy dons an R.I.P. T-­shirt, wearing the boots his best friend has left
­behind, and inside Mrs. Lana’s home, where ­people cover their heads). What I
mean to point out is that in this context, the disproportionate likelihood that
an Eastwoodian might suffer from ­mental illness or fall victim to gun vio­lence
shapes the ways in which grief is understood. Moreover, I have shown that
many ­people who grapple with grief contribute to, and draw from, a critical
reserve cultivated from their own vulnerabilities.12 It follows that by donating
their time, energy, and emotions to this reserve, Eastwoodians create what I
refer to ­here as an alternative framework of care. From Marla we learned what
the chief ele­ment in such a framework is: an elevation of madness, so that it is
not denigrated or devalued but given the same respectability as mourning. My

becoming aggrieved | 107
point ­here is that by cleansing madness of its stigma and shame, Eastwoodians
become aggrieved through collective practices of care.
Meta­phor­ically speaking, care in a context of structural vio­lence includes
the discontentment of a baby wailing in church, a w ­ oman whose grand­son
spends her hard-­earned money on something frivolous, and the annoyance
of having to walk the long way home even when ­there is a shorter path. Like-
wise, feeling irritated when your ­mother constantly leaves the ­house and yells
at ­people, yet nevertheless exercising concern for her well-­being, shows how
anger and resentment might serve a greater good. ­Toward this end, the pas-
tor’s words (that Mrs.  Lana “warns every­body, ­every day, about the conse-
quences of the bullet”) crystallize the common Eastwoodian contention that
one’s anger can be a critical asset when it is directed at the social prob­lems that
exacerbate mourning, madness, and all other manner of grief.

conclusion

In crafting a concept of grief that accounts for both mourning and madness,
it is crucial to distinguish the grief that many Eastwoodians express from
the ways ­people become aggrieved—­a pro­cess through which an alternative
framework of care can be developed. This framework seeks to balance the
scales of judgment and ridicule between the ephemeral sadness associated
with mourning and the permanent sorrow that plagues the mad. By ­doing
so, it challenges traditional and still common understandings of mourning,
which rely on a model of the h­ uman subject that is wedded to a strict sense
of the individual. In the Freudian scheme, mourning ceases when a ­mother
ends her debilitating everyday preoccupation with her loss and finds a way
to function as she had before the death of her child, thus reestablishing her
own autonomy through sorrow. My analy­sis, in contrast, moves beyond the
individual to examine collective grief. Like the Eastwoodians who visited
Mrs. Lana at her home, I do not pathologize madness even as I compare it to
mourning. Instead, placing mourning and madness on a spectrum of the same
social plane makes grief more about the affirmation of life than merely coping
with death. In this regard, I see Mrs. Lana’s screams as an attempt to create a
public sphere in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded, or dis-
missed, but valued for the productive reflections they can occasion.
What I mean to make clear, in closing, is that insofar as it clues us in to the
basic needs and desires of a dehumanized collective, examining the strategies
for caregiving in black Chicago—as well as the premises b­ ehind them—­can

108 | laurence ralph
help scholars, researchers, and medical experts understand locally salient ways
of interpreting the ­human condition. I urge researchers to begin their analy-
ses by seeking to understand the local responses to trauma that are generated
from within the communities they study b­ ecause, as I see it, the framework of
care that Eastwoodians developed is a therapeutic method of accommodating
trauma that does not criminalize p­ eople. ­There, practices of care are rooted in
the idea that, when it comes to managing the mad, ­there can be another world
of regulation that has more to do with integration than with quarantine. Cru-
cially, this alternative framework is at odds with the reliance on phar­ma­ceu­
ti­cal drugs alone to treat trauma patients. Screaming is not an indication that
someone should simply be institutionalized or merely be prescribed medi­
cation. ­People can scream, and it’s okay.
Above all ­else, this is why I’ve gone into such details about the hidden
potential embedded in a mad w ­ oman’s screams. Her anger helps us reimag-
ine grief by contemplating how life can be made livable on Chicago’s West
Side.

notes
1 Metzl, The Protest Psychosis.
2 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.”
3 Butler, Precarious Life.
4 See Frank, The Wounded Storyteller; Kleinman, “From Illness to Caregiving as Moral
Experience.”
5 Please note that “Eastwood” is a pseudonym for the neighborhood where I conducted
fieldwork. To protect the identities of my collaborators who are heavi­ly criminalized, I
do not identify the ­actual name of this neighborhood in my academic writing.
6 See Erikson and Erickson, Crime, Punishment, and ­Mental Illness; Pfeiffer, Crazy in Amer­i­ca.
7 ­Here, I am referring to the “anthropology of becoming” that is rooted in Gilles Deleuze’s
philosophical theories (see “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming”). João Biehl
and Peter Locke argue that “Deleuze’s ideas . . . ​uphold the rights of microanalysis,
[while] bringing into view the immanent fields that p­ eople, in all their ambiguity, invent
and live by.” They continue: “Such fields of action and significance—­leaking out on all
sides—­are mediated by power and knowledge, but they are also animated by claims to
basic rights and desires” (“Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming,” 335). Biehl and
Locke’s idea of “becoming” is meant to challenge accepted theories of social domination
and popu­lar modes of medical and po­liti­cal intervention. Drawing on this intervention,
I seek to demonstrate the ways in which large structural and institutional pro­cesses are
made vis­i­ble through an ethnographic engagement with “neglected h­ uman potentials”

becoming aggrieved | 109
 (“Deleuze and the Anthropology Becoming,” 317) such as a dialogue with, and a search
for insight from, someone who, like Mrs. Lana, is considered mentally unstable.
8 Metzl, The Protest Psychosis.
9 Dice ­were among the local gang’s most cherished symbols. “It represents that e­ very day
is a ­gamble,” one member told me.
1 0 This court is located inside the jail.
11 See Bambara, The Salt Eaters; Morrison, Sula.
12 See Vargas, “Black Radical Becoming.”

110 | laurence ralph
 3

Heaven

angela garcia

In this in-­between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to.
— ­gilles deleuze and félix guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

­There is no hope without anxiety and no anxiety without hope.

—­ ernst bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope

On a gray morning in November  2014, thousands of p­ eople gathered around

Mexico City’s golden-­winged Angel of In­de­pen­dence. Simultaneous gatherings
occurred at the Monument to the Revolution and the Plaza of the Three Cul-
tures, sites that point to the intensities of state repression and opposition. As time
passed the crowd swelled, as did its capacity to perceive and feel its expansion.
The point of convergence for the three groups was the desire to turn dis-
appearance into presence, and presence into a pro­cess of transformation.
The basic method was the reconnecting of ­people in space and time. In the
after­noon the crowds flowed through Mexico City’s broad ave­nues and cob-
blestone streets. As they moved, they chanted, “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los
queremos!” (You took them alive, return them alive!). They ­were referring, of
course, to the disappearance of forty-­three students from Ayotzinapa Normal
School in Guerrero State, but also to Mexico’s Dirty War and the Drug War,
continuously recomposing 2014, 1968, and 2006. It was raining lightly and the
aroma of marijuana mixed with that of copal.
 The three groups converged in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s im­mense public
square. Black-­and-­white images of the dead and dis­appeared accompanied the
living. At night an effigy of the Mexican president was set afire, casting light
into the vast darkness. The fire suggested memory (this is how they perished),1
collectivity, and new figurations of the po­liti­cal. The p­ eople gained courage
through their connection, although they knew it might not last. But the burn-
ing of the fire nurtured their hope, and in its turbulent flames they caught a
glimpse of their becoming.
Something ­else was happening. A group of demonstrators confronted po-
lice standing guard in front of the National Palace. The demonstrators threw
Molotov cocktails, stones, and even rockets and set fire to the palace’s ancient
front doors. The demonstrators w ­ ere quickly cast as infiltrators, but what cri-
teria can we use to know the difference? The riot police moved forward—­
shields in one hand, weapons in the other. They sprayed tear gas and w ­ ater
and struck demonstrators indiscriminately with steel batons. P ­ eople screamed
“No vio­lence, no vio­lence!” but the police w ­ ouldn’t stop u­ ntil they cleared the
Zócalo. The demonstrators resisted, and as they ­were pushed back and beaten
up, they chanted the numbers one through forty-­three.
The repetition of t­ hose numbers sent a melancholy tremor through the cha-
otic night, becoming its interior rhythm. It was a reminder and a challenge to the
demonstrators that the movement must survive, even as it was being shattered.
I arrived back at my ­hotel that night to find two armed men guarding its
heavy glass doors from the inside. Still and expressionless, they looked like
creatures in an exhibit. “I am a guest!” I yelled at them, pulling on the locked
doors. Throngs of demonstrators continued to run down the street, away from
the besieged Zócalo. Some held their heads as if they ­were being struck from
above, while ­others looked ner­vously over their shoulders. “Show us your
key,” the guards answered me. Feeling torn, I pressed my room key against the
glass and was allowed to slip inside the ­hotel’s quiet lobby.
The tall shuttered win­dows in my room opened onto the Zócalo. Th ­ ere
­were still thousands of demonstrators below. Some confronted the police,
their bodies surging and retreating in furious waves. But most had already
been rounded up and sat with their hands cuffed b­ ehind their backs. The
rhythmic counting from one to forty-­three continued, bouncing off the im-
posing buildings that framed the ancient plaza, ricocheting in multiple direc-
tions. For several hours I took comfort in t­hose echoing sounds, u­ ntil they
­were replaced by the morning call of church bells and street vendors passing
by. But a sonic memory resounds, and it cannot be erased.

112 | angela garcia
 What does it mean to become at moments indistinguishable from erasure?
Can vio­lence be a vitalizing f­ actor in the construction of a more livable f­ uture?
In the darkness of our times, are we still able to see something e­ lse, to trust
that ­there is something better to come?
This chapter probes ­these questions and their articulation in specific cul-
tural forms. It draws on research I conducted in Mexico City to explore how
­people endure crushing destruction and injustice, while trying to maintain
hope and the capacity for change. My ethnographic focus is two movements:
a spectrum of generational experiences with social activism and a modality of
coercive addiction treatment that is prevalent among the urban poor. While
distinct, both movements embody a po­liti­cally charged view of existence and
incite creative responses that seek to transform what is seemingly hopeless
into something hopeful. At stake are the movements’ entanglements with
vio­lence, which seem to function as a condition and practice for becoming.
In this sense, becoming involves a basic tension—or perhaps alchemy—­
between destruction and creation. I try to comprehend the logic and relation
of ­these abstractions by studying their concrete expression in Mexico’s social
and therapeutic movements.
Ethnographically, this involves tracing the multiple crises that shape the
immediacy of Mexico’s pres­ent (for example, extreme in­equality, systemic
vio­lence, femicide, and narcoviolence) in relation to broader po­liti­cal and
structural durations. It also means revealing how ­these crises are transformed
into a constant ele­ment in everyday life, with profound implications on
­human agency, subjectivity, and relationality. However, by studying the em-
pirical real­ity of unrelenting negativity, I hope to offer more than a portrait
of an apocalyptic Mexico, which seems to be a trend in scholarly and artistic
productions alike.2 Instead, I try to comprehend how the prevailing darkness in
Mexico also operates in a rethinking of vio­lence and becoming. This means
paying close attention to the latent possibilities in Mexico’s existing darkness,
as well as the moments of rupture that express the presence of something dif­
fer­ent in the making.
Several theoretical lineages have helped shape my thinking in this essay—­
from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s formulation of the minority,3 to
Catherine Keller’s apophatic theology,4 and Benjamin Noy’s thinking about
negativity as a revelatory practice.5 A more crucial influence is the philoso-
phy of Ernst Bloch.6 Indeed, in the past few years, and in step with the inten-
sifying vio­lence in Mexico, I have found myself turning to Bloch’s mystical
and revolutionary writings. At the heart of his work lies a tension between

heaven | 113
the darkness of ­human existence and the longing for a better world. This
tension also expresses a key dynamic in the movements that are the focus of
this essay. Let me offer an initial orientation to some of Bloch’s key concepts,
which guide my ethnographic analy­sis.
Darkness is fundamental to Bloch’s thought, and he sees in it both annihi-
lation and illumination. He describes humanity as being “enfolded,” “missing,”
and “wandering” in what he calls “the darkness of the lived moment,” a constant
motif in his writing.7 The ravages of the world wars, anti-­Semitism, economic
exploitation, and unjust material conditions characterize the darkness of Bloch’s
day, and it is from this specific historical context that his philosophy of hope
emerges. The only ­thing that is transcendent about humanity, Bloch says, is our
desire to “venture beyond” the pres­ent darkness.8 Philosophy shares this desire,
leading him to cast his discourse as a work of speculation.
While Bloch’s philosophy is oriented ­toward the ­future, it is also firmly
grounded in the pres­ent. Indeed, it is the “darkness of the pres­ent moment”
that drives us forward, t­ oward a ­future in which life might become something
other than what it currently is.9 According to Bloch, such a possibility depends
on “flashes of hope” or “preilluminations” of t­ hings that exist in the pres­ent’s
latent potential.10 He writes that “alone, novel and profound, the function of
hope also flashes . . . ​itself nothing but our expanded darkness, our darkness in
the issue of its own womb, in the expansion of its latency.”11 Thus, a contradictory
dynamic exists within Bloch’s conception of darkness, for it is what limits and
threatens our existence, as well as where our hope stirs and expands. Simply
put, the darkness of the pres­ent moment is the very condition that might gen-
erate the possibility of moving beyond it. It is the site of hope and the precon-
dition of becoming.
Like Deleuze, Bloch emphasizes unfinished pro­cesses of becoming over
the fixity of being.12 Bloch’s interest in becoming is guided by a fundamen-
tal belief that “the world is full of disposition to something that does not yet
exist.”13 For him, this disposition is firmly rooted in historical and material
context and the search for the missing something (such as equality or free-
dom) is what drives us to become.
In addition to darkness, hope is central to Bloch’s thinking on becoming.
He calls hope “the most ­human of all ­mental feelings” and characterizes it in
terms that we d­ on’t often associate it with t­ oday—­hope is an “excessive” and
“explosive” force often interchangeable with anxiety and hunger.14 He views
­these dynamic qualities as necessary for motivating h­ uman efforts to “venture
beyond” the “negative aspects” of the pres­ent.15 ­W hether repression or exploi-

114 | angela garcia
tation, this negativity must be thought and ultimately negated through the
anxious hope for a “not yet” real­ity he calls utopia. This orientation of hope
­toward the not-­yet resonates with what Deleuze16 and Deleuze and Guattari17
call desire—­that is, t­ hose unconscious drives that are s­ haped within concrete
circumstances, and which are fundamental to the creation of new possibilities.
For Bloch, utopia is not separate from the historical pres­ent, nor is it an
ideal place. Instead, it is a means of critiquing what is and it motivates hope and
hunger for a dif­fer­ent ­future. The hopeful quest for utopia requires that ­people
“throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves
belong.”18 In this sense, darkness, hope, and utopia return one to what Bloch
calls “the work” of becoming—­work that is not only meta­phorical or philo-
sophical, but that also depends on the a­ ctual ­labor of the individual.19 According
to Bloch, t­ here is an ethical imperative to share in this work for the good of the
community, even if that good can never be known. In this sense, he conceives of
becoming as a social pro­cess, not an individual one. ­There are shades of Deleuze
and Guattari’s collaborative writings ­here, which place a similar emphasis on the
social, po­liti­cal, and technological dimensions of becoming.20
Dreams, visions, wishes, and the religious imagination figure prominently in
Bloch’s philosophy, and he views ­these not as naive, but as concrete expressions
of the potential to become. ­These expressions operate as forms of dialectical cri-
tique through which the “not yet” is ­imagined and ­shaped. “Let the daydreams
grow even fuller,” Bloch writes, so that they may become “more familiar, more
clearly understood and more mediated with the course of ­things.”21 This recalls
Deleuze’s thoughts on art and lit­er­a­ture as offering forms of thought and feel-
ing that can respond to, and potentially address, the prob­lems of our times.
Indeed, for both Bloch and Deleuze, becoming depends at once on concrete
limits and strug­gles, affective and psychic investments, and the effort to un-
derstand and creatively expand their potential.

recollections of ­things to come

“Mexico is becoming a hell,” the writer Elena Poniatowska commented, a­ fter

forty-­three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College w ­ ere dis­
appeared.22 Indeed, when considering Mexico ­today compared to during the
Dirty War, which Poniatowska chronicled, one is struck by how much darker
the pres­ent seems to be.23 The darkness of Mexico is manifest in the mass deaths
and disappearances of ­women and youths, unpre­ce­dented levels of criminal
vio­lence and impunity, worsening economic in­equality and insecurity, and the

heaven | 115
corrosion of democracy and trust. But to conclude from ­these horrors noth-
ing more than a hopeless descent into hell would mean assuming an existence
without dreams or the possibility of change. Such an existence is inconceiv-
able to Mexicans ­today who seek to endure, escape, and transform the dark-
ness of the pres­ent. The question we are faced with, then, is how to articulate
and expand t­ hese efforts while maintaining contact with the dangers and un-
certainties that pervade Mexico ­today.
I began this chapter with the story of a demonstration ­because it is a clear
expression of a movement seeking to sustain hope for change in the face of
brutal, ongoing repression. Drawing ­people from all parts of Mexican soci-
ety, the movement is a continuation of a long history of social mobilization
by many groups challenging state authoritarianism and pursuing a better
life.24 Throughout the demonstration, references to past tragedies and mobi-
lizations combined seamlessly with the messages of the pres­ent. Todos Somos
Ayotzinapa! ezln! YoSoy132! Fue el Estado! 1968! Nunca Mas! Paz, Justicia y
Dignidad! La Revolución no ha terminado! Far from detracting from the crisis
at hand, the force of past tragedies and ongoing strug­gles helped provide the
energy for the movement on that November day, highlighting the unfinished
pro­cess of social becoming.
In his memoir of the October 1968 massacre of student demonstrators in
Tlatelolco, Mexico City, and the tumultuous de­cade that preceded it, Paco
Ignacio Taibo addresses the difficulties presented by the very notion of the
movement. “We d­ idn’t know what the movement was,” he writes, “but it was
growing . . . ​a tidal wave that just kept growing and growing.”25 Taibo recalls the
relationships, ideas, affects, and actions—­some from the past, o­ thers from the
pres­ent—­that gave expression to the desire for liberation, which was met with
increasing levels of state repression in Mexico. He writes: “All we knew was that
­there was a Movement and that it had to be defended against ­those who sought to
destroy it with clubs and bazooka fire, and protected from t­ hose who wanted
to suffocate it with words, slow it down, halt it. We knew that we had to make it
grow, nourish it, and take it beyond itself.”26
The book’s title, ’68, delineates ­these efforts in relation to the darkness of
a par­tic­u­lar historical juncture. At the same time, Taibo carries ’68 forward,
like a pre-­illumination of ­things still in the making. The book recalls Bloch’s
ontology of the “not yet” of utopia, which is or­ga­nized around not a specific
destination, but the gradual growing together of affect and action that pos-
its a quest for a more positive ­future. In the context of the mass protests in
’68, Taibo says that such a quest “meant vio­lence, repression, fear, prison, as-

116 | angela garcia
sassination.”27 However, it also meant “the reengagement of a generation of
students with their own society, their investment in neighborhoods hitherto
unknown to them, discussions on the bus, a breaking down of barriers, a dis-
covery of solidarity among the ­people.”28
This emphasis on producing arts of po­liti­cal opposition, and consequently
modes of ­human connection, resembles Bloch’s discussion of the importance
of forms of social engagement that may open up new realizations of the ­future.
For Bloch, ­these modes of engagement can manifest themselves as dreams and
actions amid the darkness of the lived moment. Hence, the positive trajectory
of hope is intrinsically linked to negativity. Likewise, when Taibo writes of
“the tremendous force of our four hundred dead . . . ​images of the wounded
being dragged off by their hair . . . ​memory of blood on the wet ground,” he
speaks of the generative force of darkness.29
In Mexico, then as now, this force is embodied by an image of the dead and
dis­appeared. It is an image that enables and challenges hope. And it shapes the
movement that has again returned to the streets, confronting the darkness that
surrounds us, finding within it sparks of light that enable us, as Bloch says, “to
see around the corner, where a dif­fer­ent, unfamiliar life may be g­ oing on.”30

a dark corridor

Grupo Centro is located in a working-­class area of downtown Mexico City,

on a street crowded with traffic, pedestrians, vendors, and beggars. It occupies
two small rooms in a building constructed when ­there was an explicit attempt
to remake Mexico City in the image of Eu­ro­pean cities. Over the de­cades, the
building’s few spacious apartments w ­ ere subdivided into smaller and smaller
dwellings, many without kitchens or bathrooms. The ornate figural ele­ments
on the building’s exterior are now chipped beyond recognition, and ivy climbs
up its deep cracks. Yet the building endures, having survived the Mexican Rev-
olution and the massive earthquake of 1985, which devastated Mexico City’s
historic downtown. ­Today, the building is home to dozens of families and
street-­level shops that specialize in miscellanea—­plastic containers, hair ac-
cessories, cleaning supplies, and the like.
At the back of one of t­hese shops is a shower curtain that covers a bolted
metal door. Beyond the door lies a narrow flight of stairs that leads to Grupo
Centro’s own heavi­ly bolted entrance. At all hours of the day, a man stands guard
in the grim stairwell, monitoring traffic between Grupo Centro and the world
outside.

heaven | 117
 Grupo Centro is an anexo (literally, an annex), the name given to infor-
mal, coercive residential treatment centers for addiction. It is one of the many
thousands of anexos in Mexico City, many of which are unmarked and set
deep within other structures, like apartment buildings, commercial ware­
houses, churches, and even parking garages. E ­ very week the media tell stories
of “slaves” being rescued from the invisible yet omnipresent hell that anexos
are made to represent.31 They are described as filthy and dark, teeming with
­people deprived of their liberty and subjected to horrific vio­lence. Yet this
identification of the anexo as an immutable netherworld remains unstable, for
as a domain that exists connected to something e­ lse, as its name denotes, the
anexo operates within, not beyond, the pres­ent.
Anexos are endlessly complex and so numerous—­the Ministry of Health
estimates that ­there are 1,500–4,000 in Mexico City alone, and thousands of
­others throughout the country—­that I ­can’t account for them in their en-
tirety. But Grupo Centro is typical of the twenty or so anexos I have studied in
the past five years. I want to offer a basic understanding of their structure and
practices. This account is by no means exhaustive, but merely indicative of the
myriad concerns that anexos raise and respond to.
Grupo Centro was run and utilized by the so-­called informal working poor,
who make up more than half of Mexico’s population and often lack access to
basic public ser­vices, including health care. Most of Grupo Centro’s residents
­were taken t­ here by force, usually via arrangements made by families, who paid
the anexo 250–500 pesos a month (equivalent to US $20–­$40) for their relative’s
treatment. Once confined, ­these individuals ­were called anexados and ­were sub-
jected to a mix of interventions—­from 12-­step meetings and religious rituals to
physical and psychological vio­lence—­all of which are employed in the anexo
as treatment for addiction. Usually, the anexados remained confined ­until they
­were claimed by relatives or deemed successfully rehabilitated, a period that
ranged from months to years. At any given time, the anexos I studied usually in-
terned 10–50 anexados, although larger ones reportedly h­ ouse over 100 anexados.
Being anexado means being annexed. It means having to sleep, eat, exercise,
cook, clean, pray, confess, and be physically and psychologically disciplined in
the same place, at the same time, with the same ­people day ­after day. Typically,
­these activities take place in one room, which is usually the only one that
anexados have access to. Such rooms are typically without a view, are cramped,
and feel too hot or too cold. Yet this restricted space is where life is lived and
produced in ways that emphasize the tensions between life and death in the
darkness of Mexico’s pres­ent moment.

118 | angela garcia
 Consider forced testimonies (testimonios), which represent the foundation
of anexos’ therapeutic program. During t­hese testimonies, anexados recount
harrowing experiences of ­family, sexual, and criminal vio­lence and identify
themselves as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses. Offered multiple times a day,
day ­after day, the relentless unfolding of testimonies ­doesn’t just express life
beyond the anexo, it becomes life within it. But this life also implies release, the
possibility of which can occur only negatively, as the forces of coercion are part
of the attempt to overcome. This is perhaps more readily apparent in the
anexos’ use of other intensive or direct therapeutic practices (terapia directa),
which include ­things like hitting and kicking and verbal humiliation. Other
common forms of corporal mortification and penance directly refer to Christ’s
atonement and redemption. The question that accompanies ­these practices is
­whether they ­will weaken, rather than increase, the potential for recovery, and
­whether and how they are constitutive of becoming.
While many anexos had names that tended ­toward spirituality, Grupo Cen-
tro was named a­ fter its location in the city’s old historic center, known as the
Centro. It consisted of two rooms, taller than they ­were wide, and a ­water closet
with a toilet that rarely functioned. Both rooms had arched, wood-­framed win­
dows that faced the street below, with missing glass panes plugged up with
cardboard. Each weekend, the street would fill with ­people from the area’s
surrounding working-­class neighborhoods, who had gathered in the Centro
to shop and stroll. The loud hum of activity penetrated the anexo, creating a
kind of passage between the inside and out. Sometimes a single voice from the
street would break through, eliciting an anexado’s response. “That sounds like
so-­and-so,” someone would say. “Is he calling me?” or “What did she say?”
The founder of Grupo Centro was a recovering drug addict named Padrino
Rafa, padrino (godfather or sponsor) being the name given to found­ers and
leaders of anexos. Two live-in counselors, former anexados of Grupo Centro,
supported him in the anexo’s daily operation, and they planned to open their
own anexo one day.
Padrino Rafa retired to his apartment each night, which was located a few
blocks away. Divorced and without c­ hildren, Rafa spent the majority of his
time at Grupo Centro: he considered it his “real home,” and the individuals
within it his real ­family. Like many padrinos I came to know, he had left pri-
mary school to work and help support his ­family. That was during the 1980s,
a period of demo­cratic transition and economic collapse for Mexico, as well
as the growth of the transnational drug economy.32 To eke out a living, dislo-
cated rural farmers increasingly turned to the illegal production of marijuana

heaven | 119
and opium poppies, while young men in the city went into small-­scale drug
dealing. ­These income-­generating strategies w ­ ere also correlated with rising
rates of addiction and death in poor communities and have fueled the prolif-
eration of anexos since the 1980s.33
Over the years, Rafa developed an addiction to the same drugs he traf-
ficked. Before getting clean and opening Grupo Centro in 2006, he was in-
terned in at least twenty dif­fer­ent anexos. His m
­ other or ex-­wife arranged and
paid for some of ­these stints, and the drug trafficking organ­ization he worked
for was responsible for o­ thers. With each internment his treatment became
more intensive, which he interpreted as a mea­sure of how “fucked up” he had
become. In one interview with me, Rafa recalled being chained to a wall for
several days in an effort to subdue his rage and have him face his suffering.
He said he felt like he was “starving,” emptied of even his own intestines, and
thus unable to eat the food the anexo eventually offered him. When his then
wife saw his wasted body a­ fter four weeks in the anexo, she was worried and
wanted to bring him home. But he d­ idn’t want to return, he said, b­ ecause he
“­wasn’t ready,” although he ­didn’t know for what.
­Today, black chains are tattooed around Rafa’s thick wrists, a constant re-
minder of his imprisoned existence as well as a provocation to “live better”
(vivir mejor). In the shift from shackles to release, he seemed to pass from
self-­destructive insatiability to a kind of fulfilling hunger. Of course, the in-
ability to fulfill hunger can be explained by oppression or sickness, and the
desire to stay in the anexo—­whether ­because of fear or madness. But the
image on Rafa’s skin suggests something more. It recalls Bloch’s thoughts on
the necessity of “something missing” for the pro­cess of becoming. Hunger,
nothing, void—­these are the negative forces that have the potential to move
one forward, and to be able to find in chains something else—­a “corridor
with a door at the far end.”34
­W hether that door w­ ill ever be reached and where it leads remain un-
certain. But it is an image that introduces the possibility of movement and
change. This is what the restricted space of the anexo and its excessive prac-
tices also seeks to provide.

­faces in the crowd

Twelve anexados lived in Grupo Centro when I first began observing it in 2011.
They ­were mostly young ­people from the neighborhood, sometimes from the
same block or apartment building, and they often knew each other. Addicted to

120 | angela garcia
alcohol, solvents, or crack cocaine, they usually stayed for three to six months,
depending on their families’ ability to pay.
The anexados spent their days together in a single room, except for one-­on-­
one counseling sessions, Rafa’s business meetings, and anexados’ occasional
visits with relatives, all of which took place in the second room. Sometimes a
curandera (spiritual healer) would be called in to perform a limpia (cleansing)
on an anexado, an activity that also took place in the second room. And ­every
night the two or three female anexados w ­ ere moved in t­here in an effort to
provide them with safety.
The delivery of testimonies filled most of the day. ­Those with longer pe-
riods of sobriety and good be­hav­ior ­were permitted to sit on folding metal
chairs, while ­others sat cross-­legged on the uneven floor. Counselors continu-
ously circled the perimeter of the cramped room, scrutinizing the seated resi-
dents and reprimanding ­those who slouched or dozed off. Speakers stood at a
wooden podium at the front of the room. Rafa often interrupted the speaker’s
narrative, ordering them to “be honest,” “go deeper” or “give in” to their suf-
fering. ­These testimonies did not ascend from despair to hope to transforma-
tion, as recovery narratives typically do—­ostensibly constructing a nonaddict
identity and better ­future with each step. Instead, anexados w ­ ere pressed to
sink into and dwell, in both content and form, in the misery of their lives,
which was also the misery of their time.
During one such testimony, a young man who was called Cabrito (liter-
ally, “young goat”) recalled an after­noon when gunmen drove into his grand­
mother’s small town in the state of Michoacán. He was with his m ­ other, who
had wanted to see her own ailing m ­ other and convince her to leave her war-­
torn town and move to the capital, where it was safer. In a rhetorical form
common among anexados, Cabrito spoke in the pres­ent tense and took on the
identities and perspectives of his ­mother and grand­mother.35 In this sense, it
can be seen as an attempt to occupy and understand multiple perspectives at
once, constituting a system of thinking through ­human hopes and fears.

“Come home with us, Mama.”

“No, no, I stay ­here.”
“­There’s nothing ­here for you, Mama, nothing.”
“­Don’t be stupid, every­thing is ­here for me.”

In the end, Cabrito’s grand­mother refused to leave for reasons that seemed to
revolve around birth and death. She had been born in that small town and had
eight ­children ­there. Her husband and two of her ­children ­were buried t­ here,

heaven | 121
and she would be, too. Cabrito saw that his ­mother’s pleading was pointless,
so he went outside to take a walk. His grand­father had been a barber and run
the local shop where men used to gather to talk and primp. He wanted to see
if the shop was still ­there and buy some snacks for the long bus ­ride home.
It was the ­middle of the day and very hot. Cabrito recalled the sight of kids,
not much older than him, dressed in school uniforms. ­There w ­ asn’t much ­else
to see. His grand­father’s barbershop was now the town’s tiendita, and he de-
scribed its poorly stocked shelves—­a few vegetables, soft drinks, potato chips,
and random toys. His m ­ other was right, he thought, ­there was nothing ­here.
Cabrito said he ­couldn’t wait to get home and see his girlfriend, smoke some
marijuana and have sex, drawing laughter from a few of the anexados and a
­couple of lewd comments. “Shut up and pay attention!,” the counselors yelled.
“Había un mal” (something was wrong). Cabrito said he noticed the suv right
away ­because it looked “out of place,” but before he could respond with his feet,
the shooting started: “Ppppppppppp. It sounded like that. Ppppppppppp. You
hear? Ppppppppppppp.” Cabrito kept making the sound of bullets spraying into
the air, like he was caught inside of it and c­ ouldn’t get out. Eventually, he col-
lapsed onto the podium and started to cry, “I’m hit, I’m hit, fuck, I’m hit!” He
­wasn’t the only one. When it was over, five p­ eople had been killed, including
three schoolchildren.
“Numbers do not speak for themselves,” Judith Butler writes, but they
may help correct “the radical in­equality that characterizes the difference
between grievable and ungrievable lives.”36 With this goal in mind, I offer
some numbers h­ ere. Since 2006, at least 120,000 Mexicans have been killed
in the drug war, another 26,000 have been dis­appeared, and over 250,000
more have been displaced.37 Submerged in a vortex of vio­lence and impu-
nity, the abstracted vision of ­these deaths and disappearances requires a
mirror to reveal the ­faces in the existing darkness. And as the ­faces become
clearer, so does the darkness.
Grupo Centro offers a terrain from which to discern both ­faces and dark-
ness, and to take seriously the efforts of p­ eople as they try to perceive a way
forward. This is admittedly difficult to discern in e­ very circumstance, and the
content of what lies ahead is also uncertain. But what can be seen in the anexo
and testimonies such as the one Cabrito offered are attempts to provide a
bridge between past and existing social conditions and possibilities for some-
thing ­else to occur. Thus, what appear to be deadly manifestations of the pres­
ent in Cabrito’s testimony become indications of life’s destructive and creative
potential.

122 | angela garcia
heaven

At the start of the drug war, ­there was a sense that living in Mexico City was
like living in a ­bubble, at least for the solidly ­middle and upper classes. But this
feeling of invulnerability to the vio­lence that afflicted the rest of the country
had completely shattered by 2013. A palpable sense of inseguridad was spread-
ing throughout the capital, fueled in part by the increase in kidnappings. Most
of ­these ­were express kidnappings, a crime in which an individual is abducted
and held in a safe h­ ouse while the person and his or her f­amily members
are drained of money. State officials posited that the source of danger to the
­people of the capital was youth gangs from Mexico City’s fringes, a claim that
became the rationalization for repressive policing of poor neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, gentrified areas of the city saw a rise in fortified apartment com-
plexes, surveillance cameras, and private security forces.
On a Sunday morning in May 2013, a mass kidnapping or levantón (liter-
ally, “a lifting”) occurred in an after-­hours bar called Bar Heavens. The bar was
located in the touristy Zona Rosa district, designated by the government as
a safe neighborhood (barrio seguro) where such ­things ­were not supposed to
happen. The missing w ­ ere thirteen youths, most between the ages of sixteen
and twenty-­six. Twelve ­were from Tepito, a poor neighborhood crowded with
tenement apartments and a massive open-­air market known for its pirated
merchandise. Many of Grupo Centro’s anexados hailed from Tepito, and some
of them had tattoos or prayer amulets dedicated to Nuestra Señora de la Santa
Muerte (the Death Saint). Santa Muerte is the patron saint of prisoners, drug
dealers and users, sex workers, victimized ­women, and Mexico’s underclass.
Appearing as the female personification of the grim reaper, she bridges death
with life, promising deliverance from vio­lence and a safe delivery to the after-
life.38 Tepito is her home.
Within hours of the mass kidnapping, the families of the missing reported
the crime to the Ministry of Public Security, which was located only two
blocks from Bar Heavens. They had an eyewitness, another boy from Tepito
who saw the abduction take place in broad daylight. Yet despite multiple re-
ports and the eyewitness, the crime was not investigated for a week. During
that period, the families staged public protests against the authorities’ indif-
ference. Each day they marched from Tepito carry­ing images of the missing
and placards announcing that the authorities did not care about them: “Ya es
mucho tiempo y nada ayuda! Ayudanos a encontrarlos!” [So much time has
passed and you ­haven’t helped! Help us find them!]

heaven | 123
 Meanwhile in Tepito large banners that read “Les has visto?” [Have you
seen them?] ­were draped across market stalls and apartment buildings. The
banners described the identifying physical characteristics of the missing: a
round face, mole, or cracked tooth; thin lips; pierced ears; black hair; light
skin; tattoos of names in Hebrew; tattoos of Santa Muerte and the Virgin of
Guadalupe; tattoos of hearts and diamonds; tattoos of tears.
Mexico City’s prosecutor and mayor referred to the youth as absent, not
dis­appeared. They said the crime was an act of retaliation between rival gangs
based in Tepito and was not related to drug cartels, concluding that the inci-
dent at Heavens was not a cause of concern for citizens or visitors to Mexico
City. Their comments made the residents of Tepito furious, and they staged
even larger protests in response. I observed several marches and vigils, in
which generations of relatives, mostly ­women, participated.
Within weeks of the kidnapping at Heavens, the number of anexados at
Grupo Centro had doubled.
I was ­there the after­noon Magi arrived. The men who transported her to
Grupo Centro immediately took her into the second room, where Rafa and
the counselors ­were waiting. Every­one ­else was in the other room, with a more
se­nior anexado named Mario left in charge. Mario had been in and out of an-
exos for more than a de­cade and had spent seven months at Grupo Centro. He
­couldn’t imagine life beyond anexos, but was determined to change his posi-
tion within them—­first by acting as an encargado (the one in charge), then by
becoming a counselor and eventually a padrino of his own anexo. Part of his
training involved repeating the commands of Grupo Centro’s counselors, and
Mario carefully raised his voice an octave above theirs to signal his lesser status.
On this par­tic­u­lar occasion, he led the group in its daily reading of recovery
lit­er­a­ture.
I heard Magi before I saw her. She screamed obscenities and demanded
to go home. Some of the anexados chuckled and wondered who the new girl
was and ­whether she was attractive. Eventually, her screams broke into sobs.
When I left the anexo that eve­ning she was still crying in the second room,
alone.
I fi­nally met Magi when I returned to Grupo Centro the following week.
She was small and thin, with long black hair that she tied on top of her head, only
to let it loose and tie it up again. She was dressed like a typical teenager, in tight
jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-­shirt that read “The Ramones.” To my surprise,
the counselors ­didn’t call her offensive names, as they did other newcomers,
and she was permitted to sit in a chair, not on the floor. I figured that she must

124 | angela garcia
have been one of Rafa’s relatives or the child of someone impor­tant. In fact, she
was a cousin of one of the ­people abducted from Heavens and a close friend of
several ­others.
It was July, and hope that the missing would be found alive was fading.
Cut off from the news, Magi asked me for updates. I hesitated to say anything
­because I worried it might upset her. But the truth was that ­there ­wasn’t much
to report, which was also upsetting. Sometimes, a­ fter seeing Magi at Grupo
Centro, I walked by Heavens. The walls ­were still plastered with images of
the dis­appeared and handwritten messages to them. Scrawled in block print,
the messages assured the dis­appeared that they w ­ eren’t forgotten, that their
­children ­were still waiting for them, and that their families would keep looking
for them and fighting for justice.
Anexos also engage in kidnapping. While their kidnappings are similar to
violent acts of forced disappearance, and the sociohistorical context is the
same, they should not be subsumed u­ nder the same category, be it criminal or
narco. That is, the anexos’ practice of kidnapping fosters a dif­fer­ent experien-
tial understanding—­one that locates the significance of the negative practice
in the search for a better ­future, although this cannot be guaranteed.
In an interview, Magi described the day she was “lifted” and taken to Grupo
Centro. She had been working at her f­ amily’s market stall in Tepito, calling out
to potential customers. Typically her ­mother or aunt worked with her, but on
that par­tic­u­lar day she was alone. She recalled,

It happened so fast. I was working and then I was in the dark. . . . ​I was hot.
I could barely breathe. . . . ​No. . . . ​I ­couldn’t move. . . . ​
I heard laughing . . . ​doors opening and closing. . . . ​My heart pounded
so hard it hurt me. . . . ​
I thought, “My god, this is it. I am ­going to die. This is it, . . .”
I kept thinking, “Is this is what happened to him [her kidnapped
cousin]? ­Will anyone find me? Are they taking me to the same place?”
But I landed ­here. I landed ­here. . . . ​I’m ­here.

In full view of neighboring vendors, customers, and passersby, Magi was

kidnapped, wrapped in a blanket, and transported to Grupo Centro against her
knowledge and ­will. Her terrifying experience was similar to ­those of many
other (but not all) anexados, and it filled her with complex emotions, includ-
ing rage. How could her parents have agreed to this, given the circumstances?
She ­didn’t even have a drug prob­lem. But her rage was tinged with sadness, as
she knew that her parents feared losing her to the terrible darkness that had

heaven | 125
befallen Mexico. During Magi’s interment, several national and international
agencies declared a femicide pandemic in Mexico, identifying the most dan-
gerous place for ­women as the State of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City.
Magi’s account of being kidnapped conjures up one of the defining im-
ages of the drug war: the image of the encobijado, a murdered body (usually
a ­woman’s) literally “enfolded in a blanket” and disposed of in a vacant lot, a
muddy canal, a dusty road. While anexos’ modified engagements with enco-
bijado joins the symbolic vio­lence of the drug war, the usual story line ­doesn’t
apply.39 For in this context, kidnapping and enfolding are figurative modes
in which ideas of care and protection mix with the tangible criminal vio­lence
that pervades everyday life. And it is within the anexos’ hybrid of vio­lence and
care that a pro­cess of becoming emerges, one that begins with being unfurled
and leads to the revelation of survival. As Magi put it, “I landed ­here. I’m ­here.”
Such awareness is achieved negatively, through the concrete threat of being
enfolded within the terrifying conditions of the pres­ent real­ity. Experiencing
darkness in such immediate terms, Magi’s unfurling from the blanket can also
be thought of as unveiling a horizon of life. In this sense, it echoes the kinds of
contradictory experiences Bloch considers so necessary for becoming: expe-
riences so “full of ambiguities” and tension that they point to the presence or
possibility of something ­else.40
Three months a­ fter they w
­ ere abducted from Heavens, the bodies of twelve
of the missing ­were found in a concealed grave on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Nine had been decapitated. As news of the discovery spread, so did the narra-
tive that the victims must have been criminals, as if that justified their brutal
deaths. Their families angrily rejected this idea. In the days that followed, they
spoke to tele­vi­sion reporters, describing their murdered relatives as young,
dedicated parents or students—­good, hard-­working ­people, not involved in
crime or drugs, ­people who ­were loved and missed.
Magi learned of the fate of her cousin and friends while she was at Grupo
Centro. Many anexados tried to console her and often repeated the phrase “it
could have been any one of us.” O ­ thers seemed frustrated by all of the attention
she received and pointed out that they had suffered similar tragedies but had
not been fussed over. A shrine was created and a memorial ser­vice held, dur-
ing which anexados offered prayers, expressed their feelings, and threatened
revenge. In the weeks that followed, the anexados w ­ ere made to continuously
engage with the darkness of the moment, the precarious conditions of their own
existence, and the possibility of release.

126 | angela garcia
 Magi remained at Grupo Centro for almost nine months—­long enough
for her ­family to feel that she was, somehow, out of harm’s way. Or perhaps her
internment had become too costly. Indeed, the mass kidnapping seemed to
be taking a toll on Tepito’s economy. Rafa mea­sured the downturn by late and
partial payments for his ser­vices, and by mounting requests to accept goods
and ser­vices instead of money in exchange for a loved one’s treatment.
Magi returned to Tepito and worked at her ­family’s market stall. I saw her
at the demonstration on November  2014. She wore a T-­shirt that bore an
image of her cousin’s face, making his death a precondition of Mexico’s move-
ment to live.

the possibility within heavens

Like the tides of demonstrators drawn together in the Zócalo, anexos repre-
sent a notion of futurity that is related to the historically situated darkness.
Far from conceptualizing utopia as an impossibility, anexos suggest that the
potential of a brighter ­future is pres­ent in its very absence.
Vio­lence is a fundamental real­ity in both the activist movements and
anexos, and this essay has tried to show how vio­lence works both as a force
for annihilation and as a summons to live. If Heavens pres­ents the real­ity of
annihilation, it also represents a longing that motivates collective po­liti­cal
movement—­movement that at once negates what is and points to what could
be. For Bloch, this is the central function of utopia.
“Our space,” Bloch writes, is “always life, or something more.”41 Answering
the questions of what that something more is and how it can ever be known,
remains life’s difficult task. The anthropology of becoming takes on this task,
following the horizon of life as it moves, even in the narrowest of spaces.

notes
1 The Mexican government claims that the forty-­three students w ­ ere incinerated in a
remote trash dump in Guerrero State, but that claim has been dismissed by the Inter-­
American Commission on ­Human Rights.
2 Cultural production is obsessed with apocalyptic visions of Mexico related to prob­lems in
urban ecol­ogy, ­labor exploitation, and especially the drug war. ­These visions generally do
not attempt to figure out what came before the apocalypse, or what might emerge from it.
3 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka.
4 Keller, Face of the Deep.

heaven | 127
 5 Noy, The Per­sis­tence of the Negative.
6 I am not alone in this regard. See, for example, Thompson and Žižek, The Privatization of
Hope.
7 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia. ­These concepts are found throughout Bloch’s writings, but I
refer ­here to this text.
8 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 4.
9 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 4.
10 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 4.
11 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 200–201 (emphasis in the original).
12 Due to space constraints, I can mention only briefly some of the common aspects in
Bloch’s and Deleuze’s work.
13 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 76.
14 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 74.
15 Bloch writes: “Hunger cannot help continually renewing itself. But if it increases unin-
terrupted, satisfied by no certain bread, then it suddenly changes. The body-­ego then
becomes rebellious, does not go out in search for food merely within the old framework.
It seeks to change the situation that has caused its empty stomach, its handing head.
The No to the bad situation, which exists, the Yes to the better life that hovers ahead, is
incorporated by the deprived into a revolutionary interest. This interest always begins
with hunger, hunger transforms itself, having been taught, into an explosive force against
the prison of deprivation. Thus the self seeks not only to preserve itself, it becomes ex-
plosive” (The Princi­ple of Hope, 76).
16 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.
17 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus.
18 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 4.
19 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 198.
20 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus, and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo­phre­nia.
21 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 43.
22 See, for example, “México se está convirtiendo en un infierno,” Univision, Novem-
ber  16, 2014, http://­www​.­univision​.­com​/­noticias​/­noticias​-­de​-­mexico​/­mexico​-­se​-­esta​
-­convirtiendo​-­en​-­un​-­infierno​-­denuncia​-­la​-­escritora​-­elena​-­poniatowska.
23 The Dirty War (Guerra Sucia) refers to the period between the late 1960s and the early
1980s when thousands of university students, leftist activists, and po­liti­cal opponents of
the government w ­ ere killed, tortured, or dis­appeared by government forces. The most
notable event was the 1968 student massacre in Tlatelolco, Mexico City. In April 2015,
historical documents related to this period ­were reclassified “confidential” and removed
from public view in Mexico’s National Archives, adding to the growing distrust of the
government.
24 See, for example, Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire; Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of
State Formation.
25 Taibo, ’68, 33–34.
26 Taibo, ’68, 35–36.
27 Taibo, ’68, 50.

128 | angela garcia
 28 Taibo, ’68, 50.
29 Taibo, ’68, 108.
30 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 1193.
31 See, for example, Gutierrez, “Epidemias de Violencia.”
32 A growing body of research demonstrates that the demo­cratic transition and neolib-
eral policies and practices exacerbated long-­standing socioeconomic inequalities and
fueled the promotion of Mexico’s illegal drug trade. See Astorga, El siglo de las drogas;
González, “Neoliberalismo y crimen organizado en Mexico: El surgimiento del Estado
narco.”
33 Zamudio, Las redes del narcomenudeo.
34 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 9.
35 In this way, his testimony expanded the limits of personal experience into a collective
narrative of strug­gle, reflecting the genre of Latin American testimonio more broadly.
36 Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, xxii.
37 Heinle, Molzahn, and Shirk, Drug Vio­lence in Mexico.
38 Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico.
39 Reguillo, “The Narco-­Machine and the Work of Vio­lence.”
40 Bloch, The Princi­ple of Hope, 948.
41 Bloch, Traces, 30.

heaven | 129
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III
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 4

Rebellious ­Matter

The Poetics of Ritual Space in a Turko-­Syrian Border Town

bridget purcell

In the hours before dawn on August  27, 2011, some thirty thousand men,
­women, and ­children had gathered at Balıklıgöl, the ritual complex at the
heart of the city of Urfa in southeastern Turkey. This was Kadir Gecesi (in
Arabic, Leylat al-­Qadr; in En­glish, Night of Power), the night commemorat-
ing the Qur­an’s revelation to the Prophet Muhammad.1 It is the holiest night
of the year—­“ better than a thousand months”2—­when prayers are heard and
forgiveness is extended, and it is customary for Muslims to gather at mosques
and spend the night awake in communal worship. That so many had chosen to
do so at Balıklıgöl points to the site’s dense significance: each of the mosques,
graves, and carp pools in this centuries-­old ritual complex is mythically tied
to the prophet Abraham. This is where, according to local belief, Abraham
was born; where he opposed the pagan king Nimrod and destroyed his idols;
and where he was saved from a fiery death by the grace of God. For many
­people, t­ hese associations place Balıklıgöl in special relation to the divine—­
for instance, the carp are known as kutsal balıklar (sacred fish), and the spring
­water is believed to have healing powers.
On ordinary days, Balıklıgöl is clean, spacious, and or­ga­nized. A multimillion-­
dollar restoration proj­ect carried out in the 1990s had refashioned the com-
plex as a three-­dimensional postcard, with its mosques standing serene and
monumental amid manicured gardens and paved walkways. The effort had
entailed cleansing the space of its noisy vernacular ele­ments: gone w ­ ere the
­houses that had crowded in around the mosques, the oddly spaced trees and
crab grass, and sundry social activities like picnicking and swimming, so
that what remained ­were clean lines and broad vistas. On this night, how-
ever, it was as though all of the efforts to preen and or­ga­nize the site had
been undone. The density of the crowds made the paths difficult to walk, and
the grassy areas ­were covered with families seated or reclining on blankets.
Though disorderly, the scene was also intimate, almost domestic: ­children
slept at their ­mothers’ sides, among simmering teapots and the remnants of
iftar dinners.
I was accompanied that night by two friends, Özlem and Zuhal, students
of Islamic theology who ­were visiting from a nearby Kurdish village. The two
­women usually came to Urfa’s city center only on the formal errands of gro-
cery shopping or visiting relatives, and for them the chance to spend a night
amid the bustle of the crowd was a novel and exciting prospect. L ­ ater, back in
the village, they would describe the eve­ning over and over, recounting each
detail. Yet on the night itself, I watched as my companions grew agitated by the
crowding, the heat, and the garbage strewn across the sidewalks. “Kalabalık,”
they repeated—­a word meaning uneasy-­making crowdedness. And when I
took out my camera to photo­graph the scene, the two seemed embarrassed,
exchanging ner­vous glances and hastening to divert my attention. It struck me
then that what I had first taken to be mere physical discomfort with this rite
also involved for them a degree of moral discomfort.
In the months of my fieldwork that followed, I would learn that for many of
my interlocutors, this ritual—­and more precisely, this ritual setting—­had in-
deed come to seem morally ambiguous. In recent years, a revivalist movement
in Urfa had promoted a purified, text-­based version of Islamic practice, casting
doubt on Balıklıgöl and its panoply of folk practices. My friends’ hesitation
thus marked a wider cultural fault line, in Urfa and beyond, between ­those
who are at home among saints’ tombs and sacred fish, and a growing constitu-
ency who insist that such ­things have no place in Islam. Elsewhere, this issue
has exploded into politics: the Islamic State’s recent destruction of ancient
ritual sites in northern Iraq is a dramatic example. But in Urfa, the shift was
incipient, and for most p­ eople not precisely ascribable. Hence my impression
of a ritual landscape in flux—­a landscape where old practices ­were subject to
new forms of doubt and uncertainty, and where it was pos­si­ble to be an im-
mersed participant one moment and an outsider the next.

134 | bridget purcell
 Such experiences of dissonance have received ­little attention in the anthro-
pology of Islam, notwithstanding the rich volume of scholarship on revivalist
movements and their effects in reshaping religious landscapes and subjec-
tivities.3 For more than a de­cade, scholarly accounts of Islamic revival (and
arguably of Islam writ large) have been dominated by a Foucauldian emphasis
on discipline and subject formation.4 One result of this shift has been a re-
newed interest in the materiality of religious life, including its spatial settings.
But in many anthropological accounts of Islamic practice, materiality tends to
be subordinated to a mandatory vision of ethical self-­perfection—­a disciplin-
ary telos whose end point is the pious subject. Saba Mahmood, for instance,
emphasizes ­those iterative, embodied practices whereby participants in reviv-
alist movements—­women like Özlem and Zuhal—­progressively bring their
religious subjectivities into line with authorized models of Islamic practice.5
As some scholars have begun to note, this analytic leaves l­ ittle room for expe-
riences of doubt, ambivalence, and distanciation within religious experience.6
What conceptual or ethnographic figures might illuminate moments like the
one above, when bodies, spaces, and subjects seem not to submit to the linear
trajectory of discipline?
I find an intriguing (if unlikely) figure of thought in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice—­a character who strug­gles to orient herself in a complex landscape
whose rules of engagement keep changing.7 Like the pious subjects of recent
ethnographies, Alice is concerned above all with the rules of proper conduct,
and she strug­gles to comport herself accordingly.8 But in Carroll’s story, the
subject is decentered with re­spect to the landscape: Alice is in Wonderland,
Wonderland is not in Alice. As the milieu changes, Alice’s strategies for engaging
it must also change. She must be big enough to reach the key on the t­able,
but small enough to pass through the door that leads to the garden. Avail-
ing herself of potions and cakes marked “eat me” and “drink me,” she grows
bigger and smaller, continually altering her relationship to her surroundings.
Unfortunately for Alice, this is not a story of progressive mastery through it-
erative practice: her methods are always ad hoc and provisional, and she must
begin again and again. Her shape-­shifting is a ­matter not of discipline, but of
becoming.
In this chapter, I explore the tentative, nonlinear ways that individuals ori-
ent themselves in a ritual landscape that exceeds their full control. In d­ oing
so, I draw on recent anthropological and feminist approaches to space and
place that, inspired in part by Gilles Deleuze, insist on a vital materiality that
at times exceeds and unsettles the subjects who encounter it.9 I w ­ ill argue that

rebellious matter | 135
such a space demands much of the p­ eople who inhabit it, asking them to adopt
multiple experiential and interpretive viewpoints in a single instant. Take, for
instance, my friends’ participation in the rite, but their discomfort with my pho-
tographing it—­how they ­were at once open to the moment and reluctant to
have it cast as an enduring emblem. While such dissonant moments might seem
insignificant in themselves, they may point us ­toward tectonic shifts at the level
of power, politics, and theology. Paying attention to them may help us under-
stand how p­ eople apprehend large-­scale pro­cesses of change and, in the pro­
cess, change themselves.

space and power in southeast turkey

Urfa is a bustling city of 900,000 in the southeast of Turkey. Located just north
of the Syrian border, it lies where the Anatolian plateau meets both the Kurd-
ish highlands (to the east) and the Syrian desert (to the south). This border
location is reflected in the city’s population—­a blend of Turks, Kurds, and
Arabs who, u­ ntil the early twentieth c­ entury, lived alongside autochthonous
populations of Jews, Yezidis, and Christians (both Syriac and Armenian).
Travelers to Urfa have long chronicled the shock of crossing the Euphrates
and finding themselves in a Turkey that they no longer recognize. In “mysti-
cal and pious” Urfa, a popu­lar English-­language guidebook observes, “you
­ iddle East.”10 This description condenses the
begin to feel y­ ou’ve reached the M
vari­ous ways in which Urfa plays other to the west of the country—­the pur-
portedly modern, secular Turkey of the Turks, the one that could almost pass
for Eu­rope. ­Those “­Middle Eastern” qualities touted as exotic touches in the
guidebook—­“­women cloaked in black chadors” and “the call to prayer as an
essential soundtrack”—­are precisely ­those which, in the wider national imagi-
nary, have singled Urfa out as both an object of cultural condescension and a
target of state intervention.11
The province of Urfa was formally annexed to Turkey in 1939, yet in many
ways its relationship to the state has remained unsettled and contested.12
Throughout the remainder of the twentieth c­ entury, the state has engaged in
aggressive spatial interventions in Urfa, attempting to fend off efforts (both
real and ­imagined) to draw it into alternative geopo­liti­cal entities. ­There have
been consistent serial efforts to “Turkify” the province, although the specific
strategies have changed over time. For instance, in the early twentieth c­ entury,
following the massacre and expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities from
Urfa, ­these efforts entailed erasing the architectural traces of Armenians and

136 | bridget purcell
other Christians, changing polyglot Ottoman place-­names to Turkish top-
onyms, and so on.13 During the second half of the twentieth ­century, ­these
efforts entailed undermining Kurdish movements via de­cades of land expro-
priation, village destruction, and forced migration. Other spatial strategies in-
cluded broadcasting nationalist symbols in restive areas—­one still finds the
Kemalist slogan “Happy is he who calls himself a Turk” emblazoned on moun-
tainsides in predominantly Kurdish and Arab regions of the southeast.
­Today, such aggressive, top-­down displays of state power have largely given
way to a softer approach grounded in economic development and modern-
ization (though many scholars and activists view this approach as consistent
with earlier assimilationist aims).14 In recent de­cades, spatial interventions
in the region have included land reform, village-­to-­urban migration, invest-
ments in tourism infrastructure, and, notably, the restoration of ritual sites like
Baliklıgöl. Given the Turkish state’s history of aggressive secularism, this con­
temporary investment in ritual space warrants some comment.15 Much like
the French laïcité on which it is based, Turkish secularism (laiklik) has always
entailed substantial state involvement in regulating religious life. For instance,
the state defines orthodox practice through an official ministry, which over-
sees every­thing from religious education to Friday sermons. Over the past
twenty-­five years, major shifts in national politics have resulted in a state less
intent on suppressing religiosity than on promoting a specific version of it.16 In
brief, the version of Sunni Islam espoused by the con­temporary Turkish state
is characterized by a “modernist” or rationalist outlook that embraces adher-
ence to the texts of the Islamic tradition and opposes charismatic practices
such as saint worship—­which are espoused both by other Islamic sects and
by many Sunnis at the level of popu­lar or folk religiosity.17
In Urfa and elsewhere, spatial interventions have been a key means whereby
local religious cultures have been brought into line with a state-­sanctioned, or-
thodox version of Sunni Islam.18 Scholars have often understood this “ortho-
doxization” of local religiosity in a top-­down fashion: the state promulgates an
official or orthodox version of Islam, which is then disseminated locally through
institutions (mosques and religious schools) and personages (imams and reli-
gious instructors), and eventually it comes to reshape religious practices and
sensibilities at a local or neighborhood level. Space, ­here, is principally a site of
collective discipline that molds the posture, sensibilities, and subjectivities of
­those who inhabit it. This disciplinary analytic applies both to the discipline
that the state applies to its citizens (what Michel Foucault calls “power”) and
to the discipline that individuals intentionally apply to themselves (what

rebellious matter | 137
Foucault calls “ethics,” including “technologies of the self ”).19 In both cases,
norms are progressively habituated or sedimented so that they become un-
conscious orientations.
This analytic illuminates much about revivalism as it is unfolding in Urfa—­
principally by drawing our attention to space and the body as sites for the
functioning of disciplinary power, and vectors whereby authoritative or of-
ficialized standards of Islam are learned and put into practice. But discipline is
only part of the story. As I describe below, space in Urfa is multiple, reflecting
not a single religiopo­liti­cal regime, but transitions and overlaps among many.
The site thus calls to mind what Foucault, in a short, exploratory essay, called
a “heterotopia”—­a space that condenses a range of exogenous institutions and
practices, some of which are internally incongruous. He writes: “The hetero-
topia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites
that are in themselves incompatible.”20 Yet Foucault does not address how
­people inhabit heterotopias—­that is, how they navigate uneven transitions
among regimes of knowledge and power.
This is a question that Urfa raises with particularly clarity and urgency. As I
write, the city has become an uneasy buffer zone, crisscrossed by Islamic State
fighters, Kurdish militants, and Turkish armed forces, each representing distinct
normative visions of religious and po­liti­cal life. In ­these circumstances, a focus
on the continuity of tradition and the sedimentation of subjectivities w ­ ill take
us only so far. We must also pay attention to the multiple, overlapping normative
­orders that constitute ­people’s lives and ask how ­people navigate their some-
times discrepant demands. This is a challenge that calls for an ethnographic
approach attuned to both the complexities of space and the temporalities of
becoming.

the poetic density of ritual space

The mosque complex of Balıklıgöl is Urfa’s beating heart, the city’s ritual and
symbolic center. On any given day, the site teems with groups of villa­gers from
the surrounding districts; Arabic-­speaking families from Syria or Iraq; groups
of Ira­ni­ans, seventy or a hundred at a time, identifiable by their distinct dress;
and the occasional tourist from Eu­rope or Western Turkey. Th ­ ese visitors move
among the site’s vari­ous ziyaret yerleri (visitation places): mosques, gravesites,
fountains, and—­most significantly—­the cave where Abraham is believed to
have been born. Th ­ ese are dense sites of ritual activity. The cave’s low, pock-
marked ceiling bears evidence of stones chipped away as souvenirs or relics,

138 | bridget purcell
and supplications are written directly on the walls, or scrawled on scraps of paper
that are then tucked into crevices. ­Water flows up through an interior spring,
and w ­ omen press in around it, filling plastic ­bottles with its healing ­water.
One cannot miss ­here the significance of space—­its affective density, its
embodied draw—­but its import exceeds the unconscious inscription empha-
sized in Foucauldian approaches. For Urfa’s inhabitants are explic­itly preoc-
cupied with ritual space, and with spatial forms more broadly. Young p­ eople
express their aspirations for upward mobility by describing the type of dwell-
ing and neighborhood they hope to someday occupy. Men and ­women in their
fifties and sixties describe the sights and sounds of the old city streets where
they grew up. And on the shelves of the municipal library, one finds an im­
mense volume of locally produced writing and photography devoted to
Urfa’s urban space, religious sites, and domestic architecture. Thus for the
­people of Urfa, urban form is the principal idiom for narrating pro­cesses of
change—­a medium that registers the effects of large-­scale, often exogenous
pro­cesses (migration and shifts in governance) on personal and communal
life. Space ­here is marked by what Rupert Stasch calls “poetic density”—­a
capacity to condense or “make pres­ent” large-­scale, exogenous pro­cesses
that have ­shaped and reshaped social life.21 A brief historical overview of
Balıklıgöl reveals it to be a palimpsest or cata­logue of ­these processes—­one
that bears witness to the always incomplete nature of transitions among
religio-­political regimes.
The earliest mentions of Urfa call it “Orhay,” a Syriac name most likely
derived from the Greek Orrha (“the city of beautiful flowing w ­ ater”) or the
22
Semitic root r-­w-­‘ (“to bring w ­ ater”). ­These names evoke a river that ran
through the city’s center—­a tributary of the Euphrates aptly called Daisan
(“leaping river”) for its tendency to flood capriciously. In the third ­century
ce, u­ nder the Seleucid Empire, the Daisan’s w ­ aters ­were harnessed through
underground channels, and diverted to springs and pools within the city walls.
­These pools—­known t­oday as the sacred carp pools of Abraham—­became
foci of healing and sacrifice for regional pagan cults, touching off an efflores-
cence of architecture, poetry, art, and ceremonial in honor of the fish goddess
Atargatis.23 Urfa’s cultic center was widely known in the ancient world, taking
its place alongside cities like Palmyra and Hieropolis, with which it was linked
by a north-­south caravan route that extended from what is now Diyarbakır
through Mesopotamia.
When Urfa ­adopted Chris­tian­ity—in the second ­century ce, it was one
of the first cities to do so—­the ritual center found new uses. Edessa, as the

rebellious matter | 139
city was known in late antiquity, was a major center for the development of
Syriac Chris­tian­ity. New ritual sites like the M ­ other Mary Church (built in
363) ­were constructed on top of Urfa’s old cultic centers, incorporating them
materially while displacing their significance.24 Yet the displacement was
only partial. The Syriac chronicler Bar Daisan reports that as late as the third
­century, the men of Urfa would castrate themselves in honor of Atargatis. The
practice was popu­lar enough to elicit a rebuke from the Christian king, Abgar,
who “commanded that anyone who emasculated himself should have a hand
cut off.”25 This makes it clear that, despite the admonitions of the elite, popu­
lar Chris­tian­ity in Urfa remained thoroughly suffused with the practices and
sensibilities of the cults that preceded it. This influence was manifest, too, in
the Eastern Christian “cult of the saints”—­one major example of which was
the cult of St. Thomas the Apostle, whose martyry was located at Baliklıgöl.26
As mythic and material schemes succeeded one another over the centu-
ries, some of Baliklıgöl’s meanings and materials w ­ ere displaced, while o­ thers
­were resignified or incorporated into new ritual constellations—at times, un-
easily. Around the f­ourteenth ­century, when Urfa was ruled by the Muslim
Zengid dynasty, the site came to be associated with Abraham, and his famed
confrontation with the pagan king Nimrod. As the story goes, Nimrod ruled
over Urfa from the citadel that overlooks Baliklıgöl. When Abraham came of
age, he confronted Nimrod and destroyed his idols. Infuriated, Nimrod made
a catapult of the c­ astle’s twin pillars, from which he cast Abraham into a pit of
fire below. But where Abraham landed, the flames turned into ­water, and the
firewood turned into carp. Thus did the sacred fish of Atargatis and the heal-
ing ­waters of Edessa find their way into the city’s Islamic myths and practices.
Ritual space in Urfa is layered, reflecting transitions and overlaps among
successive schemes of power and governance. Th ­ ese disparate pasts are never
entirely quelled but are continually “made pres­ent” in quotidian spatial forms.
­Today, Syriac inscriptions remain throughout Urfa’s ritual site; neighborhoods
are still informally called by their Armenian names; and one local church that
was long ago converted to a mosque is sometimes referred to, curiously, as the
Mosque of the Twelve Apostles. This mixed or syncretic character is not only
a feature of Baliklıgöl’s space; it is also a feature of p­ eople’s experiences in that
space. Consider Kadir Gecesi, the Islamic holy day discussed in the opening
scene, which at Baliklıgöl is celebrated in a way that exceeds prescribed obser-
vance. ­People spend the hours from dusk to dawn at Baliklıgöl, camped out
on blankets that are particularly concentrated around the cave of Abraham—­a
practice that some have traced to rites of “incubation” (sleeping at holy sites)

140 | bridget purcell
practiced in Christian Edessa.27 Kadır Gecesi also provides visitors a rare
chance to glimpse the beard of the Prophet Muhammad (Sakal-­ı Şerif), since
the city’s müftü (mufti) displays the beard ­here annually, wrapped in fabric and
encased in glass. The scene is noisy and chaotic, as hundreds of ­people line up
to view the beard each day, pressing in to touch the glass case and ideally to kiss
it. According to one local belief—­mentioned only in the absence of imams or
scholars—­spending Kadır Gecesi at Baliklıgöl three years in a row is equivalent
to one visit to Mecca. Most of the time, the heterogeneity of such practices goes
unremarked upon. But, it can—­and recently has—­become a reflexive focus.

the politics of purification

­ oday, the heterogeneity of Urfa’s ritual space has become a point of moral and
T
theological concern for many of the city’s residents. This is largely due to the
growing local influence of revivalist currents in Islam. Revivalism (also known
as reform, purification, modernization, orthodoxization, and so on) refers to
a range of transnational movements whereby the wide variety of local Islamic
cultures are evaluated and revised in light of the canonical texts of the Islamic
tradition. ­These pro­cesses, which are intimately linked to modernization, glo-
balization, and the spread of literacy, have reshaped Islamic cultures through-
out Turkey and the wider Muslim world. At the local level, revivalism proceeds
by promoting the practices and values of Islam or religion (din), while differen-
tiating them from (and devaluing) the practices of folk tradition (gelenek)—or,
more pejoratively, superstition (batıl inanç). In practice, such distinctions have
often been fought out around spatial forms, as ritual landscapes once marked
by folk and pre-­Islamic ele­ments have been cleansed or purified.28
In Urfa, the rise of Islamic revival was inseparable from the operation of
state power and, specifically, pro­cesses of state-­led modernization. In the last
quarter of the twentieth ­century, a series of land-­based interventions (includ-
ing land reform, economic restructuring, and mass village-­to-­urban migration)
rapidly transformed the province. ­These modernization efforts had a number
of aims. The explic­itly stated one was to integrate Urfa into Turkey’s wider po­
liti­cal economy by transforming it into an agro-­industrial export basin. Another
aim was undoubtedly to assimilate the province’s Arab and (especially) Kurd-
ish residents, whose complicated relationship to the Turkish state has ranged
from strategic alliance to open conflict.29 The resultant changes included shifts
in ­labor and production, shifts in the size and structure of families, and rapid
increases in literacy, formal education, and knowledge of Turkish. Although

rebellious matter | 141
t­hese de­cades of modernization w ­ ere by no means motivated by revivalist
concerns, they nonetheless laid the groundwork necessary for revivalism to
emerge and flourish. For instance, it was the increase in rates of literacy and
education in Urfa that enabled the rise of a generation of formally educated,
textually trained men and ­women, who acted as local catalysts for religious
reform.
Trained and licensed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), and
serving as imams, radio hosts, and hocas (religious instructors), local reform-
ers acted as intermediaries between Urfa’s inhabitants and a state-­sanctioned
Sunni Islam. In recent years, they have succeeded in raising questions about
central and enduring features of Urfa’s ritual landscape—­including, for in-
stance, the visitation of special places (such as shrines, tells, and the birthplace
of Abraham) and the ritual use of objects (for example, strings, beads, and
the beard of the Prophet). From a theological perspective, the salient ques-
tion concerns mediation (tawassul)—­that is, ­whether anyone or anything can
mediate between a believer and God. The revivalist answer is unequivocally
no. “The Prophet gave us the Qur­an as his trace, not his beard, or his coat,”
one imam told me. The latter could only be considered innovations (bidat)
without textual foundation in Islam. Perhaps as impor­tant as ­these theologi-
cal concerns are issues of social capital. Visiting a saint’s tomb, for instance, is
marked as not only theologically suspect, but also as rural and lower class—­
which in Urfa si­mul­ta­neously carries an ethnic valence, an association with
“backward” Kurds and Arabs as opposed to “modern” Turks.30
It is against this shifting backdrop that we must understand the transfor-
mation of Balıklıgöl in the late 1990s, courtesy of the multimillion-­dollar,
state-­backed restoration proj­ect mentioned above. ­Today, Balıklıgöl is a
gleaming monument to modernist religiosity. But prior to the restorations,
the mosques ­were run-­down, not to say derelict, with moss growing along
the outer walls and caper bushes pushing out through cracks in the façades.
Makeshift ­houses crowded in around the mosques and climbed to the edge
of the citadel. The site was largely given over to folk religiosity—to the in-
formal and charismatic practices that constitute religious life in southeast-
ern Turkey. Ostensibly, the restorations w ­ ere intended to transform the site
into an open-­air museum—­a cultural heritage site and a tourist attraction.
The restorations entailed the expropriation and de­mo­li­tion of the housing
surrounding the site, which was deemed an eyesore and a safety hazard
(for example, in its violation of building codes). All of the major mosques
and monuments ­were restored and outfitted with plaques. The religious

142 | bridget purcell
site was formalized, and set off from the ordinary residential life of the city
in a new way.
Although the state-­led restoration of Balıklıgöl was not an overtly theo-
logical proj­ect, it nonetheless imposed new constraints on how p­ eople could
interact with ritual space, curtailing a wide range of traditional practices. Hence-
forth ­there would be no sacrificing of animals, no ritual ablutions in the spring
­water, no candles, no writing on the walls. Official signs posted throughout the
ritual site designate such activities as both haram and yasak (that is, “forbid-
den” in both religious and secular language). The purification of Islam and
the state-­led renovation of Urfa’s ritual space are thus resonant pro­cesses,
working to advance a religious culture that is at once theologically sound, state-­
sanctioned, modern, ­middle class, and sanitized.
Yet Urfa’s layered histories persist—­not only as material traces, but also
folded into perceptions, practices, and sensibilities. Despite the impressive
conjunction of state-­sanctioned religious reform with proj­ects of spatial pu-
rification, ­people nonetheless inhabit and encounter space obliquely (with
its intensities, memories, and virtualities). The opening scene dramatizes this
point on a large scale: on that night, it was as though years of effort to purify
the space had been undone—­the folk past breaking into the reformist pres­
ent, destabilizing it, and denying its taken-­for-­grantedness. In the final section
of the chapter, I turn to the story of one ­woman to explore how an individual
might orient herself in ­these shifting, and often contradictory, landscapes.

subjectivity beyond sedimentation

On an uncharacteristically drizzly Saturday in September  2011, I strolled

with Zehra among the fountains and monuments of Balıklıgöl. A Qur­an in-
structor and religious reformer, Zehra was among my most trusted interloc-
utors, and it was largely through our conversations that I learned the story
of Islamic reform as it had unfolded in Urfa. This was a story that she had
experienced firsthand. Born in the 1970s in a Kurdish village outside of Urfa,
Zehra’s life had unfolded against the backdrop of Urfa’s rapid moderniza-
tion. She not only experienced but helped bring about the transition from
rural to urban religiosity, from folk practice to Islam proper. One might ex-
pect Zehra to narrate this reformist trajectory in linear terms—­and at times
she did. But this was a day of leisure, and we allowed our steps and our con-
versation to wander. As we walked among the ritual sites, Zehra shared with
me memories and stories elicited by dif­fer­ent loci, her narration tacking

rebellious matter | 143
between past and pres­ent. “Her adımda bir anı var” (a memory with ­every
step), she mused.
We bowed our heads low, entering the cave of Abraham. Zehra ran her fin­
gers along the uneven surface of the walls, tracing the lines of supplication
scrawled ­there, pausing on a talismanic charm made of dried chickpeas and
string. Such objects constitute the tangible stuff of popu­lar religiosity in Urfa:
for example, the keeping of talismanic objects (like stones chipped from holy
sites), healing practices that involve the tying of strings and drinking of cura-
tive ­water, prohibitions against bathing on Wednesdays, and common speech
forms like maledictions. If ­these practices sound odd or unrelated in list form,
it is precisely ­because they are nonsystematized, part of daily life, the mostly
unremarkable stuff of habit. But not for Zehra, or not any longer. “When we
learned to read the Qur­an,” she told me, “we realized that such ­things had no
religious basis.” She learned, that is, that God alone has power, and that no
person or object can mediate between a believer and God. She came to recog-
nize such practices as mere superstitions or innovations, and left them b­ ehind.
In adopting other practices (like prayer, attending mosque, and reading the
Qur­an), she remade herself as a modern Islamic subject.
Describing Zehra’s trajectory in this way implies that how p­ eople change
themselves is a linear pro­cess. And indeed this is how scholars of Islam have
tended to conceptualize religious change at the level of the subject. Through
external actions, ­people progressively cultivate internal states. But, thinking
back to Alice, we might develop a more nuanced notion of the relationship be-
tween practice and subjectivity. Consider that, with revival, p­ eople like Zehra
­were challenged to revise their habitual relationships with ritual space and
ritual practice. ­Those relationships are not only cognitive, but affective, em-
bodied, memorial. And if we look in a fine-­grained way at how ­people go
about changing ­these relationships, a dif­fer­ent image emerges of time and of
subjectivity.
I find a revealing instance in a short video clip taken by one of Zehra’s
students. The video shows a picnic, with some twenty w ­ omen gathered in
a circle, singing a devotional song. Immediately a­ fter the song ends, t­ here is
a moment’s pause, when a few ­people clap but most hold back. Then every­
one claps. Several of the girls begin discussing ­whether or not it is forbidden
(yasak) to clap a­ fter a song that mentions the name of God. All of them w ­ ere
familiar with such a prohibition, but ­there was confusion among them as to
­whether the prohibition was dini (religious) or w ­ hether it was one of the eski

144 | bridget purcell
or batıl (“old” or “false”) beliefs (it turned out to be the latter). For Zehra, and
now her students, habits like this one no longer passed below the threshold
of attention; instead, they presented themselves as moments of doubt, minor
disruptions in the ongoing flow of life. In the video clip, for instance, one can
actually see that hiatus between the inclination to clap and the decision to do
so, the hesitation that spread through the group before resolving itself in the
fullness of applause.
I noticed such dissonant moments often during my time with Zehra—­and
more broadly during my time in Urfa, as the opening scene highlighted. When
cultural logics are changing, one can expect to encounter such dissonances—­
for instance, between old cultural logics and new ones; or between entrenched
habits at the level of the body and new judgments at the level of thought. Th ­ ese
disjunctive pres­ents call us to imagine the temporality of religious reform not
as linear (the time of discipline), but as punctuated by breaks, revisions, and
redirections (the time of becoming). This image of time helps us notice an
ele­ment of creativity and unpredictability in pro­cesses of social and religious
change. And it helps us imagine Zehra’s story as more than an ethnographic
illustration of a historical transition from folk tradition to Islam. Zehra was
the first in her f­ amily to speak Turkish fluently, to read and write, to leave the
village for the city, and to abandon folk practice in f­ avor of something dif­fer­
ent. She narrates her biography not as a straightforward trajectory, but as a
series of rifts—­and, often enough, risks: choices between village and city life,
between marrying her betrothed or the imam ­she’d fallen in love with, and
between speaking to her students (and her c­ hildren) in Kurdish or Turkish.31
But ­these alternative paths did not simply dis­appear—­they are “made pres­
ent” in the landscape and so in social life—­and Zehra encountered them con-
tinually. Another brief vignette w ­ ill help clarify this point—­this one drawn
from a meal that I shared with Zehra’s extended f­amily in the village where
­she’d grown up. During the meal, Zehra’s u­ ncle had cursed his wife, saying
“May you go to the blue lake.” Zehra, who had been immersed in the flow of
conversation, paused and turned to me. She repeated the comment in Turk-
ish (it had initially escaped me b­ ecause it was in Kurdish). The phrase, she
explained, was a bedua (a curse or malediction)—­a fairly common speech
form, but one she now refrained from using. This par­tic­ul­ ar phrase (“May you
go to the blue lake”) had caught her ear. She asked her u­ ncle the meaning,
and he shrugged, saying it was just an expression and he d­ idn’t ­really think
it meant anything. But for Zehra, who had developed a reflexive orientation

rebellious matter | 145
to such habits, the phrase stood out. She wondered aloud w ­ hether it might
refer to Lake Van in eastern Turkey, which is widely considered the ancestral
home of Yezidis—­a once widespread religious group for whom the color blue
is prohibited. That is, Zehra interpreted her u­ ncle’s phrase as a survival from
an earlier period of the region’s religious history. I find remarkable in this con-
versation the layering of histories and languages, and the complex orientation
that this demands of participants (the disruption of the conversational flow,
the play of immersion and distanciation). It seems that when otherness is a
quotidian feature of social and spatial life,32 one’s relationship to the pres­ent
moment may be marked by multiple temporalities and spatialities.
This complex positionality is more than an annoyance or an obstacle to
overcome. It is also, I would suggest, generative of a certain ethos of openness
and receptivity to perspectives that differ from one’s own. How might this in-
flect religious sensibilities? Consider Zehra’s religious life, which appears to
be marked by a certain playfulness or experimentalism. For instance, when
I asked Zehra and her husband (an imam) about the annual showing of the
beard of the Prophet she revealed that she had once gone to see it. When her
husband expressed surprise (she had evidently never mentioned this before),
Zehra shrugged: “I was curious.” Thus even as individuals like Zehra work to
purify the landscape, the landscape “recoils back” on individual desires and
sensibilities—­injecting an ele­ment of uncertainty or openness into personal
trajectories that we might other­wise deem linear.33 Zehra’s receptivity to dif-
ference was also evident in the way that she related to p­ eople in her capacity
as a religious instructor. One after­noon at Zehra’s home, a young boy and his
­mother came to ask Zehra’s help in treating a wart on the boy’s back. Zehra
agreed and proceeded to tie a string around the wart and read a verse of the
Qur­an before sending the child home. ­Later, when I inquired about the string,
she cited a popu­lar belief that a wart ­will fall off if one ties a string around it and
says a prayer. The string part was a superstition, she assured me, but the boy and
his ­mother believed it, and she c­ ouldn’t see any harm in trying it. “Responsibil-
ity to the other demands disjointing our time in order to allow the presenting
of ­others,” phi­los­o­pher Tamsin Lorraine writes, “even when such presenting
violates our own sense of ‘the proper.’ ”34
Perhaps for ­those who, like Zehra, inhabit shifting, heterogeneous land-
scapes, the contingency and historicity of being may be closer to consciousness.
It certainly suffused Zehra’s sensibilities as a religious reformer, inflecting a
potentially purist proj­ect with a sense of contingency and even reversibility—­an
attentiveness to how ­things ­were (and might still be) other­wise. As we walked

146 | bridget purcell
through the ritual site that day, Zehra spoke nostalgically of times when, as a
child, she would visit the site with her ­mother. “We used to chip stones from
the cave walls, and bring them home, and put them in ­water and drink it to
cure illness,” she recalled. It was long before the restorations, she said, and the
site was dirty and disor­ga­nized, so that by the end of the day the hem of one’s
skirt would be crusted in dust. Yet, she reflected, “this place was more beauti-
ful then, ­people had more of a connection to religion.” But then—as if coming
to the pres­ent, or coming to her senses—­she continued: “One must be care-
ful, though, not to put one’s faith in anything other than God.” In other words,
I take it, one must resist the occasional pull of old saints and old stones. She
paused a moment, then said, “One has to always be vigilant.”

conclusion

This chapter has suggested that in Urfa, the landscape registers or “makes pres­
ent” a range of large-­scale religious and po­liti­cal formations into which the
city has been drawn over the years, one of which is the current reformist proj­
ect. ­These layered histories continue to resonate and disrupt the pres­ent—so
that ­people like the three w­ omen I introduced h­ ere effectively find themselves
amid shifting strata, the textures of which are tactile, as they walk the streets
and encounter material worlds that are at once familiar and strange. For me,
the key question is: How do they (and ­others) orient themselves in relation to
­these felt shifts among normative o­ rders? How do p­ eople navigate landscapes
in flux?35
Addressing this question calls us to connect the question of historical change
(often glossed as the “large-­scale”) to the question of phenomenological experi-
ence (the “small-­scale”). I have tried to show that moving among scales is not
only a scholarly imperative, but something that ­people do in their daily lives.
Zehra turns from the intimate flow of familial conversation, suddenly refram-
ing it with reference to the region’s Yezidi past. Or, in the opening scene, my
friends grow large with the crowd, only to shrink back from it—­perhaps imag-
ining how they might appear in a photo­graph, in the ­future, through other eyes.
In d­ oing so, they grow bigger still, with reference to a larger religious imaginary
thought to transcend the local. This is all to say that our actions are oriented
­toward wider scales of significance—­which are themselves multiple, over­
lapping, and contested.
By highlighting the complex spatiotemporal orientations of my interloc-
utors, I hope to have raised some doubts about an approach that imagines

rebellious matter | 147
religious practice as a straightforward trajectory, a telos. Like Alice, Zehra must
continually alter her dimensions, growing bigger and smaller, changing along
with—­and sometimes in contrast to—­the ritual landscape. It is precisely this
double direction that, for Deleuze, makes Carroll’s Alice a model for becom-
ing.36 Discipline moves in one direction, with the past building gradually ­toward
the pres­ent. But becoming “moves in both directions at once. It always eludes
the pres­ent, causing ­future and past, more and less, too much and not enough to
coincide in the simultaneity of a rebellious ­matter.”37 I have suggested that the
­matter of Urfa’s ritual landscape is “rebellious” in just this sense. It is a medium
through which ­people open themselves to the overlaps and disjunctions of
history, and strive to heed its contradictory calls.

notes
1 The night falls during one of the odd-­numbered days in the last ten days of Ramadan. Al-
though no one knows the exact date of the original event, it is conventionally celebrated
on the twenty-­seventh day of Ramadan.
2 Qur­an 97:3.
3 See Deeb, An Enchanted Modern; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape; Schultz, “(Re)
Turning to Proper Muslim Practice”; Silverstein, “Islamist Critique in Modern Turkey.”
4 Largely following Asad, Formations of the Secular, and Genealogies of Religion.
5 Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
6 See Hammoudi, “Textualism and Anthropology”; Mittermaier, “Dreams from Else-
where”; Schielke, “Being Good in Ramadan.”
7 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. See also Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical,
21–22.
8 See, for example, Hart, And Then We Work for God; Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
9 See Bachelard, The Poetics of Space; Connolly, A World of Becoming; Coole and Frost,
New Materialisms; Grosz, Architecture from the Outside; Ingold, Being Alive.
10 Bainbridge, Turkey, 607.
11 Bainbridge, Turkey, 607, 609.
12 In 1939 the region’s in­de­pen­dent Kurdish militias chose to fight with Turkish armed
forces rather than the would-be French occupiers, and thereby helped deliver Urfa to
the Turkish state instead of what was then the French protectorate of Syria.
13 Öktem, “Incorporating the Time and Space of the Ethnic ‘Other.’ ”
14 It should be noted that the region’s major development proj­ect, Güneydoğu Anadolu
Projesi (gap) got u­ nder way in the mid-1990s, which also marked the beginning of the
Kurdish uprising. This is surely not a coincidence, and one Turkish academic in conver-
sation with me dismissed gap as ­little more than “an effort to rebrand Kurdistan.”
15 See Bozdoğan and Kasaba, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey.

148 | bridget purcell
 16 See Hart, And Then We Work for God; Tuğal, Passive Revolution.
17 This version of state-­sanctioned Islam is clearly not the only version of Islamic practice
in Turkey, nor is it universally espoused. Yet it can reasonably be considered hegemonic,
in part ­because it has supplanted or absorbed more radical Sunni movements in Turkey
that had historically operated in opposition to the state (Tuğal, Passive Revolution).
18 Hart, And Then We Work for God; Tuğal, “The Urban Dynamism of Islamic Hegemony.”
19 See Foucault, Ethics. The paradigmatic example of space in the former sense is the pan-
opticon: by inhabiting the panopticon one internalizes the gaze of the authority and
becomes a self-­governing subject. The paradigmatic example of the latter is the skilled
pianist: through iterative practice at the piano, one internalizes or habituates rules, so
that they become unconscious orientations. For the difference between “power” and
“ethics,” see especially 223–28.
20 Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 6.
21 Stasch, “The Poetics of Village Space When Villages Are New,” 556.
22 J. Segal, Edessa.
23 J. Segal, Edessa.
24 See Guidetti and Getti, “The Byzantine Heritage in the Dār al-­Islām: Churches and
Mosques in al-­Ruha between the Sixth and Twelfth Centuries”; Guscin, The Image of
Edessa.
25 Quoted in J. Segal, Edessa, 56.
26 P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints.
27 When the historian Judah Segal visited Urfa in the 1960s, he witnessed Muslims sleep-
ing at Baliklıgöl, which he interpreted as a continuation of ancient rites of “incubation”
practiced in Christian Edessa. The city “was celebrated for a well of healing ­waters that
was . . . ​a holy place in the Christian period and ­later,” he writes. “Rites of incubation
are performed t­ here, indeed, to the pres­ent day” (Edessa, 54). Several religious teachers
whom I spoke with in Urfa considered this suggestion in­ter­est­ing and plausible, but they
did not comment further on it. It should also be mentioned that ­there is a practice like
“incubation” in Islam called istikhara. See Edgar, The Dream in Islam, chapter 3.
28 See Elias, Aisha’s Cushion; Hammoudi, A Season in Mecca; Ho, The Graves of Tarim; Tuğal,
“The Urban Dynamism of Islamic Hegemony”; Walton, “Practices of Neo-­Ottomanism.”
29 See Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey; Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State.
30 See Hart, And Then We Work for God, and “The Orthodoxization of Ritual Practice in
Western Anatolia.”
31 Zehra describes her decision to teach religion in Turkish rather than Kurdish as a prag-
matic but conflicted choice: “For me, Turkish is the language of learning, the intellectual
language. When I am explaining the hadith [a collection of Mohammed’s sayings] or
sunnet [the tradition of ceremonial male circumcision], I find I am unable to express
their meaning in Kurdish. Sometimes p­ eople say to me, ‘We d­ on’t understand, explain it
to us in Kurdish,’ but I honestly ­can’t. Unfortunately, Kurdish has been lost to me as an
intellectual language. In this way, we [Kurds] have been assimilated a bit.”
32 Stasch, “The Poetics of Village Space When Villages Are New.”

rebellious matter | 149
 33 Connolly, Neuropolitics, 18.
34 Lorraine, “Living a Time out of Joint,” 45.
35 Biehl and Locke, “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming.”
36 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.
37 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 2.

150 | bridget purcell
 5

Witness

­Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming

naisargi n. dave

Maneka Gandhi, a member of India’s famed po­liti­cal dynasty, the Nehru-­

Gandhis, is India’s best-­known animal rights activist. In the introduction to
one of her books she explains what brought her to her activism.1 She refers
to the memoir of one of India’s first animal welfare activists, Crystal Rogers, a
British ­woman born in 1906 who found herself called by the sight of a d­ ying
animal in 1959 to stay and work in India. The passage Gandhi quotes from
Rogers’s memoir, Mad Dogs and an En­glishwoman, reads as follows:2

I was on my way to New Zealand when I saw a ­horse which caused me to

remain in India. It was standing at the side of a very busy road, with the crows
tearing the flesh off its back. As I ran t­ owards it, it turned its head t­ owards me
and to my horror I saw that it had bleeding sockets from which the crows had
already pecked out its eyes. I rang up the spca [Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals] but ­there was ­little that could be done and the ­horse had
to be shot. If any passerby had done something earlier the ­horse might have
been saved. I cancelled my journey to New Zealand and stayed in India to see
what I could do for animal suffering. We need to fight on ­every front. If we
run away and hide our heads to avoid seeing the sight which horrifies us, we
are unworthy of the compassion that has been granted us by the Almighty.3
­ fter citing this passage, Gandhi writes: “Crystal is one of the p­ eople who
A
opened my eyes twenty years ago and showed me how to work for what I
believed in instead of merely showing concern.”4
I want to begin this chapter by considering the variety of ways that both
Rogers and Gandhi invoke sight and the eyes. Rogers sees a ­horse that com-
pels her to stay; Rogers sees, but the h­ orse, its eyes pecked out by crows,
cannot see; we are told we must see the sight that horrifies us; and Gandhi’s
eyes are opened by a story about sight, its willful absence, and its graphic, piti-
able loss. This centrality of sight and of ­human witnessing of acts of vio­lence
against animals is a standard trope in activist narratives. The trope is similar
to a coming-­out story, and animal rights activists in India (and perhaps else-
where) stake their commitment to a way of life based on one critical moment
­after which nothing can ever be the same. I argue in this chapter that animal
rights activists describe this critical moment as an intimate event in which
the sight of a suffering animal, and the locking of eyes between h­ uman and
nonhuman, inaugurates a bond demanding from the person a life of respon-
sibility. That event is uniquely intimate ­because it occurs between two singu-
lar beings—­because based on the locking of eyes, the ­human’s knowledge is
not of all animals in general, but of this animal at this moment. The moment
is uniquely intimate, too, b­ ecause it expands ordinary understandings of the
self and its pos­si­ble social relations. As Elizabeth Povinelli puts it, an intimate
event “exfoliates the social skin.”5
This chapter has two main objectives. First, I address how ­people come to
act on behalf of animals in India. In d­ oing so, I sketch moral biographies of
action and inaction. ­These biographies connect with my second objective, to
examine the sensorium of po­liti­cal engagement between ­humans and animals.
Why this emphasis on sight, and the valorization of the witness? While I sug-
gest that the event of intimacy between h­ uman and animal has the potential
to blow the conceit of humanity apart, another reading is pos­si­ble: that the act
of intimacy, insofar as it relies on the witnessing ­human subject, constructs
the animal as theoretical, as a mere object in the autobiography of the w ­ oman
who sees and consequently acts.6 Does animal activism thus reproduce the
supposed value of ­human being—­a valuation that underlies the mass exploi-
tation of animals in the first place—­a reproduction of what Giorgio Agamben
calls “the lethal and bloody logic” of the anthropological machine, which re-
quires the perpetual differentiation of h­ uman and its other to function?7 Or
is that reading itself a sign of humanism’s triumph—is seeing humanism every-
where only a capitulation to its colonization of imagination and thought?8

152 | naisargi n. dave
If so, what would it mean to believe that in the ethical encounter between
­human and animal a w ­ oman can indeed become an animal, not theoretically
but carnally, morally, spiritually? This chapter engages with the sensorium of
animal activism and its life inside and outside the anthropological machine.
But first, some context.

moral biographies, affective histories

Animal activism in India is inseparable from a larger affective history of liber-

alism, a history that, in turn, is deeply entwined with the history and politics
of empire.9 If we w ­ ere to simply replace horse or animal in Rogers’s recollec-
tions with female child or Hindu ­woman, her memoir would read no differently,
for example, than Katherine Mayo’s 1927 anti-­India polemic, ­Mother India—­a
book that, in its stark portrayal of everyday acts of astonishing vio­lence against
­women and girls, served as a power­ful tool of empire, arguing that the Brit-
ish needed to remain in India to protect its most vulnerable from barbarity
and neglect.10 Indeed, animal welfare in con­temporary India (like pro-­women
reform in colonial India) is largely driven by foreigners. The biggest animal
shelters and nongovernmental organ­izations (ngos), except for Maneka
Gandhi’s, w ­ ere founded by foreigners who came to India on vacation or for
work and found themselves, like Rogers, compelled by the sight of suffering
to stay t­ here—or at least to try and transform the place from afar. ­People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals (peta) has an office in Bombay, and the
Humane Society International has a hub in Hyderabad.
Of course, a homegrown animal welfare politics exists, too: cow protection
(gauseva). But even this is only superficially homegrown. Cow protection was
conceived as an anticolonial endeavor and thus emerged in an unequal encoun-
ter with the foreign.11 And in any case, cow protection does not r­ eally constitute
a politics of animal welfare: it exclusively concerns the cow, and the cow as a
symbol separating ­people who eat or slaughter them (Christians, Muslims, and
lower-­caste Hindus) from ­those who do not (higher-­caste Hindus).12 ­Because
of this deep cultural association of animal protection with caste vio­lence and
Hindu nationalism, ­people (including the ­human rights activists I have worked
with)13 express their cosmopolitanism and progressive politics in part by delib-
erately and ostentatiously eating meat, a per­for­mance in the “aggressively vis­
i­ble public theater” that is eating in colonial and postcolonial India.14 In their
eyes animal activists are, at best, elite and out of touch with impor­tant ­human
issues and, at worst, harbor high-­caste, anti-­Muslim sentiments. Try as some

witness | 153
animal activists do to disassociate their work from right-­wing politics, rum-
blings about Muslim butchers, the slaughter­house’s stench of death (remi-
niscent of language about Dalit leatherworkers), and beef-­eating Christians
continue to sound from within animal rights organ­izations.15
Animal rights activism ­faces challenges from India’s changing economy as
well. The con­spic­u­ous consumption of animal products, from leather to meats,
has increased among elite and upwardly mobile groups during India’s global
economic rise. In part, this rise has been accomplished through the massive
trade in animals, with India becoming the biggest exporter of leather in Asia and
the biggest producer of milk in the world.16 But ­under whose watch did India
become such a renowned specialist in the mass exploitation of cows? Well, of
course—­because ­every good story needs irony—­under that of the cow pro-
tectionists themselves, the Hindu right-­wing Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp). And
who but India’s foremost animal activist and former bahu of the Indian National
Congress Party is a star politician of the bjp?17 Of course, Maneka Gandhi.
Gandhi’s moral biography is as captivating and mercurial as she is. She
was not yet sixteen when, at a cousin’s party, a man approached her and asked
if she would share her plate of mutton with him; she declined.18 And so did
Maneka Anand first meet Sanjay Gandhi, son of the prime minister, Indira
Gandhi, and grand­son of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru—­over
a plate of lamb. Maneka, who was so apo­liti­cal that she did not know who San-
jay was, would marry into one of the world’s ­great po­liti­cal dynasties and, as it
happened, into a ­family of animal and environment protectionists. Nehru had
made it his personal mission as prime minister to pass the Prevention of Cru-
elty against Animals (pca) Act in 1960.19 His d­ aughter, Indira Gandhi, spon-
sored progressive environmental legislation and was known for her ambitious
conservation initiative, Proj­ect Tiger.
Animal lovers perhaps, but the Nehru-­Gandhis ­were meat eaters all, ­until
one night at dinner when Maneka began pontificating about the treatment of
animals. She was just putting a spoonful of meaty soup to her mouth when
Sanjay said: “How can you go on about animal cruelty while eating meat? Stop
eating meat or shut up.” And just like that, she had an epiphany. So obvious to
her was her hy­poc­risy that she dropped the spoon that very instant, the soup
scalding her wrist. “See?” she said to me as she pulled up the sleeve of her
kurta, “the scar is still ­there.”20 I ­will return to this point: the wound as trace,
the scar as birthmark.21
That same year, the year she turned eigh­teen, she asked her husband for
some property ­under an overpass in South Delhi, which he gave her as a

154 | naisargi n. dave
birthday gift. In turn, she gave it to a friend, who started an animal shelter
called Friendicoes. “So that was the beginning of your activism?” I asked. She
laughed and replied: “What a stupid beginning! My husband was the boss
of this city. My mother-­in-­law was the prime minister of India. And I asked
for a shop u­ nder a flyover. This is one of my prob­lems. And it was one of my
husband’s prob­lems, too. Every­body talks about how wicked he was, but the
truth is that he was just young. He had no idea what power he had. Neither of
us did.”22
­People do talk about his wickedness. It is some sort of awful irony (once
again) that he led a mass sterilization program of India’s poor during his
­mother’s autocratic emergency regime in 1975–77, anecdotally aided by Maneka
Gandhi—­who is responsible for instituting the increasingly popu­lar Animal
Birth Control program to sterilize stray dogs.23 Since her husband’s death in a
plane crash in 1980, and her banishment from home and party at the hands of
her mother-­in-­law shortly afterward, she has devoted herself to animals, found-
ing India’s largest animal rights organ­ization, ­People for Animals.24 She exploits
her name for all it is worth. “I thank God e­ very day,” she told me once, “for mak-
ing me a Gandhi.” She works seven days a week, from morning to night, usually
sitting ­behind a cluttered desk, wearing plain cotton salwar kameez (never silk or
wool), thin from years of wear. She advocates on behalf of cows, pigs, dogs, cats,
donkeys, and chickens by writing weekly newspaper columns; lobbying fellow
members of parliament; and threatening over the phone to have ­people beaten,
hanged upside down in their underwear, killed, maimed, and dis­appeared.
Given her history, nobody takes t­ hese as idle threats. Putting her vio­lence aside
if pos­si­ble—­most of which consists of idle threats—­Gandhi is tireless in her
­labors. The heavy bags u­ nder her eyes, the softening body, the more frequent
­battles with illness—­all testify to the strains of a passion that w
­ ill not let her go.
“Why must you work so hard?” I asked her once while on a doctor-­mandated
walk. “­Aren’t you worried about the consequences, the enemies you make, the
stress?”
It turns out I had asked the wrong question; she has nothing to do with it.
She answered that she was “a machine that is designed to do this, exactly this,
only this. It is a machine so sensitive,” she continued, “that its skin literally
prickles with another’s pain. But ­there is no inside to the machine. ­There is just
this skin.” ­There is no inside—­there is just this skin. What Gandhi pointed out
to me was the limitation of my worldview, my assumption that she was a sub-
ject with volition, one who could stop and start at ­will. Perhaps she was once
such a subject, but the day the soup scalded her skin she became something

witness | 155
new: she became subject to the world, rather than insisting on being a subject
in it. At the heart of this transformation lay a moment of radical humility, and
her guiding princi­ple: surrender. The activists she takes on as protégés are few,
for they must be hardy sorts with thick skin as well as the kind that prickles,
and they must share with Gandhi one t­ hing: that “in the face of that which is
bigger than you, stronger than you, you give yourself over to it, you surren-
der.” The universe is such a ­thing (bigger, stronger) and what Gandhi pushed
me to see is that the readiness to be transformed, even if by an unrelenting
stream of stimuli (painful, god-­awful) is not an act of extraordinary courage
but the only t­ hing that makes any sense. We are all bound to lose, standing up
to the world. The only way to survive is to give ourselves over, to trust that we
­will be alternately battered and buoyed. And survive she must, to keep “stick-
ing my fingers into all the holes in the dam.” This sounds futile, but to her, and
to the activists she trains, so is the notion of the rational actor, of someone
who changes the world at ­will. And if every­thing is futile, including our very
being, then what is so terrible about working in futility? And work she does.

the perpetual witness

So I was surprised when she said to me one day, from ­behind her desk, wear-
ing a tense, world-­weary expression: “I only wish ­there w ­ ere a slaughter­house
next door. To witness that vio­lence, to hear ­those screams . . . ​I would never be
able to rest.”25 As far as I could tell she never rested anyway, even without pierc-
ing screams to keep her pulse racing and her eyes open. She never rested, nor
did the o­ thers: Abodh, the director of Welfare for Stray Dogs, whose personal
cell phone serves as the default animal emergency line for all of Bombay and
who has not had an uninterrupted night of sleep in fifteen years, and whose
wife, however kind, is ­running out of patience; Abodh’s fieldworker, Dipesh,
who treats animals on the streets six days a week, voluntarily heals his own
neighborhood animals on Sundays, and in his spare time—­such as it is—­
works at another job to keep his ailing parents alive; Maya, who finally got
engaged but had no time for love, and so lost it. All of them have witnessed
something that allows them no respite; all, like Gandhi, having once been
transformed are now forever compelled by something that, on the face of it,
usurps their very (well-)being. I want to explore this t­ hing called witnessing,
specifically three t­ hings about it: first, the idea of witnessing as distinct from
merely seeing; second, how witnessing requires a disciplined presence, or the
witness’s there­ness; and third, the importance of movement in the witnessing

156 | naisargi n. dave
of vio­lence, both a movement ­toward the subject of intimacy and away from
the self and its protective skin.
To witness, as Rogers and Gandhi each have used the term, means to see in
a manner that is pres­ent, to root oneself when one might instead run or turn
away. The same stubborn presence characterizes voyeurism of horror, but that
differs from witnessing in two crucial ways. In witnessing and being pres­ent
to pain as ­these activists describe it, they seek to place themselves in a situa-
tion in which they could—if brave enough—­change the events that they are
framed and marked by.26 To witness is to be implicated and culpable in an
event that is not inexorable. Furthermore, a voyeur heightens the affective ex-
perience of being alive in his or her own skin (“I have survived this moment
and now I feel euphoric”), whereas in witnessing, that skin is shed, so that
something in the person ceases to exist a­ fter the event is over. The fiction of
the self is blown apart.
Or is it? Maybe the better question is: must it be?
I am suggesting an understanding of witnessing that blows the self apart, but
witnessing can create truth as much as it can explode it, can concern the safely
encased h­ uman self as much as the radically exfoliated one. Consider witness not
as the t­ hing one does but as the imperative. “Witness,” says René Descartes, “the
fact that the beasts have less reason than men . . . ​that they have no reason at all.”27
This is the other meaning of witness, witnessing as “we see that,” witnessing as
an appeal to evidence presumed to be commonly shared, witnessing—­because
of our privileged linking of ocularity to reason—­that demands that each of us be
in lockstep with the ­others who see. In witnessing, vision is not always singularly
intimate; it is its opposite—­common sense. That seems reason enough to be
skeptical of the privileging of sight and of the politics of witnessing.
Jacques Derrida reminds us of another reason to be wary.28 Witnessing,
he says, is autobiographical, it is proof that I am, that we are. The animal is
objectively staged for this purpose, it is seen but does not itself see, such as
the animal in Descartes’s discourse when he renders it an automaton, appeal-
ing to a man who witnesses an animal that does not see him in turn. This is the
animal that exists as theoretical spectacle, an object for the ­human that says,
“I am, ­because I see that.” (“See that” ­here has two meanings: I see that ­thing,
and I see that this is true.) Derrida calls the witnessed animal the “spectacle for
a specular subject.”29 That specular subject becomes the subject he or she is in
the act of seeing, but not through the act of being reflected back in the animal’s
gaze. This is the Levinasian animal, the one that does not have a face capable
of compelling a relationship of ethical obligation.30

witness | 157
 That is the Levinasian animal, but what kind of animal is Rogers’s horse—­
the one with crows tearing the flesh off its back, and with bleeding sockets
from which t­hose crows have already pecked out its eyes? Does this animal
have a face? Is this animal a theoretical spectacle, objectively staged for Rog-
ers’s story of “I am?” I ­don’t know. That animal senses Rogers ­running ­toward
it, and it turns to “face” Rogers. The animal, in other words, responds. Rogers
is transformed, recognizing in herself an ethical responsibility at the moment
of seeing the animal other. I have a hard time seeing her as only a specular
subject. The specular subject becomes such through an act of differentiation
owed to an ocular-­centric logic of sameness and difference: “­Because I see that
[“see that” in both senses of seeing that ­thing and seeing reason], that is not
me.” The specular subject, furthermore, can only see himself reflected in his
own gaze; the animal’s gaze cannot reflect to him his soul.31 Rogers is not that
specular subject ­because she, I think, does see her soul reflected in the gaze of
the animal: but that soul, like the sockets of the animal’s eyes, is empty. The
witnessing subject, in this case, is violently stripped away, revealed to be, and
becoming, emptiness—­the emptiness that, Agamben argues, is the nothing-­
space between ­human and animal, the space of ontological vulnerability.32
Yet we cannot take this nothingness too far. As Veena Das reminds us, the
witness of vio­lence is only a witness ­because she survives it—­because she has
witnessed, in fact, she has an obligation to live.33 Recall Gandhi, who knows
she must survive to keep working, and who knows that to survive she has no
choice but to surrender. But she survives not as what she once was, before she
became a perpetual witness. The scar she still wears from the night of the soup
is indeed, as Sara Ahmed would suggest, a birthmark, a reminder of what she
became: just skin.34 To witness, then, might best be understood as a radical
interpenetration of life and death: to maintain a disciplined presence to vio­
lence that opens up a death that then compels a new kind of responsible life in
a previously unimaginable skin. In the case of animal activists, it is a skin also
inhabited by the animal.
Carmelia Satija, a middle-­aged Hindu animal rights activist in Delhi does
not appear, on the face of it, to wear a skin unusual for a person of her social
position. I first met her in the summer of 2010 while trying to track down
an animal rights organ­ization called Kindness to Animals and Re­spect for
Environment (kare). The address I had located through a website appeared
erroneous. Instead of an ngo office or animal shelter, I found myself in front
of Rio Grande, a small store with an armed guard in an upscale marketplace in
South Delhi. It turned out that Satija was both the owner of the shop and the

158 | naisargi n. dave
founding trustee of kare, by then defunct. ­After learning from her sales clerk
that I was ­there, she drove to her shop in a black suv to meet me. We greeted
each other, and she led me through the store to her second-­floor office, where
she offered me a seat across from her at her desk. She has an oval face, long
black hair, and deep-­set eyes. Her movements are elegant, with softly jangling
jewelry and a clipped accent. Her perfume mixed with the jasmine incense
wafting through her shop.
“So,” she began, “does this ­really interest you, this activism of mine?” I an-
swered that it did, and although she was unbelieving at first, she began to bring
out reports, pamphlets, court filings, and photo­graphs, all filed away ­behind
store financial documents and inventories. (The basement of her h­ ouse held
much more material, filling entire shelving units.) “Thirty years of my life,” she
said, her face showing a mix of guilt and sadness. When I asked her to tell me
about ­those years she began with images.35
The slaughter­house footage she had in her possession, Satija said, was “more
valuable to me than gold.” She continued: “­Those images reminded me of how
horrible the world is, of the pain we cause. Even without watching the videos,
just knowing that they ­were in the cabinet served a purpose. They would never
let me stop.” She then told me about her illicit visits to the Idgah slaughter­house
in New Delhi, whose horrors she filmed and ­later had shown on the state-­owned
broadcast ser­vice, Doordarshan (an effort by the government, no doubt, to whip
up anti-­Muslim sentiment ­under the guise of compassion). The Idgah slaughter­
house has the capacity to pro­cess 2,500 animals per day for meat, leather, and
by-­products, but instead it butchers upward of 13,000 animals daily, around 3,000
buffaloes and 10,000 goats.36 The animals are brought in from miles away, thrown
from the trucks into heaps by their limbs, most with their legs already broken,
and some already crushed to death during the journey. Boys and men begin the
pro­cess of hacking the animals into pieces and skinning them with rusty knives,
the butchers barefoot and shin-­deep in blood and shit. Th ­ ere are few sights
more heartbreaking—or for ­those less sentimental than I, more ironic—­than
of sickly cows eating from the nearly one thousand pounds of c­ attle excrement,
body parts, and clotted blood that the Idgah slaughter­house dumps at a nearby
landfill, a playground for kite-­flying slum ­children, ­every day.
Telling me about her visits to Idgah, Satija continued: “It’s not just the sights
that you always remember. Worse even than the looks in the animals’ eyes,
worse than the screams, was the stench of death. It’s not only the stench of blood
and gore, it’s the stench of death. Even now, I wake up in the ­middle of the night
with that stench in my nostrils.” The value for Satija of witnessing slaughter is

witness | 159
that it forces her always to move, to stave off rest and the pretenses that enable
it. The activism, then, compelled by witnessing (which, as I have suggested, is
partly defined by a disciplined staying put in the face of horror) is also a kind
of ­running—­fervent movement away from the bounded self that only impo-
tently remembers, and ­toward that which suffers on account of one’s own life.
This defining dynamic of witnessing as staying put in the face of death, only to
then constantly move away from our own impotence and ­toward the other in
a relation of intimacy that thins the ­human skin and thickens relationality, is
one described by many of the ­people who have populated my narrative. Recall
how Rogers runs t­oward the d­ ying h­ orse and keeps moving u­ ntil her death
thirty-­five years l­ater, homeless and almost penniless; Gandhi anticipates
never resting while in the earshot of the nightmarish cacophony of death; the
stench of death in Satija’s nostrils tears her out of the tenuous refuge of sleep.
­These relationships among witnessing, animal activism, and the impossibility
of respite also come into play in ­people’s decisions not to involve themselves
in the lives of animals. A ­woman in her early twenties explained to me why she
did not volunteer at an animal shelter in Chennai, saying that she was “deathly
afraid of caring too much.” Is any other politics, I won­der, constrained by such
a mortal fear of caring too much, of the heart bursting, the skin thinning, not
being able to rest again? In other words, is any other politics so limited by the
fear of intimacy, or so determined by the witnessed events that create it?
Satija’s witnessing of the suffering of animals did more than force her to
­labor ceaselessly; that witnessing, I want to stress, constituted an intimate
event in which her own social skin would be opened up, stripped away, and re-
made, thickening worldly relations. In her own words, such witnessing forced
her—­would force us all—to become the animal in pain. “To realize the suf-
fering of animals,” she said to me, “requires you to become an animal that talks.
­Because they cannot [talk], that becomes my responsibility.” I want to think
now, through the rubrics of humanism and its ­others, about what it means for
Satija to “become an animal that talks.”

becoming animal

Povinelli elaborates a history of the concept of intimacy in post-­Enlightenment

Western thought.37 Intimacy ­here is the freely chosen bond between sover-
eign subjects, a foundational fiction of the autological society that sets itself
apart from the genealogical one—in which ­people are incapable of intimacy
­because their bonds are already chosen for them in advance along such lines

160 | naisargi n. dave
as tribe, caste, kin, and custom. Part of what interests me about this material
on animals and witnessing in urban India is how it contributes to the proj­
ect of destabilizing that fiction by showing how an act of intimacy—­intimate
­because singular, ­because it exfoliates the social skin, and expands the bound­
aries of pos­si­ble relationality—­exceeds and even resists sovereignty. First, the
animal subject is brought into its intimate relation with a ­human through its
unfreedom. And second, by entering into intimacy with an animal in pain, the
activist seeks not to be more f­ ree, but to render herself even more deeply sub-
ject to unequal relations of obligation and responsibility: in fact, to surrender.38
But the intimacy of ­human and animal, by showing that intimacy is other
than a freely chosen bond between two sovereign (and thus presumably
­human) subjects, does not only explode the species divide. Intimacy also re-
introduces and stabilizes that chasm. As Satija describes it, realizing the suffer-
ing of animals makes imperative a simultaneous sublimation and deployment
of the self as a sovereign h­ uman subject to and for the needs of the unfree other.
The activist si­mul­ta­neously must become the animal (shedding her own skin
in sublimation) and hyperembody herself as h­ uman by d­ oing precisely that
which defines what it is to be h­ uman: to speak or, h­ ere, to give voice to that un-
free other that cannot speak, while the witness is safely encased in her ­human
self. Satija exemplifies how voice itself emerges in the “zone between two
deaths”—­here, the death of the animal and the death of the w ­ oman whom the
witness was in the moment before she witnessed.39 But the voice that emerges
in the zone between two deaths not only cries out against injustice; it also calls
forth the very cleavage between h­ uman and animal that enables that injustice
to thrive at all.
Or does it? Maybe the better question is: must it?
An obvious and eminently reasonable analy­sis of Satija’s vision of becom-
ing an animal is the one I just made: that despite its aim to break from vio­lence,
animal activism only reproduces the war between species through its anthro-
pocentric humanism.40 But that is just one interpretation, and perhaps its fatal
flaw is precisely its eminent reasonability—­a kind of approach to the world
that also finds its foundation and value in the “bloody and lethal” tradition of
metaphysical humanism.41 What if I suggested that my very assumption of an-
thropocentric humanism in Satija’s desire to “become an animal that talks” may
well be the prob­lem h­ ere: that my assumption of humanism results from my
being locked in a closed, binary logic of repre­sen­ta­tion in which I know what
­human and animal are, and I know that they are ­either dif­fer­ent or that they

witness | 161
are the same. Instead of hearing in her claim, “I = it” or “it = me,” why am I not
hearing “I + it + b + z = something you have never thought before?”42
Perhaps it would be useful to linger on Satija’s use of the word becoming. She
did not say she wanted to be an animal, but that she wanted to become one.
The difference between being and becoming is similar to that between wit-
nessing and specular subjects—­a difference that lies, to use Brian Massumi’s
words, between rendering the self molar or dissolving the self into supermo-
lecularity. We are all capable of becoming other, Massumi tells us; all we have
to do is want it.43 We have to want to escape our bodily and social limitations,
a desire that may be sparked by politics, by philosophy, or by witnessing. But
that desire may also be conflicted: oscillating between the desire for molarity
(which manifests in being something other—­say, an animal that talks—­and
is administered through the logic of sameness and difference) and the desire
for supermolecularity (which does not, strictly speaking, ever manifest: it is
only becoming and hyperdifferentiation). I do not know the nature of Satija’s
desires, but I am willing to say that my immediate unwillingness to accept that
she does become animal in a way that is disruptive rather than productive of
anthropocentric humanism unjustly limits in advance the potential effects of
her, my, and the animal’s becoming.44
I never saw Satija in the field (never saw her becoming animal with my own
eyes), and therefore cannot say “I see that” her becoming is true—so let me
move for a moment to something I did witness. In the summer of 2013 I spent a
week with an American ­family, the Abrams-­Meyers, who had moved from Se-
attle to a rocky, hilly village outside Udaipur, in the northwest Indian state of
Rajasthan. They ­were Jim, Erika, and Claire, and when I stepped out of the Udai-
pur train station and gave the name of the village I wanted to get to, the rickshaw
driver said, “Erika ka ghar?” [Erika’s ­house?]. Erika had told me that might hap-
pen, but the proof of their local celebrity still tickled me. The driver brought me
to their gate, and the sound of the engine brought Claire to the door, followed
closely by Erika, who was quite literally flapping with excitement.
They ­were all abnormally tall, ­these Americans. Jim is a sturdy man who
wears Dickies pants, a thin gray T-­shirt, and heavy work boots. He rides to
their shelter ­every morning on a Royal Enfield motorcycle, and when I sat
­behind him I was transfixed by the deep creases in his sun-­reddened neck. He
was once a professor of lit­er­a­ture. Claire, in her early twenties, dresses simply
and wears a bandana to keep the hair off a face that is beautiful in its classic
symmetry, her Roman nose dotted with a stud. She was twelve when they left

162 | naisargi n. dave
Seattle and has not been formally schooled since, which might in fact account
for her extraordinary curiosity and wisdom about the world. Erika—­well, Erika,
I have to say, is a lot like Big Bird. And I can say that b­ ecause I know she does not
mind, for she has nothing against e­ ither birds or muppets and is quite aware that
she is tall, wild, and gangly. Erika almost always wears saris, but while I was ­there
the f­ amily was moving their animal shelter to a larger site, which involved actu-
ally carry­ing animals in their arms, one by one, from a van into large outdoor
enclosures. So I usually saw her in random ­house pants and kurtas, sometimes
with glasses on her head, sometimes with her head covered with a bandana that
she other­wise wears around her neck. I think I ­will always remember the sight
of her, slightly disheveled, slightly mad looking, but somehow calm, with every­
thing revolving around her in a steady, necessary orbit. In my mind, she is carry­
ing a bucket full of ­water even though it has been a very long and hot day, and
the dogs trail b­ ehind her, and she is harried but full of love. And I can see why an
activist named Jaivardan says Erika “is like a god” to him; another activist named
Rohit calls her “the ­mother of animals”; and Timmie Kumar—­who directs Jai-
pur’s renowned shelter, Help in Suffering, and has a cult following herself—­told
me that she “fell to the ground and wept when [she] first saw Erika with the
animals.” I know that sounds overly dramatic, but somehow it is not when you
see this w ­ oman rolling in the dirt with salivating, joyous, romping three-­legged
dogs. I wish I had fallen to the ground in tears myself.
One of the ­things about Erika, as with any witness, is her mix of move-
ment and stillness. She walked me to the large animals section of the shelter,
populated mostly by donkeys, goats, and cows, with a c­ ouple of para­lyzed
pigs. We came upon a large lump on the ground, covered by burlap, and then
I saw the hooves and tail showing from ­under it. I moved around and saw the
nearly closed eyelids, the body rising and falling with laborious breaths: it was
a ­dying cow, her neck bent unnaturally. ­Because of Rajasthan’s antislaughter
law, Erika could not euthanize her. She had been ­dying for days. Erika had
assumed that the previous day was ­going to be the cow’s last, and she told
me what they do at times like ­those. Erika calls the workers over, one by one
or perhaps two at a time, and she asks them to stop what­ever work they are
­doing and just be t­ here with the animal. She got down on the ground, next to
this burlap and flesh, and demonstrated to me: “Just be s­ ilent next to its d­ ying
body, stroking its head if they feel they can, cradling it, kissing it, or just sitting
­there, body to body, life to life, death to death, soul to soul. Say ­you’re sorry
that it’s leaving this world, if you feel moved to say that, say ­you’re sorry

witness | 163
that it lived in a world like this, if that’s what you want to say. What­ever you
do, just be ­there.” In ­these moments of being-­w ith, she added, the social
bound­aries between ­humans, too, fall apart, when they are together, from
their varying backgrounds of caste and race, all with their butts equally on the
shit-­and piss-­strewn ground and their hands on the crusted body of an animal
in pain, sometimes crying, sometimes stoic, sometimes calm, but all the time
and all of them ­there, facing the boundary between life and death that w ­ ill one
day hunt us all down, regardless of the skin we wear.

­these are becomings, all

I turned to Erika to answer a question that Satija had provoked: can we be-
come animal, become other, in a way that is disruptive rather than productive
of anthropocentric humanism? Or to put it differently: can we become some-
thing other than the safely encased h­ uman self? I have no doubt that I watched
some of Erika die in that instant with the cow, that I witnessed her becoming-­
other through her surrender to becoming-­death. I simply would not feel right
reducing that moment to a reproduction of anthropocentrism, though surely
someone could make that argument if they wanted to. But more impor­tant,
I want to suggest that it does not m ­ atter what she became; she affected me,
forever, just as she affects all t­hose who enter her orbit. The entire point of
becoming, in the Deleuzian sense, is not to go from one ­thing to another, but
to be a phenomenon, an event, an act of bordering in which both original cat-
egories are revealed to be infinitely other than what they are. Becoming is pure
effectuation, the effect of affectively redefining the places we started from: in
this par­tic­u­lar case, ­woman and animal. In another case it was man and rat.
This is from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus:

When Hofmannsthal contemplates the death throes of a rat, it is in him

that the animal “bares his teeth at his monstrous fate.” This is not a feeling
of pity, as he makes clear; still less an identification. It is a composition of
speeds and affects . . . ​it makes the rat become a thought, a feverish thought
in the man, at the same time that the man becomes a rat gnashing its teeth
in its death throes. The rat and the man are in no way the same ­thing . . . ​
but are expressed . . . ​in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects.
Unnatural participation.45
Becoming; unnatural participation; turning the self not into another kind
of self, but only into a “question-­machine.”46 Social movements, in this sense,

164 | naisargi n. dave
are full of becomings: they are defined and made by them. The phrase un-
natural participation, in particular—­because of its echoes, I suppose, of sexual
policing and sodomy laws, but also of the emergent and perverse—­takes me
from the animal to the queer, to a pivotal moment in the history of queer
organ­izing in India. (This might seem quite separate, but the queer and the
animal have many connections between them.)47 In 1998, a film called Fire,
about the love affair between two sisters-­in-­law in a middle-­class New Delhi
home, was released throughout India.48 What followed w ­ ere violent public
clashes instigated by right-­wing activists who claimed that the film was an
abomination: ­there are no lesbians in India, they said. Lesbians responded
with three ­simple words: “Indian and Lesbian.”49
Is this so unlike Satija’s claim that she becomes an animal? Was not “Indian
and Lesbian” an act of becoming par excellence? Certainly when ­those words
­were first uttered, they ­were as improbable as a wealthy, middle-­aged Hindu
­woman saying, “I am an animal.” The very identity of India, a­ fter all, rested on
its exclusion of queer, and the very identity of queer rested on its exclusion
from citizenship,50 mirroring the mutual exclusions of h­ uman subject and ani-
mal abject. “Indian and Lesbian,” during the riotous weeks that followed that
utterance, was indeed a becoming, an effectuation, a question-­machine. And
it affectively redefined dominant categories of social understanding, birthing
inbred monstrosities where ­there was once, so we had thought, a gaping abyss
between this and that. Lesbians became Indian as blacks had become men in
another radical becoming in Memphis in 1968, where the sanitation workers’
strike gave rise to a mass of signs that also marked a singular becoming, this
time with four words instead of three: “I Am a Man.”
­These are becomings, all: a lesbian becoming Indian, a black man becom-
ing Man, a w ­ oman becoming animal. But putting it this way, t­ here are at least
two differences between the first two cases and the last one. The first two begin
with a movement from the par­tic­u­lar (molecular) to the general (molar), while
the last one begins with a movement from the general-­particular (­human, but
still only ­woman) to the par­tic­ul­ar. The first two, in other words, are majori-
tarian, the last one minoritarian. This first difference can prob­ably explain the
second, which is that we find the first two becomings credible (for who, ­really,
would not want to be more, to be a man?), while most of us do not find the last
one believable (for who, ­really, would want to be less, to become an animal?).
What is it for me, or anyone e­ lse, to critically question Satija’s becoming
animal? I question, in part, the motivation and effects of Satija’s “animal that
talks,” describing it as more humanism. I call on the signs from our initial

witness | 165
conversation: her references to my­thol­ogy to suggest that Hindus, perhaps
more than ­others, are inclined to compassion; her use of the phrase stench of
death, unleashing a chain of references in my own mind that takes me quickly
to a history of caste vio­lence (though it could just as well take me to Omaha,
Nebraska, where they use the same phrase to speak of slaughter);51 and her
wealth and comfortable life, which might signal to me a remove from strug­gle.
But what do I know? What do I know of her heart other than what she tells me
of it (and she tells me that she becomes an animal ­because she has witnessed
an animal in pain)? Nonetheless, I think, “Can it be?” An Indian lesbian can be
an Indian ­because she already is; a black man can be a man ­because he already
is; but Satija cannot be an animal ­because I know what an animal is, and an
animal is not this bejeweled ­woman with a ­daughter at an Ivy League school.
Throughout all of this, I know. But what if we ­were to surrender to the spirit
of becoming?52 To truly, carnally enact a critique of Cartesianism by allow-
ing other facets of the sensorium to reign? What if we ­were to become Satija;
see what she sees; experience what inspires her to shed her skin and become
the animal in pain, the animal that writhes at night, a smell in her nostrils, a
flash in his mind’s eye, a scream neither past nor pres­ent but h­ ere, in her bed,
calling from below? What if we ­were to make her, and what she sees, a fever-
ish thought coursing through our flesh? Could we feel, then, that she is not
becoming or failing to become a subject, but becoming an event, an operation
on the categories of thought and action that we hold onto, demanding that
we not be something new, but let go of what we tell ourselves that we and our
interlocutors are, so that we can sometimes, like her when she tries, become?
It would be to be like Maneka Gandhi, to give ourselves over. It would be to
be like Timmie Kumar, to come apart in the face of something extraordinary.
It would be to be like Erika, to put arms around the body of a ­dying animal, ear
to its flesh, and be filled with the pulse of its enormous, failing heart. It would
be to feel more ourselves and yet be ever less certain, and more curious, about
what that even means. And is that not the point of all our multispecies ethno-
graphic explorations?53 Is that not what it means to do anthropology—­not of
anthropos as we believe we know it, but of life?54

­ oward the end of my first meeting with Satija, she began showing me images
T
from a collection of photo­graphs. As we came on one of a dog with a mangled
leg covered in maggots, I noticed her wet eyes. It reminded me of something

166 | naisargi n. dave
that Frida Kahlo once wrote: “They say ­there are two ­things that ­don’t mean
anything: a dog’s limp, and a w
­ oman’s tears.” In her witnessing, in her intima-
cies, and in her becomings, Satija tries and fails and tries again to make ­those
­things ­matter ­after all.

notes
1 M. Gandhi, Heads and Tails.
2 Though Gandhi pres­ents Rogers’s narrative as a direct quote, she actually paraphrases
Rogers (I pres­ent Rogers’s original version). The passages Gandhi uses about sight and
the eyes are still accurate.
3 Rogers, Mad Dogs and an En­glishwoman, 42–43.
4 M. Gandhi, Heads and Tails, 5.
5 Povinelli, The Empire of Love, 179.
6 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 82.
7 Agamben, The Open, 38.
8 Jacques Derrida (The Animal That Therefore I Am) and Miriam Ticktin (“­Human Rights/
Humanitarianism Beyond the ­Human”) have revealed how animal rights politics rely on
humanist values such as compassion, thereby reproducing the very distinctions between
action and passivity and between the noble and the mute that underlie other colonial
and neo­co­lo­nial forms of exploitation. This is an impor­tant reading of ­human action on
behalf of animals—­one I largely agree with—­but I hope to show alternative ones.
9 L. Gandhi, Affective Communities. That said, as Leela Gandhi shows in Affective Commu-
nities, animal activism in India is also inseparable from an affective history of radicalism.
Among her central figures is Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, whose vegetarianism
was part of a broader fin-­de-­siècle anticolonialism that created deep affective bonds be-
tween ­humans and ­humans, specifically whites and Indians. Indeed, part of what I dem-
onstrate in this chapter is the difficulty of parsing the liberal or conservative from the
radical—­which might come down to what we are and are not able (and willing) to see.
The Mahatma is a good example of this ambivalence, since his vegetarianism was part of
a radical anticolonial pacifism as well as a masculinist politics of purity, though not one
reducible to caste (see Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 75–115).
10 Mayo, ­Mother India.
11 Pandey, “Rallying Round the Cow.”
12 Yang, “Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India.”
13 Dave, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics.
14 Roy, Alimentary Tracts, 8.
15 The anthropological lit­er­a­ture on animal politics in India has largely focused on its fail-
ures, vio­lences, and hypocrisies. For example, Parvis Ghassem-­Fachandi (Pogrom in
Gujarat) demonstrates that the Hindu right’s enforced pacifism t­ oward the cow serves
as the ground for its mortal vio­lence against non-­Hindus and lower castes (see also Chi-
gateri, “ ‘Glory to the Cow’ ”). I could not agree more. But that is not all t­ here is to say

witness | 167
 about the politics of ­humans and animals in India. By telling stories from the perspective
of animal activists who identify with progressive rather than conservative c­ auses (see
L. Gandhi, Affective Communities), and from theoretical perspectives other than that of
how power reproduces itself in predictable ways, I hope to show that ­there are and must
be other ways we conceive of human-­animal engagements in India—­ways that are not
predetermined or fully determined by Hindu nationalism.
1 6 Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organ­izations, The State of Dairy C ­ attle in India.
17 Bahu is Hindi for “daughter-­in-­law.” Maneka Gandhi joined the bjp ­after being cast out
of the Congress Party by Indira Gandhi, her mother-­in-­law. See K. Singh, Truth, Love,
and a ­Little Malice.
18 This is the story she told me (Maneka Gandhi, interview with the author, June 11, 2011,
New Delhi). For a slightly dif­fer­ent version, see K. Singh, Truth, Love, and a ­Little Malice.
19 For more details, particularly on the role of Rukmini Devi in the pca Act, see Dave,
“Witness”; Krishna and Gandhi, “Rukmini Devi and Animal Welfare.”
2 0 Maneka Gandhi, interview with the author, May 29, 2008, New Delhi.
21 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 27.
22 Maneka Gandhi, interview with the author, May 29, 2008, New Delhi.
23 See Tarlo, Unsettling Memories.
24 See K. Singh, Truth, Love, and a ­Little Malice.
25 This sentiment is like one expressed by Paul McCartney, Michael Pollan, or Timothy
Pachirat, the feeling that seeing glass-­walled slaughter­houses would inevitably transform
our treatment of animals through horror and repugnance. Pachirat in fact calls for a “pol-
itics of sight,” in which activists work to render transparent the vio­lences we systemati-
cally conceal, creating a kind of reverse panopticon (­Every Twelve Seconds, 242–43). But
Pachirat’s work is not entirely relevant h­ ere for at least two reasons. First, the activists
discussed in this chapter are not concerned with motivating o­ thers to act; they are con-
cerned foremost with disallowing complacency in themselves. Second, vio­lence against
animals in India is not nearly as concealed as it is in the United States, and the apathy
created by the vio­lence’s ubiquity is more of a prob­lem than is the tendency to conceal it.
26 Das, Life and Words: Vio­lence and the Descent into the Ordinary.
27 Quoted in Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 77.
28 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 77.
29 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 82.
30 See Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natu­ral Rights.” See also Calarco, Zoographies,
55–78.
31 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 82.
32 Agamben, The Open, 92.
33 Das, Life and Words.
34 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 27.
35 Carmelia Satija, interview with the author, June 11, 2010, New Delhi.
36 Maneka Gandhi v. Union Territory of Delhi and ­Others, Civil Writ No. 2961, 1992.
37 Povinelli, The Empire of Love.
38 See Mahmood, Politics of Piety.

168 | naisargi n. dave
 39 Das, Life and Words: Vio­lence and the Descent into the Ordinary, 61–62.
40 See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am; Ticktin, “­Human Rights/Humanitarian-
ism Beyond the ­Human.”
41 Agamben, The Open, 38.
42 Or, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, riffing off V ­ irginia Woolf, “Five o­ ’clock
is this animal! This animal is this place! . . . ​That is how we need to feel” (A Thousand
Plateaus, 263).
43 Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizo­phre­nia, 94.
44 João Biehl and Peter Locke also, via Deleuze, argue for an anthropology that recognizes
that what we see does not exhaust the potential of what might be, and might become
(“Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming”).
45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 258 (emphasis in the original). Hugo von
Hofmannsthal was an Austrian writer who published in the early twentieth c­ entury. Also
in relation to Hofmannsthal, Deleuze and Guattari discuss writers who, through their
“unnatural participation” beyond the h­ uman, act as “sorcerers” and are able to throw the
self (and an openhearted reader) into radical upheaval (A Thousand Plateaus, 240).
46 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 259.
47 See Chen, Animacies; Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure; Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.”
48 Mehta, Fire.
49 Dave, “Indian and Lesbian and What Came Next.”
50 Bacchetta, “When the (Hindu) Nation Exiles Its Queers.”
51 Pachirat, ­Every Twelve Seconds, 30.
52 In asking what it would mean to believe a phenomenon that challenges our regimes of
rationality, and not merely to believe that this phenomenon is true for our interlocu-
tors, I am interested in a long-­standing debate about belief and ethnographic method,
one that Paul Nadasdy (“The Gift in the Animal”) addressed. He persuasively asks us
to inhabit alternative ontologies, to believe—in his case from the First Nations in the
Yukon—­that the animal gives itself as a gift to its hunter. I follow Nadasdy to a point,
but I diverge to ask what it would mean to inhabit only becomings that traverse lines of
sameness and difference, self and other.
53 Kirskey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” 546, 559.
54 Kohn, How Forests Think.

witness | 169
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IV
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 6

I Was Cannibalized by an Artist

Adriana Varejão, or Art as Flux

lilia m. schwarcz

introduction, or a string of false coincidences

I met Adriana by chance. Some years ago, I was on my way to Rio de Janeiro,
and as I boarded the plane, I noticed a young ­family: a beautiful ­mother, a
­father, and a happy d­ aughter. I also noted that the m
­ other kept staring at me. I
thought no more of it, but a string of coincidences was only just beginning; as
it happened, I ended up sitting right ­behind them.
That was when the ­woman turned around to face me and said, very di-
rectly: “My name is Adriana Varejão. I love your books and want you to write
an article about my work.” I recognized the con­temporary artist immediately,
but I found it strange that she would recognize me. So I responded: “I am
afraid I am not who you think I am. I am just (and at most) an anthropologist
interested in art, or a historian, but not an art historian or an art critic.”
Her reply was immediate: “I read your book The Spectacle of the Races, and
that’s why I want you to write something about my art.” I was at a bit of a loss
and let the ­matter drop.
Some months l­ater, I was invited by Isabel Diegues, an editor at the arts
publishing ­house Cobogó, based in Rio de Janeiro, to contribute to a book
about Varejã­o’s art. I responded as I had to Varejão on the plane, and Isabel
replied: “But she wants to ‘teach you about her art.’ ” To make a long story
short, I deci­ded to go to Rio de Janeiro, where I began a series of “classes” with
the artist. We met and discussed her work, I watched her working, she gave me
open access to her archive, and most importantly, we became friends.
I loved the stories Adriana told me in ­these meetings, and especially her
way of “translating” formal information. I was enthralled by the opportunity
to follow her creative pro­cess and to experiment with a new dimension of my
own work as an anthropologist. I was starting to realize that, at least in my case,
the bound­aries between the author of knowledge and the subject of knowledge
­were ­really not so clear at all. Before my eyes, every­thing was transformed to fit
Adriana’s world and work. A reference from a book, old pictures, documents,
ceramics, a research proj­ect—­anything could trigger a new piece, anything
could be “translated” into art.
I was particularly interested in how Adriana creates false tiles in her work
and transforms them into allegories—­perhaps the best instruments for diffi-
cult communication between such diverse settings as China, Brazil, and Por-
tugal. Tiles have historically been used as part of the lucrative business that
united dif­fer­ent parts of t­ hese three countries and, at the same time, as symbols
of dif­fer­ent cultures. That is why parody is the best term from which to begin
understanding her work. The artist does not create a new tile: she creates art as
a tile. Con­temporary art thus becomes a false document, which bears signs of
the passage of time. At the same time, intentional imperfections can reveal the
work of the operation. A false tile is not actually false, b­ ecause it becomes real
in a new work (plates 2 and 3).
Adriana can cheat with art: she creates tiles in her paintings to make them
real: real tiles. This is one of her means ­toward poiesis, her way of showing that
in art, every­thing is a parody—­a parody of the self. Dif­fer­ent cultures have
used tiles as a way of exchanging products and as symbols. Tiles have also
acted as a privileged language, with cultural difference inscribed in formats,
drawings, colors, and techniques. For Adriana, tiles w ­ ere also a way to express
the ambiguities of colonization, insisting that colonization created suffering
and leisure at the same time. What emerges in this work is a complex and am-
biguous pro­cess combining vio­lence and plea­sure, death and miscegenation.
Colonization, in Adriana’s work, is addressed alongside cannibalization as
a way to understand order and disorder, pres­ent and f­ uture, and exchange and
vio­lence. The concept of cannibalization is prevalent in both Adriana’s art it-
self and the way she comments on it. Drawing on modernist references from
the writings of Oswald de Andrade1 and the French traveler Jean de Léry,2 she

174 | lilia m. schwarcz
transforms meanings into images and images into other images. More than a
biological function, to Adriana cannibalization was a way of managing ques-
tions of transformation and an impor­tant way of creating networks of com-
munication: of being other, being the e­ nemy, or incorporating the e­ nemy’s
strengths. The subject has been studied by scholars at dif­fer­ent stages in intel-
lectual life, and ­there is not room enough to discuss all their ideas ­here. Better
to consider Montaigne’s famous essay from 1580,3 or the writings of Manuela
Carneiro da Cunha and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on this subject.4 ­There
is a substantial difference between the concepts of anthropophagy (symbolic
consumption) and cannibalism (the physical consumption of ­human flesh),
of which Adriana was very much aware. The former has a ritual meaning; the
latter, a biological one. The crucial point is that Amerindians did not eat their
enemies ­because they ­were hungry. Eating the strongest prisoner was a way of
receiving that person’s strong spirit and a means of exchanging symbols, men,
and messages. Cannibalism is, in fact, a central theme in Adriana’s art (plates
1, 4, and 5). In her work, one can easily locate quotations, images, and docu-
ments from vari­ous times, but in all cases and at the same time, what is vis­i­ble
is a parody: a duplication of a document, a mirror that can reproduce but also
distort or duplicate.
Let me return, once more, to my relationship with the artist. My first sensa-
tion, ­after ­those initial “classes,” was a kind of vertigo. Who was the expert and
who was the native in this brand-­new situation? It is not my intention to re-
hash postmodern analyses of the rebellion of our objects and how this has af-
fected anthropology as a discipline.5 My concern ­here is a dif­fer­ent one: I was
afraid that I would be cannibalized! Instead of simply studying Adriana, she
had started studying me and “translating” my own work for her own purposes.
But I thought no more of this worry. A ­ fter my first series of meetings and
dialogues with Adriana, I wrote an essay titled “Varejar, ladrilhar: uma carto-
grafia ladrilhada da obra da artista” [A tile world map of the artist’s work].6
­Later on the book in which it was included turned out beautifully, and the
group of essays in it, written by dif­fer­ent authors, offered a pa­norama of Adri-
ana’s work. I found it strange, however, that my article was not accompanied
by the images I had included in it, which showed pieces I had discussed in the
text. Instead, the editor (and, I ­imagined, Adriana) had opted for images of an
installation called Testemunhas oculares, x, y, z [Eyewitnesses, x, y, z], a work
consisting of portraits of three dif­fer­ent Adrianas—­one African, another Chi-
nese, and a third indigenous—­with a tray set out before each painting, and a
single glass eye placed on each tray (plates 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11).

i was cannibalized by an artist | 175

 The eyes, if one looks carefully, are egg-­shaped, made specially by the artist.
They open to reveal scenes of cannibalism copied from the work of Léry—­
scenes that w ­ ere seared into the sixteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean imagination. In
his accounts of Brazil, Léry immortalized scenes of horrific rituals, with native
­women very naturally chomping on legs, arms, and other body parts of slain en-
emies. Their dancing, cooking, and feasting represented a kind of hell on earth.
But the ­women ­were quite white, looking almost Eu­ro­pean and somewhat
reminiscent of the witches that likewise haunted the Eu­ro­pean imagination.
So in this case, indigenous w ­ omen—­and perhaps witches—­were portrayed
together in this very odd ritual. In this work, Adriana started a conversation
about colonization, difference, and the forms through which we approach it,
and its colors. The artist’s self-­portraits in “Eyewitnesses, x, y, z” show her per-
forming not only three dif­fer­ent races, but also three dif­fer­ent colors.
It is not my intention ­here to interpret this piece. What shocked me at the
time was why she had selected that par­tic­u­lar work, which I had not men-
tioned even once in my essay, to accompany my text. I did not bring the sub-
ject up ­until one day when she invited me to have lunch with her. She was in
São Paulo, the city where I live, and wanted to talk to me. We agreed to write a
book together, and I immediately started imagining a proj­ect, as we academics
always do. It was to be a retelling of Brazilian history with Adriana’s work as a
kind of guide.
We met again, and no sooner had she started talking than I realized that
she had another plan, a visual plan, and that it was much, much better than my
own. She wanted to abolish the notion of time altogether and instead work
with the idea of cartography. She also wanted to explore, with my help, her
pro­cess of creating art. Rather than using images as products that merely re-
flect real­ity, it would be better to introduce a less conservative methodology
that could deal with art itself as production. I had the opportunity to estab-
lish a dialogue not about Adriana’s work, but with Adriana, her work, and her
world. In other words, instead of using images as illustrations, the idea was to
understand how works of art can interfere in real­ity, creating and destroying
customs, values, and symbols.
Before she starts painting, Adriana consults historical references such as
documents, books, photo­graphs, and old plates and tiles. I realized that this
was a chance to understand not just one work, but the pro­cess by which she
acquires a language—­a Varejão language.
I accepted the invitation on the spot, but before we got started, t­ here was
one question I just had to ask: “Adriana, every­thing is fine, but why the hell

176 | lilia m. schwarcz
did you decide to illustrate my essay with that par­tic­u­lar image in your previ-
ous book?” She answered me frankly: “­Because I read that story in your book.”
She explained that my book The Spectacle of the Races had shown her that
nineteenth-­century scientific racial theories saw the eyes as a means of mea­sur­
ing madness, criminality, and even geniality.7 She had found that story “terrific,”
she said. I was disappointed, b­ ecause I knew I had never written anything on
that subject!
The information itself was ultimately correct, part of a series of phreno-
logical models used during the nineteenth c­ entury, in Brazil and elsewhere.
It was also part of a wide range of models, known as racial theories, that ­were
very fash­ion­able at the time. But I was certainly not the author of, or even
a commentator on, that argument. In short, Adriana thought she had read
something in my book that ­wasn’t actually ­there. She cannibalized me and
my work in the same way that she cannibalizes other sources, mixing all of
them together: she reads, sees, studies, and develops her work by “translating”
it all into art.
This translation reminded me of Marshal Sahlins’s conclusions on a dif­
fer­ent theme: cultures always intertranslate.8 In this sense, each event is rein-
terpreted according to very dif­fer­ent significations, even if they are somehow
determined by prevailing cultural standards. Through this pro­cess, however,
events can end up reor­ga­niz­ing culture. The ­great challenge for historical an-
thropology is not merely to know how events are ordered by culture, but
how, in that pro­cess, culture itself is ordered.
During my own pro­cess of learning, seeing, and reading with Adriana, I
also remembered some of the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s expla-
nations about the relationship between India and the West, which suggest
that in a clash between two cultures, the resulting hybrid is dif­fer­ent from
the sum of its parts.9 As Bhabha points out, one has to “move beyond the
narratives of originary and founding subjectivities in order to focus (now)
on ­those moments or pro­cesses that are produced by the articulation of cul-
tural differences.”10 ­These in-­between areas are where subjectivization strat-
egies (singular and collective) are drafted.11 This relates to Edward Said’s
ideas in Orientalism: we are always translating and inventing new repertoires
and languages—­political languages.12 Eu­ro­pean culture, as Said puts it,
“gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a
sort of surrogate and even underground self.”13 ­These forms of “translation”
between cultures act as a strategy replicated by Adriana, who similarly feeds
her creativity in the sphere of art. She works from the subjectivities that

i was cannibalized by an artist | 177

underpin our colonization and sociability and creates art in which cultural
differences in Brazil are articulated, always in an overtly po­liti­cal way.
As an anthropologist, I could understand that I was taking part in a game
of mirrors and projections: I was becoming the other that would be trans-
formed into a new image. An intermediate space, an in-between. But in this
case, ­there was no otherness. The anthropologist was part of an anthropopha-
gic ritual that excludes but also includes. Nevertheless, with time, ­things ­were
­going to become more and more digestible: ­there ­were books and ideas to
be eaten.

parentheses: picturing theory

The more I worked alongside Adriana, the more I felt familiarity but also dis-
tance before that 360-­degree work of art, a sensation akin to the experience of
discovering a new document. ­W hether the distance is between a curious tour-
ist and a new country, a seasoned historian and an ancient parchment, or an
anthropologist and images she is working with, we assume that it can never
be fully bridged. Perhaps at that stage the best ­thing would have been, as the
critic Michael Baxandall puts it, to try to recover “the ­causes of a painting”
or the “intention” b­ ehind its production and form.14 In other words, I should
have tried to read the artwork, armed with other sources against which to
compare my interpretation: ele­ments from Adriana’s own pictorial tradition
and the context to which it belongs. In so ­doing, I would have been writing
about “a place that may well be distant” but is always situated.15 In this sense, and
given that I am a social scientist, the best option would have been to examine
the contexts in which the artist moves.
Yet the task remained unclear. The question that arose was: how do we rec-
oncile writing and art? ­After all, to describe something in words is, first and fore-
most, as Baxandall once again shows, a repre­sen­ta­tion of what we think about
a work or our repre­sen­ta­tion of it. It is never a written recovery of the work as
such.
Furthermore, as we ­were dealing with an artwork, it was impor­tant not
to overlook the analy­sis of its formal aspects. We might recall Claude Lévi-­
Strauss’s well-­known contention that art is expression, a form of knowledge
located on the border between science and myth.16 In all of ­these domains,
art operates through concrete signs as opposed to concepts—­and a fortiori
“by his craftsmanship” the artist “constructs a material object which is also the
object of knowledge.”17

178 | lilia m. schwarcz
 The theme of art is ever pres­ent in Lévi-­Strauss’s work, from the similarities
between ­music and myth, as set forth in The Raw and the Cooked,18 and obser-
vations about indigenous art in Tristes Tropiques,19 to books that deal more
specifically with the art world, such as The Way of the Masks20 and Look, Listen,
Read.21 In this sense, Lévi-­Strauss helps us understand and value perspectives
like that of Ernst Gombrich, for whom, in the analy­sis of art, “form precedes
content.”22 In other words, ­there is no dealing with the specificities of ­these
documents without acknowledging that a work of art owes more to other
works than to its context. Posing a daunting challenge for social scientists, the
issue becomes how not to neglect the par­tic­u­lar language of art, whose reper-
toire is very often specific, and no doubt self-­referential.
However, the more so­cio­log­ic­ al aspects (like place of origin, biography,
gender, and ethnicity) that also affect artistic objects in their pro­cesses of
production, circulation, and reception occupy limited space in the analyses
of Lévi-­Strauss, more keenly attuned as he was to the stylistic forms and sym-
bolic meanings of a given piece. It is as if, like myths, works of art w ­ ere in
dialogue with each other more than with their contexts. In this sense, they are
form—­material that stands apart, to some degree, from social morphology.
Clifford Geertz’s anthropological approach to art is rather dif­fer­ent. Inter-
ested in analyzing the relativism of aesthetic taste and the definitions attrib-
uted to art, Geertz is invested in the idea that knowledge, even in this field, is
always “placed” in some ethnographical setting: “such placing, the giving to
art objects a cultural significance, is always a local m ­ atter; what art is in clas-
sical China or classical Islam, what it is in the Pueblo southwest or highland
New Guinea, is just not the same ­thing.”23 Ever concerned with ethnographic
contexts, Geertz denies the existence of any universal princi­ple for the defini-
tion or analy­sis of the theme. In his essay “Art as a Cultural System,” he in-
troduces a “semiotic science of art,” in which the meanings of works, based
on their formal or prosodic characteristics, would be incorporated into the
data derived from “specific patterns of life.”24 In other words, it is the broader
cultural context that lends the work its meaning—or, better put, a par­tic­u­lar
meaning.
From this perspective, a work of art is framed as a sort of symbolic media-
tor within social relations. In this sense, and even more so in Geertz’s vision,
our attention should be directed not to the formal aesthetic characteristics of
works, but rather to the context of their production. In this case, what r­ eally
­matters is the “external conception of the phenomenon.” 25 So for Geertz,
anthropological interest in artistic manifestations is limited to exploring what

i was cannibalized by an artist | 179

he calls an essentially collective sensibility wholly located in social life. Art
therefore represents the materialized expression of a way of living and feeling,
bringing “a par­tic­u­lar cast of mind out into the world of objects, where men
can look at it.”26 In other words, through art, anthropology understands how
we think in society, not how art itself thinks.
The prob­lem is that to think of art as a mere reflection of social life is to
posit art as an or­ga­nized and, in a sense, depoliticized w ­ hole, as if it arose de-
void of conflict, entirely unified and homogeneous. In other words, art would
be understood as a kind of obvious and passive product of its context. In
Geertz’s own words, “one could as well argue that the rituals, or the myths,
or the organ­ization of f­amily life, or the division of l­abor enact conceptions
evolved in painting as that painting reflects the conceptions under­lying social
life.”27 In this way, we might say that Geertz gives up on understanding the
reflexivity of the artistic universe ­because, as he writes, ­there is no need to
consider ­these items in terms of their heuristic value as producers of customs,
values, or even concepts.
Alfred Gell, on the other hand, defends a position diametrically opposed
to Geertz’s. For Gell, art does not necessarily reflect anything. Above all, it ar-
ticulates a network of clustered intentionalities and negotiates intentions and
ways of conceiving them among producers, receptors, and intermediaries. In
Gell’s conception, art plays a relevant role as a practical mediator in social life.
His perspective offers another way of approaching this domain, one geared
­toward evaluating the negotiations and agency of the artistic object. As Gell
explains, with a jab in Geertz’s direction, he is more “preoccupied with the
practical mediatory role of art objects in the social pro­cess, rather than with
the interpretation of objects ‘as if ’ they ­were texts.”28 Gell launches a veritable
methodological program for an anthropology interested in and concerned
with art. “In place of symbolic communication,” he writes, “I place all the em-
phasis on agency, intention, causation, result and transformation. I view art as a
system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic
propositions about it.”29
With this perspective in mind, Gell broadens the concept of the “art ob-
ject,” moving beyond, for example, the opposition between art and artefact.
Gell demolishes the concept: “The nature of the art object is a function of the
social-­relational matrix in which it is inserted. . . . ​But in fact anything what-
soever could, conceivably, be an art object from the anthropological point
of view, including living persons, ­because the anthropological theory of art

180 | lilia m. schwarcz
(which we can roughly define as the ‘social relations in the vicinity of objects
mediating social agency’) merges seamlessly with the social anthropology of
persons and their bodies.”30
However, if Gell articulates cosmologies of the cultural environment with
social interactions mediated therein, Lévi-­Strauss seems less concerned with
the ethnographic background of artistic objects. This lack of concern makes it
difficult to consider the agency of subjects within the fabric of social relations.
With ­these models in mind, my challenge is, first and foremost, to seek
out a dif­fer­ent equilibrium between formal aesthetic analyses and the social
studies of art. On the one hand, as social scientists, it is impor­tant for us to
understand a work in its context, so as to assess to what extent it responds to
its time. Even works of art are not just unique, autonomous products of an in­
de­pen­dent artist. In this sense, it is impor­tant to situate the artist and the art
in their context. On the other hand, we cannot overlook the internal dialogues
that works of art have within themselves based on patterns of intention: recur-
ring references to preceding or con­temporary works, or even conversations
with earlier works in the artist’s own oeuvre. It is an ongoing and imbricated
exercise in communication and reciprocal influence, befitting an object im-
bued with its own languages. To grasp the citations and visual references an
artist evokes is the task of the anthropologist, as it is part of the discipline’s
remit to rally its native’s voice and thereby, in some way, to reclaim it.
Such an approach is also a way of taking seriously Baxandall’s methodolog-
ical proposition for an “inferential criticism,” which reveals the dual effort to
articulate concepts and objects: to describe is to explain, and vice versa.31 He
maintains that “the concept deepens the perception of the object and the ob-
ject deepens the reference of the word.”32 Thus, in the pro­cess of describing a
work, we can see how the act of description evinces its constitutive references,
and how the inverse operates as well.
I wish to return ­here to the concepts of parody and intertextuality. Accord-
ing to Bruno Latour, the ways in which the “cascade of images is discernible in
the artistic domain shows the firm and intricate connection which each image
has with all ­others that have been produced, the complex relationship of se-
questration, allusion, destruction, distance, citation, parody and dispute.”33
However, it is just as impor­tant to avoid overpowering artwork by histo-
ricizing it, plucking it from the divine realm as Prometheus did with fire, and
relegating it entirely to the world of man.34 In other words, we might as well
avail ourselves of our habit of critically questioning sources so as to refrain from

i was cannibalized by an artist | 181

falling for a reading that rather romantically wraps the artist and his oeuvre
in a magical, demiurgic light. As Lévi-­Strauss wrote about artistic production
and its delusions of singularity: “When he claims to be solitary, the artist
lulls himself in a perhaps fruitful illusion, but the privilege he grants himself
is not real. When he thinks he is expressing himself spontaneously, creating
an original work, he is answering other past or pres­ent, ­actual or potential,
creators. ­W hether one knows it or not, one never walks alone along the path
of creativity.”35
Between a more formalist approach (concerned with aesthetic disposi-
tions, canons, and relationships between stylistic ele­ments, harmonies, and
pictorial compositions) and a more historicist view (primed first and fore-
most to investigate the intrinsic content of the work of art and its contextual-
ization in the historical and social moment of its production), it is impor­tant
to heed Baxandall’s reminder to analyze art by establishing “relations between
the object and its circumstances,” thereby moving beyond mere dichotomy.36
Form is always content, so any separation of ­these domains might better
serve didactic functions—­that is, to resolve disputes between rival fields of
knowledge—­than unveil phenomenologically distinct worlds.

a second time: cannibalization with color

Adriana and I started to work together more seriously in 2010. We used to meet
­every month. During ­those occasions, Adriana would explain her dif­fer­ent se-
ries of works to me. We discussed books, ideas, places, references, and even the
text I was writing. I used to read some parts of the book aloud. Eventually, each
series became a chapter: one was about colonization, another about the reread-
ing of academic art, another about saunas, another about her big artistic plates
(plates 12 and 13), and, fi­nally, one about her works related to the Yanomami
Indians (plates 16 and 17).37
What I want to focus on ­here is not a conclusion, but rather a new begin-
ning. Some time ago, Adriana called and told me she was working on a new
proj­ect that she was sure “I would love.” Together, we discussed at length the
importance of terms for describing skin colors in Brazil, and also the relevance
of thinking about color as a social classification in Brazil. I mentioned that
the country’s official census has five colors—­white, black, yellow, indigenous
(described as red), and pardo (an untranslatable word that refers to a kind of
brown)—­and noted that t­ hese color terms show the difficulties and ambigui-
ties we face. In Brazil, we avoid discussing origins or social pasts by describing

182 | lilia m. schwarcz
the world through dif­fer­ent colors. Yellow is Oriental, red is indigenous, black
and white need no explanation, and pardo is a kind of et cetera, otherness,
or none of the above—­a joker in the classification pack. We also discussed
the social uses of ­these terms, and how color is a social marker of difference
in Brazil. Color is a doppelgänger of race, and it is always circumstantial. It
can change depending on social situation, economic status, the day in ques-
tion, and other contextualized perceptions.38 The sociologist Oracy Nogueira
called it the prejudice of mark, or physical and external appearance, a form of
categorizing ­people by phenotype or skin color.39 The opposite of the model
of prejudice of origin, this model is more ambiguous as it allows for greater
flexibility, negotiation, and social use. As Edward Telles’s research in vari­ous
Latin American countries has shown, “pigmentocracy” is a power­ful category
in the social pro­cess of creating hierarchies.40 Although I cannot address other
countries ­here, at least in Brazil, color is a language—­a way of dealing with
differences through a kind of naturalization of hierarchy.
­These ­were the kinds of issues that Adriana wanted to discuss. In her previ-
ous works, she frequently introduced dif­fer­ent tones of (fake) skins. We also
talked about the Pesquisa Nacional em Domicílios (pnad),41 a national survey
in which Brazilians w ­ ere asked to define their own skin color and collectively
came up with 136 dif­fer­ent terms.42

1 Acastanhada somewhat chestnut-­colored F

2 Agalegada somewhat Galician F43

3 Alva snowy white F

4 Alva escura dull snowy white F
5 Alvarenta* snowy white F
(not in the dictionary; possibly dialect)
6 Alvarinta* snowy white F
7 Alva rosada pinkish white F
8 Alvinha snowy white F dimin

9 Amarela yellow F
10 Amarelada yellowish F
11 Amarela-­queimada burnt yellow F
12 Amarelosa yellowy F
13 Amorenada somewhat dark-­skinned F
14 Avermelhada reddish F
15 Azul blue ·
16 Azul-­marinho sea blue ·

i was cannibalized by an artist | 183

 17 Baiano from Bahia M
18 Bem branca very white F
19 Bem clara very pale F
20 Bem morena very dark-­skinned F
21 Branca white F
22 Branca-­avermelhada white ­going on ­red F
23 Branca-­melada honey-­colored ­white F
24 Branca-­morena white but dark-­skinned F
25 Branca-­pálida pale ­white F
26 Branca-­queimada burnt ­white F
27 Branca-­sardenta freckled ­white F
28 Branca-­suja off-­white F
29 Branquiça* whitish F
30 Branquinha very white F dimin

31 Bronze bronze-­colored ·
32 Bronzeada suntanned F
33 Bugrezinha-­escura dark-­skinned Indian F dimin + 
derogatory

34 Burro-­quando-­foge disappearing donkey humorous

(that is, ­nondescript)

35 Cabocla copper-­colored F
(refers to civilized Indians)

36 Cabo-­verde from Cabo Verde ·

37 Café coffee-­colored ·
38 Café-­com-­leite café au lait ·
39 Canela cinnamon ·
40 Canelada somewhat like cinnamon F
41 Cardão color of the cardoon, or thistle ·
(blue-­violet)

42 Castanha chestnut F
43 Castanha-­clara light ­chestnut F
44 Castanha-­escura dark ­chestnut F
45 Choco­late chocolate-­colored ·
46 Clara light-­colored, ­pale F
47 Clarinha light-­colored, pale F dimin

48 Cobre copper-­colored ·
49 Corada ruddy F
50 Cor-­de-­café coffee-­colored ·
51 Cor-­de-­canela cinnamon-­colored ·
 52 Cor-­de-­cuia gourd-­colored ·
53 Cor-­de-­leite milk-­colored (that is, milk w
­ hite) ·
54 Cor-­de-­ouro gold-­colored ·
55 Cor-­de-­rosa pink ·
56 Cor-­firme steady-­colored (firm color) ·
57 Crioula Creole F
58 Encerada polished F
59 Enxofrada pallid F
60 Esbranquecimento whitening ·
61 Escura dark F
62 Escurinha very dark F dimin

63 Fogoió having fiery-­colored hair ·

64 Galega Galician or Portuguese F
65 Galegada somewhat like a Galician F
or Portuguese
66 Jambo light-­skinned ·
(the color of a type of ­apple)

67 Laranja orange ·
68 Lilás lilac ·
69 Loira blonde F
70 Loira-­clara light blonde F
71 Loura blonde F
72 Lourinha pe­tite blonde F dimin

73 Malaia* Malaysian ­woman F

74 Marinheira sailor ­woman F
75 Marrom brown ·
76 Meio-­amarela half ­yellow F
77 Meio-­branca half ­white F
78 Meio-­morena half dark-­skinned F
79 Meio-­preta half ­black F
80 Melada honey-­colored F
81 Mestiça half-­caste (mestiza) F
82 Miscigenação miscegenetic ·
83 Mista mixed F
84 Morena dark-­skinned, ­brunette F
85 Morena-­bem chegada very nearly ­morena F
86 Morena-­bronzeada sunburnt ­morena F
87 Morena-­canelada somewhat cinnamon-­colored F
­morena
 88 Morena-­castanha chestnut-­colored ­morena F
89 Morena-­clara light-­skinned ­morena F
90 Morena-­cor-­de-­canela cinnamon-­colored ­morena F
91 Morena-­jambo light-­skinned morena F
92 Morenada somewhat ­morena F
93 Morena-­escura dark ­morena F
94 Morena-­fechada dark ­morena F
95 Morenão dark-­complexioned man M aug

96 Morena-­parda dark ­morena F

97 Morena-­roxa purplish ­morena F
98 Morena-­ruiva red-­headed ­morena F
99 Morena-­trigueira swarthy, dusky morena F
100 Moreninha pe­tite morena F dimin

101 Mulata mulatto girl F

102 Mulatinha ­little mulatto girl F dimin

103 Negra negress F

104 Negrota young negress F
105 Pálida pale F
106 Paraíba from Paraíba ·
107 Parda brown F
108 Parda-­clara light ­brown F
109 Parda-­morena brown ­morena F
110 Parda-­preta black-­brown F
111 Polaca Polish ­woman F
112 Pouco-­clara not very ­light F
113 Pouco-­morena not very dark-­complexioned F
114 Pretinha black, ­either young or ­small F
115 Puxa-­para-­branco heading ­toward ­white F
116 Quase-­negra almost ­negro F
117 Queimada sunburnt F
118 Queimada-­de-­praia beach ­bronzed F
119 Queimada-­de-­sol sunburnt F
120 Regular regular, ­normal ·
121 Retinta deep-­dyed, very ­dark F
122 Rosa rose-­colored F
123 Rosada rosy F
124 Rosa-­queimada sunburnt rosy F
125 Roxa purple F
 126 Ruiva redhead F
127 Russo Rus­sian M
128 Sapecada singed F
129 Sarará blonde negro ·
130 Saraúba* (possibly dialect) untranslatable ·
131 Tostada toasted F
132 Trigo wheaty ·
133 Trigueira brunette F
134 Turva murky F
135 Verde green ·
136 Vermelha red F

Although this list has been around for many years, t­ here is some continuity
in the terms. In Brazil, color terms can be rainbow-­like (black, white, yellow,
and red, but also green, purple, or even blue); change b­ ecause of gender (aug-
mentative for the men, diminutive for ­women); change ­because of the sun (or
the lack thereof); be modified depending on the day; and, most importantly,
change with social situation. In Brazil, we might say that a person does not
have a race: he or she is a race—if only temporarily. That is why race can
be a language and a becoming. Th ­ ere is a popu­lar expression that says “­things
are becoming black,” which means that a situation is getting worse. On the
other hand, becoming white is always aspirational, and the above examples of
“quite white,” “almost white,” and “heading ­toward white” show how power­ful
whiteness is as a symbol in Brazil. The importance of the color white is also
revealed in terms “approaching” this color. This sense of pro­cess or change is
not unique to whiteness. ­People describe themselves not as one stable color
but, most often, through examples of changing situations:

Half dark-­skinned
Half-­black
Honey-­colored
Half-­caste (mestiza)
Miscegenetic
Mixed
Dark-­skinned, brunette
Very nearly morena
Sunburnt morena
Somewhat cinnamon-­colored morena
Chestnut-­colored morena

i was cannibalized by an artist | 187

 Light-­skinned morena
Cinnamon-­colored morena
Light-­skinned morena
Somewhat morena
Dark morena
Dark-­complexioned man
Purplish morena
Red-­headed morena
Swarthy, dusky morena
Pe­tite morena
Mulatto girl
­Little mulatto girl
Negress
Young negress
Pale
From Paraíba
Brown
Light brown
Brown morena
Black-­brown
Polish ­woman
Not very light
Not very dark-­complexioned
Black, ­either young or small
Heading ­toward white
Almost negro
Sunburnt
Beach bronzed
Regular, normal
Deep-­dyed, very dark

­ ese terms show a series of agencies and negotiations. One has an approx-
Th
imate color or a color for now in Brazil, and describing one’s color is always
an ambiguous and complicated pro­cess. This explains the prevalence of terms
that describe not essential or final situations but partial, changing descriptors:
“quite,” “almost,” “not very,” “heading for,” “somewhat,” “half,” and so on. This
is not to say that t­ here is no such a t­ hing as a regular color. On the contrary,
many terms try to describe the color itself: 77 half-­white, 88 chestnut brown,

188 | lilia m. schwarcz
124 burnt pink, 16 sea blue, 38 café au lait, 25 pale white, 28 off-­white, 52 gourd-­
colored, 115 heading ­toward white, 58 polished, and 18 r­ eally white. Even so,
the very attempt to describe one’s color denotes the effort to make sure of it.
The list also includes numerous variations on white: white, rosy white, honey-­
white, beige, burnt white, freckly white, off white, whitish, and snow white.
White is not just a color in Brazil, it is a kind of social objective. While some
impor­tant changes in race relations have taken place since 1970, with the
growth of black activism in the country and the increase in social inclusion
programs, the deeply rooted belief in whiteness as a sign of superiority re-
mains. This is vis­i­ble in the pnad survey responses, many of which are vari-
ants on white.
A second pos­si­ble category for analy­sis is the use of color qualifiers in con-
junction with feminine diminutives or masculine augmentatives, such as 60 be-
coming whiter, 30 quite white, 100 ­little dark-­skinned girl, 62 ­little dark girl, 102
­little mulatto girl, and 95 large dark-­skinned man. Gender is another power­ful
social marker of difference, and as Anne McClintock reminds us, nationalism is
raced and gendered.44 It is common for race and gender to intersect in descrip-
tions of social hierarchy. In this case, the use of the diminutive evokes sexual
connotations.
The list also includes terms such as miscege­ne­tic, mixed, and getting whiter,
revealing the popularity of ­these concepts in responding to official surveys. In
fact, miscegenation is a widely used term in Brazil, strongly connected with
the ideology of the Estado Novo,45 in which the idea of a racism-­free country
where every­one lived in harmony was officially formulated for the first time.
Since then, ­these terms have become hackneyed, denoting not so much real
miscegenation as the wish for miscegenation and pro­cesses of whitening.
Other terms show how race is often understood as a concept of circum-
stance. Beach bronzed, sunburnt, and toasted are descriptions that evince the
distinction between ser (to be as a main verb, or an essential trait) and estar (to
be as an auxiliary verb, or in a state of). In Brazil, a person may be one color
temporarily, not permanently. It depends on social hierarchy, symbolic geog-
raphy, to whom you are married, or where you live. If your partner is whiter
than you, you immediately become whiter by association. If you live in a bet-
ter part of a slum, you may look more white than if you lived in the worst part.
Social markers of region interact with and help describe one’s position in a
par­tic­u­lar society.46
­There are also some possibly ironic terms in the list, revealing a series of al-
lusions under­lying their tone of mockery: runaway donkey color (a common

i was cannibalized by an artist | 189

jocular reference for a nondescript color), having fiery-­colored hair, and
honey-­colored. ­These terms show how difficult it is for a person to define his
or her color accurately, and how ambiguous this sort of definition can be. It is
sometimes better to make a joke of it.
But the list also includes very common colors, some of them expected and
­others less so: blue, yellow, white, coffee-­colored, copper-­colored, orange, lilac,
pink, purple, green, and red—­a real rainbow, or possibly an “Aquarela do Bra-
sil” (Watercolor of Brazil), to recall the famous 1939 song by Ary Barroso. Even
back then, the popu­lar poet and musician captured the myth of a color-­coded
racial democracy. In the words of Barroso’s song: “Brazil, my Brazilian Brazil /
My mulatto, wily scoundrel / Gonna sing you in my verses / Oh Brazil, samba
­will play / As the rhythm makes you sway / . . . ​/ Brazil so fertile and delightful /
Where the honey-­colored eyeful / Sneaks an indiscreet peek / Oh, the coco-
nuts fall from this palm tree / Where I string up my hammock / On nights
aglow with bright moonlight / Brazil, for me . . . ​/ Ah! this Brazil dusky and
serene/ It’s my Brazilian Brazil / Land of samba and the tambourine.”47
While I cannot comment ­here on all the colors and their combinations that
appear in the survey responses, one conclusion is clear. If the definitions them-
selves are multifarious, they have in common a certain consistency in their de-
tailed references to color as an external and physical aspect, but also as a socially
defined feature. It is in­ter­est­ing to note that in this extensive list, only a few of the
136 terms refer to a place of origin, and few used the word pardo. While ­things
have undoubtedly changed in Brazil ­after almost forty years, it remains clear
that p­ eople use color as language: a social language that contains information
about gender, region, ethnicity, and social hierarchy.
And what about Adriana? While we w ­ ere writing our book together, she
was also creating a brand-­new series of works based on color. She called the
items in the series Tintas polvo (Octopus ink). She had invoked the octopus
in earlier works, the creature appearing on her plates and in her pa­noramas
(plate 9).
­There is no coincidence ­here; instead, ­there is pro­cess. The octopus releases
melanin, the same substance that gives our skin and hair their color. “We do
not know it, but we are surrounded by ink,” Adriana says. But let me remind
you of another particularity of this complex animal. The Portuguese word polvo
(octopus) closely resembles povo (­people). The octopus can change color, as
can Adriana. And she does so not just in this recent proj­ect, but in her work in
general—in which we find a kind of ongoing visual reflection on color, skin,
painting, and parody. She proposes a discussion using color as language.

190 | lilia m. schwarcz
 In Tintas polvo, Adriana created a box of thirty-­three paints whose colors
she “in­ven­ted,” starting a new conversation about the dif­fer­ent tones of ink,
paint, or skin (plates 14 and 15).

Fogoió (flame-­haired)
Branca suja (off-­white)
Morena bem chegada (bordering on morena)
Amarelosa (yellowy)
Branca melada (honey-­white)
Parda morena (dark-­skinned girl)
Bugrezinha escura (dark Indian)
Café com leite (café-­au-­lait)
Azul marinho (sea-­blue)
Branquinha (snow white)
Agalegada (Galician-­like)
Choco­late
Burro-­quando-­foge (runaway donkey)
Morena-­jambo (fair morena)
Turva (turbid)
Queimada de praia (beach bronzed)
Escurinha (very dark)
Mulatinha (­little mulatto girl)
Encerada (varnished)
Sapecada (scorched)
Puxa para branca (heading ­toward white)
Bahiano (Bahian)
Cabocla (copper-­colored [refers to civilized Indians] girl)
Cabo verde (Cape Verde)
Cor de cuia (gourd)
Cor firme (colorfast)
Mertiça (mestiza)
Pálida (pale)
Polaca (Polish)
Parda clara (fair pardo)
Retinta (deep-­dyed, very dark)
Pouco clara (not so fair)
Meio preta (half black)

i was cannibalized by an artist | 191

 The translation of the terms into English—­required by an exhibition in
New York City that took place in 2014—­proved especially challenging. It was
difficult to translate the tones of skin, or even to translate popu­lar terms or
jokes, which are often strictly related to their cultural and social context. It was
also difficult to create a­ ctual inks from terms that are always unstable, ambigu-
ous, and sometimes untranslatable.
I played a role in this pro­cess, and I find it impossible to describe. We’d
be better off just thinking about it. Th ­ ere is a semantics and a poiesis at work
­here. To create ink or paint is an act of producing repre­sen­ta­tions, parodies,
and classifications. It is a tribute to the dif­fer­ent possibilities of discourse, the
multiplicity that is a kind of common foundation of depiction in art. Art, of
course, is not a reflex or a product of its context; it produces its own mean-
ings, customs, and repre­sen­ta­tions. One might call this a kind of visual liter-
ary fiction. As Horace said, “as is painting, so is poetry” (“ut pictura poesis”).48
The Greeks called this activity ekphrasis, meaning the description of images
in words.
In fact, when looking at artworks, the challenge is how to walk the tight-
rope between more formalist analyses (­those that place greater emphasis on
the aspects treated in the history of art, such as form, color, background, and
perspective) and more historicist readings (­those that strive to draw connec-
tions between works and their contexts). If we social scientists feel more at
home with analyses of a so­cio­log­ic­ al ilk, we cannot neglect the reflexivity that
emerges as an internal consequence of this kind of work. Works of art are prod-
ucts of their time, and as they depend on the receptiveness of their culture, they
are capable of producing the realities in which they are situated. In this sense,
as W. J. T. Mitchell noted, perhaps the best we can do is resist drawing theories
from images, but rather to “picture theories.”49

becoming the other

It is becoming very difficult for social scientists to deal with images. As Bax-
andall says, our attitude ­toward visual art is, to say the least, melancholic. We
cannot describe in words what does not pres­ent itself in pages and notes, and
it is difficult not to transform images into illustrations. But this case was dif­
fer­ent. When I started my research, I thought I would just describe Adriana’s
work and her creative pro­cess. However, she si­mul­ta­neously cannibalized
both me and the ideas of other scholars and transformed them into something
­else: another story, a visual argument, and another kind of discourse.

192 | lilia m. schwarcz
 The French phi­los­o­pher Jean-­Jacques Rousseau once defined alterity as
not only a way of discovering the other, but also a relationship in which that
discovery was a form of denial or suspicion of oneself.50 Maurice Merleau-­
Ponty saw in anthropology “a way of thinking in which the object is another
and demands a transformation on our part.”51 Even Lévi-­Strauss tried to
describe anthropology as a science of the other.52 I sincerely thought I was
simply trying to translate Adriana’s art, trying to understand my object, as we
anthropologists like to believe we do. But in this case, the opposite took place
without my knowledge (at least at first). Adriana tried to give visual space to
certain t­ heses I had in mind or had written about. She had selected me as her
in­for­mant, not the other way around. Adriana is not an unknown artist. On
the contrary, she is one of the most well-­known con­temporary artists in Bra-
zil, and even internationally. One could say that through her art, she brings
an alternative, distinctly globalized world into view (plates 18 and 19).
Perhaps Adriana’s stature raises a dif­fer­ent challenge for anthropologists, as
we are not very accustomed to dealing with this kind of native. In my case, the
most difficult part was understanding the kind of anthropology I was encoun-
tering in my research, which challenged all kinds of conventions. Th ­ ere was
no strict division between the writer and the object, the owner of knowledge
and the native, or the one who has the conditions to produce science and the
other who passively follows.
­Today, this duality is a caricature of the anthropologist’s work, and what
was happening in my case was an extreme example. I was selected by, and did
not select, my object; I became the work of ­others; and I did not just create a
work based on my own native philosophies.53
Perhaps my challenge was to stabilize what I had learned in describing Adri-
ana’s creative pro­cess. This challenge could also be a way of dealing with an
anthropology of becoming—­becoming food, theory, native, or art—­and how
our relationships with our subjects transform, create, or suggest new forms of
communication and perhaps understanding. Gilles Deleuze tells us that “to
write is certainly not to impose a form of expression on the m ­ atter of lived ex-
perience.”54 Lit­er­a­ture and other written forms of expression are most often
incomplete. This produces a kind of vertigo, a sense of always being in between
or among dif­fer­ent forms of expression.
In this engagement with the incompleteness of lit­er­a­ture and writing one be-
comes the other (the subject of knowledge is transformed into the object), but
sometimes the opposite is also true: lit­er­a­ture can be a delirium, but also a destiny.
We try to write about what is missing, but in so d­ oing we create new possibilities.

i was cannibalized by an artist | 193

 This can be read as an act of anthropophagy, in the sense that the Brazil-
ian modernist Oswald de Andrade gave to the term in the 1930s: we eat, we
regurgitate, and we create a new product—­a kind of mixture of dif­fer­ent ori-
gins.55 Using anthropophagy as a power­ful meta­phor for the Brazilian pro­cess
of cultural production, Andrade created a new way of seeing ­people. Nothing
is ­really new: every­thing is or can be transformed.
­Here, we reach a certain plateau. To become, in this sense, means to create
something new: new alternatives of making. Maybe we are close to an anthropol-
ogy that is open to what results from the relationship established between the
ethnographer and the native, the observer and the observed. Following the flux
of ­these narratives, giving place to the philosophies of our in­for­mants, becom-
ing part of ­those theories—as participant observers, and not just taking part in
participant observation, as Bronislaw Malinowski used to urge—­maybe we are
talking about an anthropology with and not about, an anthropology that works
together with its subjects, as opposed to simply producing books or essays about
­those ­people. That is, an anthropology that re­spects ­others in the sense that we
not only listen to and write about them, but we also learn from their theories.
Following Adriana’s work and listening to her explanations about art, the
world, proj­ects of life, and depictions of Brazil, we might experience a simi-
lar pro­cess. She can be considered a kind of Brazilian visual interpreter and
together we created a new literary visuality and a new visual fiction. In the
end, our roles r­ eally ­were reversed. Adriana was the one who listened to
me and, respecting what I explained about my values and what I r­ eally care
about, created a new becoming: becoming art.56
Cannibalization is a reflexive pro­cess in which one si­mul­ta­neously reproduces
forms of depiction and repre­sen­ta­tion and produces new ones. That is perhaps
an indication of the true incommensurability of language and image. Writing
about what we see is almost a fruitless exercise, but even if it is “in vain, it is still
our way of ­doing ­things and producing meanings, new meanings, for the subjects
we engage with.”57 In t­ hese terms, the relationship between Adriana and me r­ eally
did get flipped, and it produced another kind of anthropology: an anthropology
that can incorporate relations, emotions, and a pro­cess of mutual translation.

notes
1 Andrade, “Manifesto antropófago.”
2 Léry, História de uma viagem feita à terra do Brasil.
3 Montaigne, Pensadores.

194 | lilia m. schwarcz
 4 Carneiro da Cunha and Viveiros de Castro, “Vingança e temporalidade.”
5 Clifford, A experiência etnográfica, and The Predicament of Culture; see also Rabinow, Es-
says on the Anthropology of Reason; Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man.
6 Schwarcz, “Varejar, ladrilhar.”
7 Schwarcz, The Spectacle of the Races.
8 Sahlins, Ilhas de história.
9 Bhabha, O Lugar da Cultura.
10 Bhabha, O Lugar da Cultura, 26.
11 Bhabha, O Lugar da Cultura.
12 Said, Orientalism.
13 Said, Orientalism, 3.
14 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 37.
15 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 10. As Heliana Salgueiro shows in the introduction to that
volume, it is hard to deal with the act of describing and visualizing. Distance, cultural dif-
ference, and a lack of synchrony are key concepts in this relationship to ­representation.
16 Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind.
17 Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind, 4.
18 Lévi-­Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked.
19 Lévi-­Strauss, Tristes Tropiques.
20 Lévi-­Strauss, The Way of the Masks.
21 Lévi-­Strauss, Look, Listen, Read. See also Menezes Neto, “Atravessando fronteiras,” and
“Boa para agir.”
22 Gombrich, Arte e ilusão.
23 Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1475–76.
24 Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1481, 1475.
25 Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1477.
26 Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1478.
27 Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1480.
28 Gell, Art and Agency, 6.
29 Gell, Art and Agency, 6 (emphasis in the original).
30 Gell, Art and Agency, 7.
31 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 69.
32 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 72.
33 Latour, Jamais Fomos Modernos, 141.
34 Menezes Neto, “Boa para ­agir.”
35 Lévi-­Strauss, The Way of the Masks, 148.
36 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 77.
37 Schwarcz and Varejão, Pérola imperfeita.
38 Valle Silva, “Aspectos demográficos dos grupos raciais.”
39 Nogueira, Tanto preto quanto branco.
40 Telles, Pigmentocracies.
41 Fundação Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, “Pesquisa Nacional Por Amostra
de Domicílios—1976.”

i was cannibalized by an artist | 195

 42 In this list, F and M indicate feminine or masculine gender, respectively; dimin indicates
diminutive form of the term, and aug indicates augmentative form.
43 Galician ­here implies historical origin in the Galician cultural/ethnolinguistic commu-
nity of northwestern Spain.
44 McClintock, Imperial Leather.
45 Getúlio Vargas’s dictatorship and populist government in Brazil (1937–45).
46 Moutinho, “Diferenças e desigualdades negociadas.”
47 “Aquarela do Brasil.”
48 Ars Poetica, 11, 361–65.
49 Mitchell, Picture Theory.
50 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins of In­equality.”
51 Merleau-­Ponty, “De Mauss a Claude Lévi-­Strauss,” 199–200.
52 Lévi-­Strauss, Antropologia estrutural.
53 See Strathern, O gênero da dádiva; Viveiros de Castro, A inconstância da alma selvagem.
54 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 1.
55 Andrade, “Manifesto antropófago.”
56 The book that Adriana Varejão and I published in 2014 was a result of four years of dia-
logue and conversation (Schwarcz and Varejão, Pérola imperfeita).
57 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 63.

196 | lilia m. schwarcz
 7

On Negative Becoming

lucas bessire

an origin story

“I do not know my own story,” the young ­woman called Tié was whispering.
It was 2007, late on a cool night in a new village at the edge of an ancient
forest that pulsed in the dark and exhaled a rolling wind. We w ­ ere huddled
around a double handful of embers in the wattle-­and-­daub shack of Tié’s cap-
tors. The shack was theirs, but they ­were away and the o­ thers ­were asleep.
Even so she sat in silence, and I ­didn’t know why.
Her husband, Cutai, was by that time my hunting partner, the one who
gave me his first find of the day and who received mine in turn. The pretext
was laughable: I was only good at digging up turtles, but I’d like to think it
opened out into other kinds of reciprocity, however topsy-­turvy, l­ater. I knew
how quietly Cutai could move when necessary. One moment I was asleep, the
next he was ­there murmuring to come with him ­because his wife wanted to
tell me something. It was an odd request.
It was also a moment ripe with promise. Halfway through my dissertation
fieldwork, I felt like I was getting nowhere. Moreover, I thought Cutai and
Tié w­ ere exceptional. They w­ ere members of one of the world’s last bands of
voluntarily isolated nomads ­until 2004, when they fled the dwindling forests
of northern Paraguay, haunted by memories of genocidal vio­lence and the
sounds of the bulldozers that never stopped. They settled near a group of their
close relatives, who had been captured by missionaries and Ayoreo from an
­enemy group and had converted to evangelical Chris­tian­ity.
When the 2004 band of holdouts came in, many i­ magined them to be “the
last ­great hope for Ayoreo cultural revitalization.”1 Yet the aftermath of the
2004 contact unsettled this narrative. Up close, the 2004 group defied fanta-
sies of redemption based on encountering an untouched primitive ideal. Like
Ishi a c­ entury before, much of their life in the forest had been focused on the
practical prob­lems of concealment from the alien beings—­trucks, ­cattle, and
bulldozers—­they thought ­were relentlessly pursuing them.2
They called the space of postcontact life Cojñone-­Gari, or That Which
Belongs to the Strangers. It was a New World in which nothing was certain.
Every­thing had been recast in doubt and murk, especially the coordinates of
humanity. From their relatives, Tié and the ­others learned that surviving in
this world meant negating their past selves and transforming themselves into
Ichadie, or New P ­ eople. It was a fraught pro­cess, never complete. Of them all,
Tié seemed most able to resist the transformations demanded of her. Or so
I  thought. She sometimes said she ­couldn’t hear and often fell into deep si-
lences, and I never knew what she meant to say, much less what she thought
about anything.
On that night we sat passing a tin cup of tereré and breathing fragrant smoke
and listening to the night wind rustle through leaves and branches and tarps
and garbage. Tié began to speak in her throaty whisper, eyes averted, with long
pauses ­after each phrase:

I do not know where my story ­will go.

I was born in the place called Aremia.
I do not know what story to tell.
I do not know what I ­will say.
I do not know.
I do not know my story.
We looked for doidie roots.
We found them near Cucarani.
­Little birds, in the after­noon.
We painted our bodies.
We ­were sucio, dirty, in the after­noon.
We painted our bodies with ashes and down.
Black and white.
They ­were sucio, dirty.

198 | lucas bessire
 Sucio.
They sang.
They told many stories.
They saw far away.
The old man was ­there, too.
He told stories.
I do not know what to say.
We ate honey.
We killed fish.
We ­were dirty.
I do not know my story.
I do not know what to say.
My thoughts and my memories are gone.
They ­will no longer come to me.
I do not know my own story.

We sat quietly for a long time. I c­ an’t forget her fractured story, even though
it pains me to share and I still ­don’t understand it. What was she trying so hard
to convey, if not her own not-­quite-­ness, the way she was suspended between
opposing objectifications of her humanity, none of which fit? How to make
sense of the senseless delirium she seemed to communicate? What footings
can such vertiginous perspectives suggest for a po­liti­cally engaged anthropol-
ogy of the con­temporary? And how to resist the ways my recycled stories about
­these stories—­despite my intentions other­wise—­seem to amass, subtly and
inexorably, a terrible affective weight of their own that threatens to drag them
deeper and deeper into the dizzyingly mournful miasma of a death foretold?

ethnographic delirium

In his short essay “Lit­er­a­ture and Life,” Gilles Deleuze evokes two poles of
delirium: a “diseased” delirium of domination based on holding immanence
accountable to the ideal types it imposes, and a “bastard” delirium that “cease-
lessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting every­thing that crushes and impris-
ons.”3 It is this second form of delirium, he argues, that opens us up to the
vital possibilities of becoming. For Deleuze, “to become is not to attain a form
(identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indis-
cernibility or undifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished”
from the t­ hing itself.4 This apparent melding, however, is always interrupted
by the constant slippage between category and content. Writing t­oward this

on negative becoming | 199
slippage offers a technique for affirmative re­sis­tance when it fills in t­ hese gaps
with fabulations of a missing ­people. Deleuze is quite specific about what
kind of p­ eople are missing: “a minor p­ eople . . . ​a bastard ­people, inferior,
dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete.”5
This is precisely the kind of Indigenous subject—­bastardized, ex-­, incom-
plete, and resolutely open-­ended—­that is all too often erased from and by much
philosophically oriented anthropology no less than the ethnographic archives
on which such formulations draw their claims of empirical weight.6 In its re-
fusal of the preemptive foreclosure of her humanity, the dizzying testimony of
Tié unsettles this erasure. Instead, her unauthorized voice pushes against the
limits of the common categories by which Indigenous life becomes intelligible
and governed. Her palpable sense of dislocation reveals the generative power of
negation and the paradoxical resilience of ­human life. More precisely, she calls
attention to an unsettling art of living wherein immanence is collapsed into the
terms of rupture in such a way as to make the affirmative power of desire or the
leakiness of the social indistinguishable from a cascading chain of negations,
at once deadly and vital. Common among Ayoreo and closely attuned to the
global politics of Indigeneity, this delirious life proj­ect may be considered a
mode of negative becoming.7
Such vital arts emerge from and reformulate the evolving conflict be-
tween the world-­making proj­ects of Ayoreo and the world-­ordering proj­ects
of ­others. This life proj­ect arises from the efforts of ­people to live with and
against several key contradictions in the politics of legitimate Ayoreo life8—­a
politics whereby cultural legitimacy is increasingly used to distinguish who is
worthy of exceptional protection and who is allowed to die.9 This collapse of
cultural and biolegitimacy is causally related to the ways that the incoherence
of the Indigenous category may, u­ nder certain conditions, reor­ga­nize the re-
lationship between contingency and actualization for some of ­those to whom
the Indigenous label partly sticks.10
Such global dynamics take particularly acute form among so-­called ex-­
primitives: internally colonized Indigenous ­peoples struggling to survive on
the margins of a dystopic New World, not least ­because their ties to legitimat-
ing cultural origins are now refused, impossible, tenuous, or suspect.11 For ­these
marginalized subjects, the diffuse collapse of culture and life may at times blur
into the definitive operations of neo­co­lo­nial governance, especially when it oc-
curs against a schizoid backdrop of seemingly contradictory forms of vio­lence
aimed at p­ eople who refuse to stay within the authorized slots of Indigeneity.
This is certainly true for Ayoreo ­people, who confront a dizzying conflation of

200 | lucas bessire
bodily diminishment, voracious ecological destruction, the apocalyptic escha-
tology of millenarian faith, the exclusionary stigmas reserved for supposedly
deculturated indigenes, the feverish pursuit of redemptive cosmologies, the
caudillistic expenditures of advocacy nongovernmental organ­izations (ngos),
and the structural inequalities of neoliberal po­liti­cal economies.
Negative becoming does not merely instantiate t­hese power­ful forces of
destruction—it also trips them up in their own contradictions. In such ways,
this technique of negation illustrates a crucial point. It underlines how the
sense-­destroying axes of colonial dispossession engender not only well-­
documented coordinates of suffering but also novel vital experiments and
unsettling kinds of immanence. The paradox, of course, is that such life proj­
ects often do not fit within or are imperceptible to many of the conventional
analytic dichotomies used to understand emergence in Indigenous commu-
nities. This disconnect between analytic foreclosure and vital open-­endedness
is not coincidental. Rather, it is a crucial operation that calls attention to a
wider system of expenditure and negation, a system to which Ayoreo sensibil-
ities are more finely attuned than many analyses of it.12 This begs the question:
How might a more serious approximation to the creative and critical capaci-
ties of hypermarginalized Indigenous subjects help correct the m ­ istakes of our
past selves or negate the colonial genealogies of our own analytics and write
more effectively against their systemic dispossession?

affirmative negation

Aasi was one of the leaders of the forest band captured by armed missionaries
and e­ nemy Ayoreo in 1986. The story goes something like this: In late Decem-
ber the New Tribes Mission pi­lot spotted a column of smoke and ­later located
a camp of forest Ayoreo. The following day, missionaries led a group of Chris-
tian Ayoreo to the camp. Led by Aasi, the forest ­people had seen the airplane
and prepared defenses. The mission group approached the village at dawn,
led by Aasi’s b­ rother—­who had been captured in 1979. A fight broke out. Five
Christians ­were killed and four badly wounded. The mission group retreated,
and ­after much shouted discussion the forest ­people agreed to surrender. Four
days ­later, the captives arrived at the mission on the back of a tractor-­trailer.
Afterward several of the New ­People starved themselves to death, and ­others
died of “sadness.” Aasi took the unpre­ce­dented step of renouncing his status
as a dacasute warrior. Instead, he became widely known as an ayaajingaque
peacemaker.

on negative becoming | 201
 He was a slight man who rarely spoke but who radiated kindness and a
calm strength. It was hard earned. He had found visions and killed jaguars alone
with a spear and he had stood to defend his p­ eople in the face of death and
he still carried the slug from a shotgun lodged against the base of his skull and
he was the best tracker left alive although he could barely breathe in t­hose
days. He could find lost c­ hildren or tell the sex and age of a tortoise from the
slightest traces of its passage, w ­ hether over hard-­packed earth or leafy detri-
tus. When he sang the old songs with his gourd rattle, the other elders would
gather and sit and listen ­until dawn to show their re­spect. He was a reluctant
storyteller but masterful when the mood was upon him.
One of his funniest stories was about the time he made a ­mistake and fell
from the top of a tall honey tree onto his face, breaking several ribs, bleeding
internally, and losing consciousness. Eventually he crawled back to the camp,
only to discover that every­one ­else had deci­ded to move that day. He did not
wish them to wait on his account, so he said nothing about his injuries. He
told them to go ahead, and without a single word of complaint he picked up
his heavy bag and followed as best as he could, stopping only to pass out from
time to time before continuing his journey.
Aasi and I spent much time together in the twilight of his life around his
hearth and ­under the fluo­rescent glare of hospital lights. I like to think that we
­were close, but like always that is a tricky game and I can never be sure. He told
me that his life had changed in the mid-1990s. First, he contracted tuberculo-
sis and began to suffer from the chronic wasting disease that l­ater killed him.
Next, he began to work on nearby ranches clearing the forest with an ax and
hunting iguanas for their skins. Then, he became a Christian.
Few ­were so intimate with rupture. Contact, for Aasi and ­later the New
­People, meant entering a New World where Jesus was the ultimate arbiter of
moral humanity. Aasi associated Cojñone-­Gari with a set of causal relation-
ships and orientations that w ­ ere radically dif­fer­ent from t­ hose he attributed to
Erami, the forest world of the past. Life suited to this new world was created
when God poured his spirit into a convert. This pouring erased the person’s
willpower, emotions, and memory and created a New Person who had a recon-
stituted kind of soul m ­ atter called the ayipie, and who was capable of surviving
in the pres­ent. What was so striking about Aasi’s take on this general proj­ect
of rupture was that he explic­itly related it to the originary differentiations of
­humans and nonhumans recounted in the adode myths now abandoned as sa-
tanic lies. ­These myths described the origins of moral humanity. They recounted
an Original Time populated by the Ancestor Beings, an undifferentiated group

202 | lucas bessire
of proto-­humans, proto-­animals, proto-­plants, and proto-­qualities. Each myth
explained how ­these Ancestors ­were transformed into the nonhuman forms
apparent in the world ­today. At the moment of transformation, each Ances-
tor Being gave two t­hings to t­hose who maintained a humanoid form. The
first was a puyaque taboo, or a moral restriction on be­hav­ior and its associated
punishment. The second was a prescriptive chant that could be used to relieve
the illness or malaise caused by transgressing the restricted be­hav­ior through
sympathetic magic.
The key point is that humanity emerges as a condensation of transformative
pro­cesses in ­these retrospective descriptions of the complex of myths, taboos,
and curing chants. The Original Time of the Ancestor Beings preceded the rise
of ­human society. The Ancestors w ­ ere not fully ­human. Rather, they ­were hu-
manoids that ­were fundamentally amoral and unsocialized, lacking the means
to reproduce a moral society. In fact, t­hese Beings learned how to become
moral h­ umans—­how to make fire, weave clothing, construct shelters, plant
gardens, kill game, wage war, cure illness, and enlist metaphysical alliances—­
only through the embodied knowledge imparted by other Ancestor Beings as
they transformed themselves. In other words, moral h­ uman life is defined
as the capacity to harness and control the terms of transformation and rup-
ture.13 This notion is akin to an Ayoreo theory of becoming.
Confronted with the insoluble existential dilemmas of contact, many Ayoreo
turned to this theory. Yet in a dizzying inversion, they argued that reclaiming the
capacity of becoming in Cojñone-­Gari meant negating the very coordinates of
the moral in Erami: myths, curing chants, and ceremonies. The abandonment of
tradition, in such a scheme, simply marked the most recent of several historical
transformations of humanity. Citing and extending self-­transformation through
negation was a radical affirmation of Ayoreo capacities of becoming in the face
of violent subjection. Continuity implied rupture and vice versa. Perhaps the pe-
culiar agency drawn from the positive charge of rupture was why p­ eople like Aasi
seemed to wear their self-­negation so deeply and so lightly at once.
I could never share Aasi’s ease with rupture. And I wish the story could end
with his resilience, or that I could forget how ­these ideal trajectories of self-­
transformation would prove so illusory and crash so harshly against the insolu-
ble contradictions of becoming an Indian in the Chaco. Even so, Aasi was one
of the few who never lost his faith. Faced with the certainty of an undignified
death hastened by appalling neglect in the local health care system, he was the
one to comfort me. “I am not a child who cries with his fear of death,” he told
me. “If I cry, it appears as though I am a liar, as if I had no faith.”

on negative becoming | 203
the colonial mirror of expenditure

While this proj­ect of affirmative rupture may be carefully attuned to the

upheavals of contact, the paradox is that within the peculiar double binds
of internal colonialism it also made its Ayoreo proponents newly eligible for
extermination. That is, Ayoreo subjects confronted a system in which two pur-
portedly oppositional domains of dehumanization w ­ ere conjoined and mutu-
ally sustaining: subjection due to their ostensive difference, and violent dispos-
session justified by the ostensive loss of legitimate difference, or culture death.
Together, ­these operations animate an apparatus of consumption predicated
on incoherence and the mutual interruption of contradictory schema of le-
gitimate Indigenous life. Dysfunction is how it functions. This nonlinear ap-
paratus, in turn, instantiates a wider po­liti­cal and moral economy aimed not
so much at production as at senseless expenditures of life.
The colonizing force of nonsensical expenditures emerges from the em-
bodied conjuncture of several proj­ects focused on Ayoreo life: evangelical mis-
sionization, the culturalist protest against that evangelism, rampant ecological
destruction, the hypervisibility of so-­called isolated ­peoples, and the renewed
conceptual investment in primitive cosmologies. Each can be considered a par­
tic­u­lar mode of delirium, and when they converge around expenditure, the de-
lirium is intensified in po­liti­cally instrumental ways.
The evangelical missionary proj­ect among Ayoreo, for instance, never
claimed to be rational. Indeed, the entire mission order was predicated on a
fundamental disorder: the irrational and excessive desire to hoard Indian souls.
Ambiguity and efforts to eliminate doubt—­efforts that in turn led to further
ambiguities in need of domestication—­were the primary technique and motor
of the proj­ect. This princi­ple, in which frustration blurred into faith and vice
versa, emerged from the gap between missionary ideals of savagery, conver-
sion, and salvation and the hard practicalities of managing unruly ­people. This
delirious disorder linked vari­ous aspects of mission work. Missionaries saw
themselves as ideally overwhelmed by the passion to collect Indian souls, or
“brown gold,” in lands dominated by Satan. Only by ­doing so could the Body
of Christ’s Bride be complete and the Rapture of the faithful occur.14
Yet dealing with the devil for Indian souls meant abandoning any clear dis-
tinctions between dark and light. The pursuit of souls meant that missionar-
ies became complicit in local systems of slavery, epidemics, shamanism, and
infanticide. The figure of savagery in need of contact was thus amplified not
­because the missions functioned smoothly but precisely ­because they did not.

204 | lucas bessire
The ever-­increasing drive to hunt forest Indians was at least partly a response
to the contradictions of r­ unning missions that resembled death camps. Re-
peated time and again, the Indian hunt can be considered the central ritual of
the colonizing proj­ect. Its participants sought to track down, capture, enslave,
and convert small groups of forest Indians in order to save and care for them
by eradicating their difference. In ­doing so the Indian hunt created and ampli-
fied the figures of savagery to be hunted anew.
Culturalist critiques of missionary hunts also risked blurring into their
opposite. The tragic outcome of the 1986 contact with Aasi and the ­others
became the target of a vigorous international critique, which framed the Indian
hunt as a form of ethnocide. This narrative of ethnocide became the founda-
tional myth of Totobiegosode-­Ayoreo humanity.15 It is also an origin myth for
the po­liti­cal anthropology of Indigeneity. The equation is s­ imple: the death of
culture is equivalent to the loss of the value of Indigenous life. “Genocide assas-
sinates ­people in their bodies,” Pierre Clastres wrote in his famous 1974 essay
on the topic. “Ethnocide kills them in their minds.”16 For Clastres, “ethnocide
is the systematic destruction of the ways of living and thinking of p­ eople dif­
fer­ent from t­hose who lead this venture of destruction.”17 He finds this same
“­will to reduce difference and alterity” to be “at the very heart of the State’s
substance.”18 Moreover, he links ethnocide and the reduction of alterity to a
modern drive for economic production: “Produce or die, this is the motto of
the West. . . . ​Woe to the Indians caught in the path!”19
A special kind of woe was reserved for the Ayoreo. The Paraguayan eth-
nologist Ticio Escobar invoked Clastres’s definition to summarize the after-
math of the 1986 contact with Totobiegosode-­Ayoreo. In an evocative passage
that helped galvanize the Indigenous rights movement in Alfredo Stroessner’s
Paraguay, he described the ethnocide of Ayoreo in the following terms:

The most tragic effect of missionary ethnocide is that it breaks the spine of
a p­ eople, it converts their members into caricatures of westerners and l­ater,
as it does not have any reasonable proj­ect to offer them, it pushes them ir-
responsibly to sell hides, to hand over their forests and symbols, and t­ owards
direct exploitation or it sends them to a marginal underworld of begging,
prostitution, alcoholism and petty delinquency where they end as beings
that have no place in their culture or the culture of ­others. . . . ​Once the com-
munity is dissolved, the pact that united it with nature according to its com-
mon designs is also dissolved; soon, the Indian finds himself in opposition
to a universe with which he once identified himself and he sees his rela-

on negative becoming | 205
 tions with his ecological environment adulterated; at the end, he himself is
turned into a predatory destroyer. Collective tradition is also dissolved: the
anathema launched against his ancient beliefs creates an artificial wall of
forgetting that interferes with the transmitting metabolism of his culture: a
phobic negation of the past and a schizophrenic fracture of time invents a
pure pres­ent without ghosts or memories.20

What is difficult to understand is how recognizing Indians as the “shadows

of men”21 seems to require, almost despite itself, denying the strange agen-
cies and vitalisms that surge from the former Savage’s new role as consum-
mate negator and destroyer, no less than they do from descriptions of that
role. This denial arises from the reduction of the value of life to the limits of
bounded traditional culture. By accepting this reduction, the model of ethno-
cide answers before it is posed the question of why any one of t­ hese shadowy
ex-­Indians would so eagerly invest in “opposition to a universe with which he
once identified himself ” and the “phobic negation of the past” or in a schizoid
fracturing of time. It presumes t­ hese emerging vitalisms are not generative ex-
perimental forms finely adapted to wider colonial dynamics, but pathological
disorders that are symptoms of contamination and death. In ­doing so, diag-
nosis and symptom are inverted. Ethnocide reappears not as pathology but
as organ­izing princi­ple and essential metanarrative. Yet it, too, is haunted by a
delirious investment in the same dehumanizing logics as the Indian hunt. The
unavoidable irony is that both this dismissive diagnosis and the feverish pur-
suit of the primitive not only sustain terrible vio­lence but inadvertently birth
a strange new subject: an interstitial, residual being caught between life and
death, animated by profane desires and radiating decay yet somehow stub-
bornly still right ­there, refusing to assume a frozen pose, in your face, talking
back, cracking wise, asking for a coin, trying to turn a trick in an outrageous
outfit and with—­could it be?—­a raucous laugh.
One prob­lem with this model lies in how it reproduces cap­it­ al­ist narratives
of production. Yet the pursuit of capital in the Chaco is by no means rational.
Cleared of most of its former Indigenous inhabitants, this once iconic wil-
derness is in the midst of a land rush. B ­ ecause of the rising price of beef and
the ­legal privileging of private property, land prices have skyrocketed. Many
­people with long-­standing titles to large tracts of land, including most of the
Mennonite ranchers in the area, have become multimillionaires. Much of this
capital is reinvested in “improvements” and clearing more forest. The result
is a shockingly fast transformation of an entire ecosystem, greater disparity

206 | lucas bessire
in wealth, and one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. Many ranch-
ers and government officials label this transformation as production, which is
considered a moral value. In planetary terms, of course, this transition from a
carbon-­capturing and extremely biologically productive multistoried forest to
a dystrophic grass monoculture used to feed beef c­ attle is senseless. Produc-
tion blurs into its own economic and social opposites. It is not hard to share the
common Ayoreo perception that the entire exercise is a wanton staging of de-
struction and a cele­bration of negative power, maximally expressed in the figure
of the bulldozer: a massive howling machine of polished metal and inexorable
treads that crushes all in its path, manned by rotating crews, never stopping.
It is no coincidence that the assault on the forest is accompanied by nos-
talgia for the wilderness and supposedly isolated primitives. The frustrated
desires for pure difference are once again displaced onto the small bands of
Ayoreo holdouts who, despite all odds, maintain a life of nomadic concealment
in the shrinking forests. Like the New ­People before them, they have gained
an international hypervisibility. They legally resemble ele­ments of nature and
are regularly celebrated as existing in harmony with nature.22 While the hyper-
marginality of a­ ctual Ayoreo-­speaking ­people is rendered po­liti­cally invisible, a
transnational moral economy is mobilized to preserve the haunting fantasy of a
pristine Ayoreo life hidden in a besieged wilderness. The paradox, again, is that
the terms by which this difference becomes appealing are the very terms that
justify their abandonment to the fate that we think we already know, the sense
of an inevitable end foreclosing their ­futures as surely as the bulldozers do.
The combined result is an incoherent colonial system predicated not on
the rational accumulation of profits but on a series of violent, nonsensical ex-
penditures that often converge around the consumption of Indigenous life.
This resonates closely with Georges Bataille’s startling insight that what he
called “unproductive expenditures”—­waste, destruction, sacrifice, and orgi-
astic consumption—­were not merely dysfunctional but actually at the core
of global po­liti­cal economies and their failed efforts to domesticate the ex-
cessive fecundity of natu­ral and social life.23 Bataille argues that the fetishiza-
tion of positive production masks and sustains the operations of systemic ne-
gation, the true motor of cap­i­tal­ist civilization. The point for Bataille is that
this negative expenditure, or depensé, paradoxically contains a latent affirmative
force. That is, this kind of targeted destruction does not only destroy but also
creates and sacralizes that which is negated. Only by intentionally amplifying
this play of affirmation within negativity, he a­ rgues, could one have the slight-
est chance to reclaim in its midst a mea­sure of “subversive sovereignty,” the

on negative becoming | 207
strange power that flows from inhabiting self-­negation and embracing life
beyond authorized utility.24 From this perspective, the dynamics that meld
the experiences of becoming Indian in the Chaco with ethnographic analy-
ses of them—­loss, abjection, insufficiency, and the breakdown of narrative
itself—­take on the shades of something more than lamentation. Instead,
they voice an experimental resilience that continually reworks contingen-
cies into becomings, vio­lence into immanence.

broken lines of flight

Aasi’s nephew was a man I’ll call Pejei. One eve­ning, I noticed that he was
missing from his customary place around the communal fire. Pejei ­didn’t ap-
pear the next night or the night ­after that. It appeared that his entire ­house­hold
had left and that his shack was abandoned. No one was chopping wood or
hauling ­water, and ­there was no fire inside. But someone was inside: I heard
moans and mutters late at night. Then, suddenly, Pejei was back. His laugh was
strained, his smile a l­ ittle too quick, and he had nothing to say. The o­ thers ­were
careful and gentle with him, making a point to share their food. When I asked
him where he had been, an older ­woman interjected.
“His ayipie left him,” she said. “But now he’s okay again.”
Pejei nodded and smiled. I learned that he had spent the last three days
tied to a post with a coarse rope, thrashing and moaning and trying to run away
to the forest. Pejei was one of several Totobiegosode who ­were susceptible to
a form of madness called urusoi. A handsome man in his mid-­fifties with the
build of a weightlifter, he came from a long line of distinguished dacasute
warriors and was said to resemble his ­father, Aasi’s ­brother and the principal
leader of the Totobiegosode whose band was hunted down and captured in
December 1978.
By March 1979, Pejei’s ­father had starved himself to death. The young Pejei
was hired out to a local rancher, and when he returned several months l­ater,
he learned that most of his ­family had died in his absence. He then married a
young ­woman who five years ­later gave birth to twins, traditionally consid-
ered taboo. Pejei’s first bout of urusoi came when missionaries pressured the
­couple to keep both infants, despite the fact that Pejei saw a sign that indicated
the death of his wife if they v­ iolated the prohibition. Back on the mission,
they had ­little choice. True to Pejei’s prophecy, his wife soon died. Since then,
attacks of urusoi could strike him at any time. He had been told to take anti-
psychotic medi­cation.

208 | lucas bessire
 Urusoi could be caused by any profound fear. I was told that it was often
triggered by frightening encounters with white men or ­things associated with
them, such as the sudden appearance of a Cojñoi carry­ing a gun in the for-
est. The episode I witnessed with Pejei was attributed to an airplane that had
unexpectedly passed overhead at dusk. The sound of this airplane and the air
it pushed down, “its breath,” touched Pejei, and the fright caused his ayipie to
leave his body.
During my fieldwork, several ­people suffered from attacks of urusoi. One
man kept ripping off his clothes, trying to grab his spear and moaning that he
had to kill the Cojñone. Aasi’s wife told me that it was the heat of a fever that
made her want to cast off her clothes and run back to the forest. Yet urusoi itself
was an unstable sign. Prior to contact, this affliction was attributed to trans-
gressing the moral prohibitions of ritually power­ful spirit beings, particularly
Poji, or Iguana. In the past, a person struck with urusoi was thought to mimic
and acquire the traits of Poji. Like an iguana, the afflicted ones would run to the
forest, sleep in the daytime in a hole they dug underground, and eat raw food.
They ran from their own p­ eople, lost their ability to speak, became afraid of fire,
turned yellow, and jumped from one place to another at dizzying, impossible
speed. ­Those afflicted by urusoi lost the defining core of their moral humanity.
In the absence of the ayipie, they acted like nonhuman beings.
In the upheavals of contact, cases of urusoi proliferated. But t­ hose afflicted
with urusoi in Cojñone-­Gari experienced symptoms dif­fer­ent from t­ hose expe-
rienced prior to contact. Postcontact victims of urusoi w ­ ere not compromised
by violating the taboos of a single spirit being, but by residues of their past selves
embodied in their flesh. The other Totobiegosode explained that Pejei’s sickness
was caused not by his ayipie’s vanishing or hovering in an indistinct state but by
its returning to the past. If he ran out of medicine, his ayipie left his body and
returned to the cucha bajade, or former practices now considered deeply offen-
sive to God. Like Pejei, o­ thers afflicted by urusoi turned against the trappings
of moral life in Cojñone-­Gari. Like Pejei, they attempted to destroy all traces
of Cojñone around them, particularly the symbols of contact. They tore their
clothes, they broke their dishes, they refused to eat the foods of the whites,
and they tried to run to the forest. They ­were usually restrained by being tied
to a tree or a post. Ayoreo said that someone suffering from urusoi acted “like
an animal,” but the symptoms bore a striking resemblance to past forms of
­human life.
Ayoreo used the same word to describe the state of being drunk or high.
During my fieldwork, huffing shoe glue or drinking grain alcohol w ­ ere the

on negative becoming | 209
chosen means of escape for a number of younger Ayoreo. To be sure, they
had much to flee. Across the Chaco, Ayoreo w ­ ere treated as subhuman ­matter
out of place. This was particularly acute for the many who lived in unauthor-
ized camps on the outskirts of towns and cities, where disease, poverty, rape,
and murder ­were commonplace. The terrible irony is that Ayoreo proj­ects
of self-­actualization through negation ­were most often legible to outsiders
only as the loss of culture and a return to an essential savagery, a pro­cess that
amplified the violent negativity such critiques ostensibly protested. In such
disturbed conditions, urusoi was a radical technique for reworking the condi-
tions of colonial subjection into a kind of negative vitality.
Ayoreo commonly say that t­ hose who indulge in intoxicants have a vicio, or a
vice. The most extreme of the Ayoreo viciosos ­were ­those known as the Puyedie, or
the Prohibited Ones.25 They ­were a group of some two dozen Ayoreo who lived
hidden in the tall grass of an abandoned lot b­ ehind the train station, where they
supported themselves through sex work of the most marginal kinds. Puyedie
­were defined by two vices. The first was their addiction to smoking coca paste—
an unrefined mash of coca leaves, sulphuric acid, and kerosene, gasoline, or ben-
zol that was known in Ayoreo slang as puyai. Prior to contact, the word puyai
referred to the set of moral prohibitions established through adode myths. Now
it is applied to intoxicating drugs as well as to the domains of the past considered
profane and immoral. The second vice of the puyedie was consuming dirt and
bricks, which they pounded into dust and ate. In a series of remarkable interviews
with the Bolivian anthropologist Irene Roca Ortiz, who directed the first Ayoreo
public health proj­ect in 2012, some Puyedie said that any bricks would do, while
­others ate only the bricks used to line the bottom of open sewage ditches. The
eating of bricks and dirt was not secondary to the coca smoking. Some said it
was brick eating that led to the coca smoking, rather than vice versa. They said
that some Puyedie eschewed any other kind of food and ate so many bricks that
their skin turned yellow—­like an iguana.
One Puye ­woman named Rosy told of passing out and waking up in strange
places, snatches of incoherent conversation, bribing police with money or sex,
and living a life defined by violent confrontations with Ayoreo and Cojñone
alike.26 She began sniffing gasoline in her early teens while living on an evan-
gelical mission near the city, and she learned how to smoke coca paste from
other Ayoreo. Rosy said that she knew her vices w ­ ere dangerous: “The vices
kill us.” Many of her friends had already died from their vices—­more than she
could keep track of: “More than ten, more than twenty, I d­ on’t know.” She her-
self was frequently sick ­these days, from what she ­didn’t know: “When you are

210 | lucas bessire
a viciosa, any illness ­will grab you, you know.” Even so, she said she ­wouldn’t
give up her vices: “They are sweet to me.” In her interviews with Roca Ortiz,
Rosy emphasized that her deadly vices gave her life. She said that without her
vices, she became more like an animal. She said she could not give them up:
“You’d better tie me to a tree,” she said, smiling, “or I w­ on’t stay.” The same
coarse rope is used to tie all ­those afflicted with urusoi or vice, to keep them
from ­running off to an alterity at once inhuman and legitimating. And it is the
same knot that always slips.

negative becoming

How to account for such attitudes as something more than evidence of loss
and disintegration? The voices recounted above provide some key clues. They
imply that certain Ayoreo life proj­ects emerge from t­ hose points at which two
distinct ­labors of the negative collide: the incoherent negativity of internal
colonialism manifested in oppositional schema for objectifying and govern-
ing legitimate Indigenous life, and an Ayoreo immanence premised on gaining
mastery over this insoluble negativity by claiming, in distinct ways, the power
of self-­negation as a meaningful technique for reproducing moral life despite
and through the terms of dehumanization. In other words, negative becoming
as a vital technique flows from the delirium-­inducing synergies between con-
tradictory regimes of Ayoreo life. ­These include the fracturing of sympathetic
magic and the frustrated promise of evangelical eschatology; the world-­ending
vio­lence relentlessly stalking certain small Indigenous populations; the ram-
pant ecological devastation of the Gran Chaco; the feverish pursuit of primitive
cosmologies and their redemptive potentials by tradition-­seeking anthropolo-
gists; the moral aspirations and economies of humanitarian ngos focused on
preserving culturalized life; the tenuous coordinates of causality for dispos-
sessed ­peoples and the lightning-­quick oscillations from reason to nonsense
and back again that ­these engender; the irrepressible desires to assert humanity
despite or through cataclysmic threats and in d­ oing so to reclaim authority over
the conditions of its possibility even if this means self-­sacrifice; and the power
of ethnography to conjure up and unleash spirit negatives in its efforts to effect
a further transcendence of self and world. Ayoreo proj­ects of negative becom-
ing embrace and intensify the delirium of colonial subjection.
Among the most power­ful of such contradictions is a conceptual operation
and current trend in some anthropological theory that first mea­sures the value
of Indigenous life in terms of its continuity with an artificially limited set of cos-

on negative becoming | 211
mological positions glossed as nonmodern ontological exteriorities, then crafts
the social ­orders of a ­future demanded by forecasted crises upon the disavowed
exclusions of this ideal, and fi­nally imposes the terms of this f­ uture back onto the
pres­ent as a normative schema for a po­liti­cal anthropology aimed at solidarity
with con­temporary Indigenous ­peoples and their strug­gles. Such an operation,
of course, cannot account for the proj­ects of negative becoming. This lack of
accounting, as Michael Taussig argues, is intrinsic to colonial vio­lence and the
“epistemic murk” on which it depends.27 The persecution of difference ­under co-
lonial regimes does not eradicate alterity but amplifies it through fetishized
images of wildness in need of domestication. This amplification, in turn, draws
force from and is predicated on what poses as its countermea­sure, “the hermeneu-
tic vio­lence that creates feeble fictions in the guise of realism, objectivity and the
like, flattening contradiction and systematizing chaos.”28
Such contradictions, as Bataille reminds us, may be immanent not to
language games but to an entire planetary economy wherein conventional
framings of Indigenous strug­gles pose as metanarratives for masking what is
actually a strug­gle over the means, methods, and modes of expenditure. If the
capacity to control the terms of expenditure is inseparable from sovereignties
of vari­ous kinds, the issue is not only how to limit expenditure but also how to
better understand its uneven distribution.
What kind of ethnography is capable of writing t­owards such openings
rather than their preemptive foreclosure? As outlined in this volume, the an-
thropology of becoming suggests several starting points.29 In the first place, an
analytical shift from being to becoming requires a theory of the Indigenous
subject that goes beyond cultural determinism. Instead, ethnographers are
challenged to attend to the critical capacities and creative agencies so force-
fully retained by historically dispossessed ­people despite and through the
nonsensical and constantly displaced footings of dehumanization. ­Doing so
means presuming that the affirmative force of such emerging sensibilities lies
not in their noninteriorizable qualities but in the experimental resilience they
reflect and provoke ­under conditions of extreme marginality. This, in turn,
challenges the sense of inevitability implied by many analytic tools and allows
Indigenous subjects to reappear not as ideal types known in advance but as
always unfinished, incomplete, and open-­ended.
In such ways, the ethnography of becoming reclaims anthropological in-
sights from their philosophical uses (including the primitivist genealogies of
Deleuze and Guattari’s original conceptualizations).30 In ­doing so, it raises
new questions and pos­si­ble orientations for the po­liti­cal anthropology of indi-

212 | lucas bessire
geneity. Po­liti­cal critique can no longer be restricted to the defense of cultural
continuity or the logics of cosmological alterity; indeed, restricting the search
for revisionist potential to the ahistorical contents of primitive ontologies or
a society against the state is no solution at all, but part of an updated mode of
domination justified in the name of impending crisis. The anthropology of
becoming interrupts this mode by refusing to take categories for granted, by
staying close to contents to unsettle forms, and by finding actionable critique
in the unruliness of that peculiar spark that unsettles, ignites, and always es-
capes, but not before illuminating the shape of a new humanistic politics and
ethnography yet to come.

notes
1 Bartolome, El Encuentro de la Gente y los Insensatos, 308.
2 For more on Ishi, the member of the Yahi tribe who was caught in northern California
in 1911 and ­later celebrated as “the last wild Indian in North Amer­i­ca,” see, for example,
Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds.
3 Deleuze, “Lit­er­a­ture and Life,” 229.
4 Deleuze, “Lit­er­a­ture and Life,” 225.
5 Deleuze, “Lit­er­a­ture and Life,” 228.
6 See, for instance, Hage, “Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Po­liti­cal
Imaginary ­Today”; Viveiros de Castro, “Introduction,” and “Perspectival Anthropology
and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.”
7 Space constraints prevent a full discussion of ­these points ­here. For an elaboration of the
arguments suggested in this chapter, see Bessire, Behold the Black Caiman.
8 For insightful analyses of the global politics of life in question, see especially Fassin, “An-
other Politics of Life Is Pos­si­ble,” and Humanitarian Reason.
9 Much has been written, of course, on the governmental force of the culture concept,
especially within multiculturalism. See especially Hale, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism”;
Jean Jackson, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious”; Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition.
10 For a further development of ­these points, see Bessire, “Apocalyptic ­Futures,” “The Poli-
tics of Isolation,” and “The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality.”
11 This notion of the ex-­primitive is an expanded version of that developed so eloquently
by Clifford Geertz in “Life among the Anthros.”
12 My discussion of negativity is indebted to Gaston Gordillo’s gripping analyses of “rubble”
for criollo settlers in the Argentine Chaco (En el Gran Chaco and Landscapes of Dev­ils).
Gordillo reveals how the peculiar generative force of negativity resides in the ways
­people live alongside and appropriate the material detritus of state and corporate vio­
lence (Debt, 188–90). Such practices, Gordillo shows, go beyond any simplistic positiv-
ity, as they unsettle the totalizing force of negation itself.

on negative becoming | 213
 13 For a related description of creation myths and cosmological tenets among the Kayapó,
see Turner, “The Crisis of Late Structuralism.”
14 See Johnston, The Story of the New Tribes Mission.
15 See Perasso, Cronicas de Cacerias Humanas.
16 Clastres, Archeology of Vio­lence, 103.
17 Clastres, Archeology of Vio­lence, 103.
18 Clastres, Archeology of Vio­lence, 108.
19 Clastres, Archeology of Vio­lence, 113.
20 T. Escobar, Misión, 37.
21 T. Escobar, Misión, 37.
22 See, for instance, Glauser, “Su presencia protege el corazón del Chaco Seco.”
23 Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 3, and The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge.
24 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 3:198, 230–31.
25 This discussion is indebted to materials collected and shared by Irene Roca Ortiz. See
also Roca Ortiz, Pigasipiedie iji yoquijoningai.
26 Irene Roca Ortiz, personal communication with the author, November 14, 2012.
27 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, xiii.
28 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, 132.
29 This use of becoming is borrowed from Biehl and Locke, “Deleuze and the Anthropol-
ogy of Becoming,” and inspired by discussions in Biehl, “catkine” and Vita.
30 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus, and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo­
phre­nia. See also Biehl, “Ethnography in the Way of Theory.” It is a noteworthy irony that
the philosophical concept of becoming was initially inspired in part by a problematic
ethnographic archive and latent primitivism, inherited from Antonin Artaud and Clas-
tres. On Clastres’s Society against the State and the repurposing of both within the proj­ect
of ontological anthropology by Viveiros de Castro in “Introduction,” see Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

214 | lucas bessire
V
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 8

Time Machines

The ­Matter of the Missing in Cyprus

elizabeth a. davis

At the lab one after­noon in February—­a few days ­after it had snowed in Nico-
sia for the first time in fifteen years, and all the scientists had left their ­tables
and run outside in their white lab coats to play on the tarmac—­M. and S.
­were working together on a case, S. dealing with the body and M. with the
artifacts found with it in the grave. M. held up a watch for us to inspect. It was
still in good shape, somewhat small for a man’s watch, with a s­ imple, round
face and a cloth strap. M. pointed out that the watch had stopped when the
date read “16.” This body had come from a mass grave dating, it was thought,
to August 16, 1974, immediately ­after the second Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
M. and S. stopped for a moment and looked at the watch. S. explained to me
that it might have been broken at the same moment when the man was killed.
We see lots of watches, she said. Usually, if t­ hey’re not broken, you have to assume
that they just kept working, keeping time long a­ fter the person was killed, which
is weird—­like a heart beating in a dead body. But then you see one like this, and
you know it had the same fate as the person. It’s like a time machine—it takes you
right ­there.
At this acute yet inchoate moment of polarizing conflict at the complex fron-
tiers of global war, ­those frontiers may seem ever expansive—­not only across
geopo­liti­cal terrain but also across time. If the recent and ongoing conflicts in
Iraq and Af­ghan­i­stan, Darfur and Colombia, Gaza and Kurdistan, and Egypt
and Syria are apprehended as the overdetermined effects of multiple vectors
of empire, ­those vectors recur almost infinitely into the past, into many com-
pound histories of vio­lence, while their effects extend likewise into the ­future:
into a “permanent war economy,” as Ed Sard called it at the close of World
War II;1 a “permanent war,” in the Reagan-­era view of Sidney Lens;2 or a “per-
petual war for perpetual peace,” in the words of Gore Vidal, just ­after 9/11.3
The complementary threats of terrorism and security seem to petrify our po­
liti­cal horizons as they define and legitimate state power along with domes-
tic and transnational insurgencies. Like development, democ­ratization, and
debt, they appear as parts of the global unfolding of a systemic logic of sov-
ereignty and capital, generating predictable forms and unyielding constraints
for ­human life.
Yet in critical inquiries into war—­past, pres­ent, or ­future—­such closed
visions of the po­liti­cal landscape are often animated by the search for con-
testatory and subversive, if not liberatory, spaces in the shadow of this appar-
ent world machine. So it is imperative to ask by what criteria we may identify
silence, reduction, conspiracy, and foreclosure in wartime—­and also, on the
contrary, how we might discern meaning, legitimacy, creativity, and possibili-
ties of transformation. How do we distinguish the open and malleable aspects
of war from ­those that are inevitably and intractably determined? Or, to bor-
row Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s framing, how do we let paranoid hermeneutics
interact with reparative ones in our “ecol­ogy of knowing”?4
I ask this question with a par­tic­u­lar scene of perpetual war in mind. Since
2007, I have been visiting and working in Cyprus, a country still divided by the
so-­called Green Line, a de facto cease-­fire line dating to 1958. It was designated as
a United Nations (un) cease-­fire line following devastating episodes of civil and
paramilitary vio­lence in 1963, and it became the permanent partition line a­ fter
the war of 1974. For the period between 1963 (when the first large-­scale inci-
dents of vio­lence took place ­after Cyprus declared in­de­pen­dence from ­Great
Britain in 1960) and 1974 (when the cease-­fire line definitively separated the
island’s populations), the government in the north reports 1,800 Turkish Cy-
priots killed and 502 missing, while the government in the south reports 3,000
Greek Cypriots killed, with 1,493 missing. During the same period, almost
215,000 Cypriots ­were displaced, or about a third of the Greek-­Cypriot popu-

218 | elizabeth a. davis
lation and half the Turkish-­Cypriot population.5 Although a po­liti­cal settle-
ment for reunification has persisted as the dominant issue in Cyprus since
1974, the Green Line remains in place ­today.
The ­matter of this chapter arises from the forensic scene in which Cypriots
reckon with war through the artifacts of death: the bones and belongings of
­those who went missing during the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. Th ­ ese
artifacts objectify knowledge about the vio­lence of the past that remains ever
pres­ent in the ongoing division of p­ eople and places, in the Green Line and
all its symbolic and material referents in Cypriots’ everyday lives. But the fo-
rensic pro­cess of objectification does not exhaust their activity; the bones and
belongings of the missing, fossils apparently “frozen” in the past, have come
to be dynamic operators in complex time. Jane Bennett, parsing Deleuze, de-
scribes “an operator” as “that which, by virtue of its par­tic­u­lar location in an
assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes
the difference, makes ­things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing
an event.”6 As operators in this sense, the artifacts of the missing tell many
kinds of time in the performative rhythms of science and ritual; they material-
ize the temporalities of death, waiting, discovery, analy­sis, sanctification, and
reburial.
The time machine that S. showed me that after­noon at the lab “takes you
right ­there”—­­there being a time, the moment of a death. The literality of the
watch’s repre­sen­ta­tion of time made it an ideal time machine, but in its capac-
ity to materialize and stop time, it was no dif­fer­ent from many other objects of
forensic work. Layla Renshaw, writing of exhumations of the civil war dead in
Spain, notes the “power­ful material and aesthetic properties and affordances of
the dead and their associated objects . . . ​[which] actively shape the responses
and repre­sen­ta­tions that can be made by the living.”7 The key to this insight
lies in the “active” shaping of ­those repre­sen­ta­tions by artifacts of the dead.
I see this activity in the ways that bones tell time. They rec­ord the rhythms,
patterns, and accidents of a person’s life in traces left by eating habits, smoking
habits, repetitive movements, diseases, injuries, and environmental ele­ments.
They also continue to tell time a­ fter death, aging at a dif­fer­ent pace once bur-
ied in the ground. In this material and temporal capacity to tell time, bones
are perhaps more like mechanical timepieces than they are like other organic
­matter of the body, such as the flesh—­which quickly decomposes and dis­
appears ­after death.8
­These time machines, as I ­will call them, seemed to me during my field-
work in Cyprus to generate what William Connolly, riffing on the final scene

time machines | 219
of Barton Fink, describes as “moment[s] of time without movement, engag-
ing dif­fer­ent zones of temporality”—­moments that “arrest multiple sites and
speeds of mobility that impinge on one another when in motion.”9 As I under-
stand Connolly, it is the interference among t­ hese sites and speeds (“temporal
force-­fields”) that actuates the experience of stopping (“time without move-
ment”), but a focus is required (an image, object, or “multisensory memory”)
around which the past and pres­ent may coalesce in that moment.10 What
Sedgwick seeks as reparative hermeneutics can be found, I think, in Connolly’s
proj­ect to “amplify the experience of becoming” by harnessing such “protean
moments”—­dilated beyond the “punctual time” of decision and action—to
new reflections on “ethics, politics, economics, and spirituality,” and thus to
develop an apprehension and appreciation of the uncertainty and essential
openness of the world.11
I find this vision of a “world of becoming”12 to be a vitalizing complement
to the paranoid hermeneutics in which the violent history of Cyprus seems so
deeply entrenched. Following Sedgwick’s suggestion that paranoia is a chosen
disposition to knowledge rather than a privileged path to truth, and that it
may thus coexist and fruitfully interact with other dispositions to knowledge,
I aim to develop a dif­fer­ent orientation to ­these artifacts that are so often held
to symbolize a Cyprus “frozen in time.” In what follows, I explore how forensic
objects in Cyprus refract and reor­ga­nize time, and how they thus summon and
configure relationships between the past and the pres­ent, and the dead and the
living. I examine the intimate and complex work scientists do to “see” a missing
person in his or her bones—­a work of reconstruction, simulation, imagination,
conjuration, and humanization—­and consider what this knowledge does to
them in turn.
This chapter draws on the fieldwork I conducted in 2011–12 with the Com-
mittee on Missing Persons (cmp) in Cyprus. The cmp is a Greek-­Cypriot/
Turkish-­Cypriot agency established in 1981 ­under un auspices. Its mission
is to determine the location and identity of the bodies of over 2,000 p­ eople,
both combatants and civilians, who went missing during the vio­lence of the
1960s and 1970s. The cmp has three po­liti­cal representatives: a Greek-­Cypriot
member and a Turkish-­Cypriot member, appointed by their respective gov-
ernments at the level of Minister, and another known as the “Third Member,”
selected by the International Committee of the Red Cross and appointed by
the un. ­Under the members’ direction, since 2004, teams of Greek-­Cypriot
and Turkish-­Cypriot archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and ge­ne­ticists
have been conducting investigations: exhuming remains on both sides of the

220 | elizabeth a. davis
Green Line, analyzing them, and confirming their identity with dna testing.
Once a missing person’s identity is confirmed, the remains are returned to the
person’s relatives—­who also receive, if they wish, psychological counseling
and financial support for burial.
For de­cades ­after the division in 1974, state authorities in the north and
the south blocked the cmp’s investigations, concealing information about the
deaths of the missing and the location of their bodies, and ­either encouraging
relatives to put the past ­behind them (in the north) or cynically nurturing the
hope among relatives that their loved ones might still be alive (in the south).
Exhumations of mass graves in Cyprus ­were conducted occasionally in the
late 1990s and early 2000s by international nongovernmental organ­izations
such as Physicians for H ­ uman Rights,13 and by consulting agencies like the
for-­profit British Inforce Foundation and the nonprofit Argentine Forensic
Anthropology Team. Even though the cmp had been established in 1981, it
did not begin its own systematic investigations ­until 2004, when the recovery
of the missing was “de-­linked” from the prospect of a po­liti­cal settlement and
newly framed as a “purely humanitarian issue”14—­the outcome of efforts by
officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Republic of Cyprus, ­under
pressure from the Eu­ro­pean Union (eu) and lobby groups formed by relatives
of the missing.15 Since then, of the 2,001 p­ eople counted officially as missing,
1,209 have been exhumed and 750 have been identified: 566 Greek Cypriots
and 184 Turkish Cypriots.16
Although the cmp does not emphasize this point, its purview is limited to
victims of inter-­communal vio­lence—­that is, Greek Cypriots killed by Turk-
ish Cypriots or Turkish military personnel, and Turkish Cypriots killed by
Greek Cypriots or Greek military personnel. Many victims of vio­lence cannot
be counted in ­these communal terms. For example, it is well known that many
Greek Cypriots, mostly leftists and other supporters of President Makarios
at the time of the attempted coup in July 1974, w ­ ere killed in that period by
Greek-­Cypriot members of eoka-­b,17 a right-­wing paramilitary organ­ization,
or by Greek officers and soldiers. Similarly, I have heard many accounts of
the deliberate but secret bombing of Turkish-­Cypriot homes and mosques by
members of the tmt,18 a Turkish-­Cypriot paramilitary organ­ization, or by the
Turkish Army, which passed this vio­lence off as Greek or Greek-­Cypriot in
order to stoke fear and hostility between the two communities and raise sup-
port among Turkish Cypriots for partition (taksım). At least two international
agencies—­the In-­Force Foundation and Physicians for ­Human Rights—­have
investigated cases of Cypriots killed or hidden by members of “their own”

time machines | 221
communities, and a few archaeologists who now work at the cmp participated
in ­those investigations, but the investigations themselves are or­gan­i­za­tion­ally
unconnected to the cmp. Intra-­communal vio­lence in Cyprus, which has left
unclaimed bodies throughout the island, is thus secreted within the mission
of the cmp; forensic knowledge of ­these deaths is not legible to the politics of
peace and reconciliation.
Despite the history of secrecy surrounding the fate of the missing, the cmp
has received a ­great deal of media coverage in Cyprus in recent years, and the
forensic teams have been featured in a number of tele­vi­sion broadcasts and
documentary films.19 Images of scientists working with bones have become
as commonplace as t­ hose of grief-­stricken relatives in repre­sen­ta­tions of Cy-
prus’s violent history. This imagery originates and circulates in a very dif­fer­ent
way from the forensic photo­graphs produced in the pro­cess of investigation
and stored in the cmp’s confidential archives. ­These very public photo­graphs
and films of scientists at work participate in a genre of repre­sen­ta­tion that is well
established outside Cyprus—in places like Argentina, Bosnia-­Herzegovina,
Chile, Guatemala, and Spain, where, as in Cyprus, forensic investigations of
the missing and dis­appeared have become public forums for “witnessing” and
“memory recovery.”20 Along with the forensic training and the infrastructure of
investigation contributed to Cyprus by international agencies is this genre of
publicity, which Francisco Ferrándiz and Alejandro Baer, documenting recent
exhumations of leftists killed in the Spanish civil war, describe as a “global pool
of images of repression, loss, terror and vio­lence.”21 This genre features images
of mourning ­women—­the M ­ others of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, for ex-
ample, mirroring the ­Mothers of the Missing in Cyprus—as well as images of
forensic teams working with bones in a scenario of grim science that Gregory
Whitehead calls the “forensic theatre.”22
Given the po­liti­cal sensitivity of the cmp’s work, its visibility surprised
me when I first began working with the forensic teams. But I have come to see
this visibility as a defining feature of the cmp—­a constitutive ele­ment in the
synergetic dynamic of secrecy and publicity entailed by its mandate to con-
duct po­liti­cally neutral investigations, detached from any prospect of justice
for murder, rape, and other crimes of war. According to its terms of reference
laid down in 1981, “the committee ­will not attempt to attribute responsibil-
ity for the deaths of any missing persons or make findings as to the cause of
such deaths.”23 This mandate is grounded in an ideology of closure, a coercive
expectation that confirming the deaths of the missing and returning their re-
mains to their families ­will suffice to heal the wounds of the past and clear

222 | elizabeth a. davis
a path ­toward reunification. The bones and belongings of the missing, exca-
vated painstakingly from mass graves and laid out on t­ ables for analy­sis, identi-
fied and photographed, and cata­logued and archived before their reburial, are
scripted in the narrative of closure promoted by the cmp as the brute facts of
death to be ascertained—­and thus as substitutes for other truths that cannot
be disclosed to the public. But the experience of time that t­ hese artifacts sum-
mon for the scientists who work with them, and for the relatives of the missing
who ultimately claim them, may open up a dif­fer­ent course. In focusing on
­these objects, I mean to show how they both stop and dilate time, summon-
ing the dead into relationships with the living as they reckon with suddenly
indeterminate histories and uncertain ­futures.

secreting evidence

Despite the cmp’s stance of po­liti­cal neutrality and its interdiction on attribut-
ing responsibility for the deaths it investigates, the forensic scientists I knew
made informal findings e­ very day about the c­ auses and circumstances of the
deaths of the missing. F., an osteologist who had been working at the cmp for
several years, told me that their lab reports ­were designed to prevent conclu-
sions from being drawn about the cause or manner of death; the forms elicited
information in discrete, quantitative chunks, rather than in what she called
“narrative” form. F. had been trained to think in narrative terms, she said, as-
sembling pieces of evidence that would lead to the conclusion that the event of
death had tran­spired in a certain way. A narrative like that needs a lot of descrip-
tion, she told me. The cmp lab reports had boxes for recording mea­sure­ments
of each bone according to several dif­fer­ent metrics, to determine the person’s
age, sex, injuries, and pathologies, but ­there ­were no spaces in which to write
descriptions of the bones. Moreover, the forms required a kind of differential di-
agnosis; the scientists ­were asked to note any traumas or pathologies that might
be related to the death, supplying evidence for multiple pos­si­ble ­causes without
drawing any conclusion. When I asked F. who would read t­hese reports, she
said: No one! They just sit in the archive. But she added that she thought the cmp
was afraid that families might request the reports years down the line, so they
wanted to limit the information recorded on the forms.
And so the production of forensic evidence yielded its own secrets, in turn.
­These secrets w ­ ere not only a m ­ atter of what was concealed in the cmp’s
confidential archives. They ­were also a ­matter of what was quite literally de-
stroyed in the pro­cess of investigation. When h­ uman remains are exhumed,

time machines | 223
the graves are destroyed. I have learned from archaeologists that such destruc-
tion is part and parcel of discovery, and that what is destroyed depends on
what investigators are seeking. As the team leader at one excavation site told
me, The first ­thing I learned about excavations is that they destroy culture. Once
you understand that, you understand that the question is how to learn as much as
you can from a site while d­ oing the least damage. According to cmp protocols,
material evidence recovered in an excavation would be removed from the site
each day; brought to the lab; and washed, dried, cata­logued, and stored in
the climate-­controlled annex ­until it was time for analy­sis—­which could be a
­matter of weeks, months, or years. When the analy­sis was complete, any bones
and fragments that could be identified conclusively w ­ ere returned to the rela-
tives of the victim, along with any associated artifacts. Artifacts that could not
be associated with a specific person ­were retained by the cmp in storage. Any
potentially dangerous materials, like munitions, ­were turned over to the un to
be destroyed by a bomb squad. Thus, according to procedure, most of the ma-
terial evidence recovered by the cmp was reburied; some was stored anony-
mously; and some was destroyed.
In my work with the cmp, I saw nothing to indicate that the excavations
conducted by its forensic teams ­were any more damaging to evidence than any
­others, but archaeologists did question the appropriateness of their excava­
tions in a more general sense. For example, when I joined a team working at
a large excavation site on a mountainside in the north, I heard a long debate
over lunch between A., who worked part time curating exhibits at the Archae-
ological Museum in Nicosia, and G., who said he was altogether “against”
excavation and exhibits. A. had started the conversation by announcing her
plan that eve­ning to see a new exhibition at the Archaeological Museum,
just opened in cele­bration of the upcoming Cypriot presidency of the eu. G.
asked her: What is this? You spend all day working on an excavation and then at
night you go to the archaeology museum? Surprised, A. asked him: ­Don’t you like
archaeology? A ­ ren’t you an archaeologist? He told her that he preferred archae-
ological parks, where sites ­were opened with all the artifacts left in situ and
glassed over so that visitors could see the site intact. He complained that the
science of archaeology had not progressed much in a hundred years, that ex-
cavation techniques w ­ ere still “very primitive” and did terrible damage to the
history embedded in the ground. A. agreed that archaeological techniques
­were in some ways “too crude for proper excavations,” but she contended
that was exactly why they needed to continue their work—to improve their
methods and keep learning about their civilization and their history. G. said:

224 | elizabeth a. davis
History ­doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to ­future generations. We should be preserv-
ing it for them. We could do that with satellite photography and three-­dimensional
photography—we ­don’t need to excavate right now. P ­ eople in the ­future ­will have
better tools; t­ hey’ll know what to do. A. asked him how they would know when
that moment had arrived: How long should we wait? Anyway, t­ here are ways to ex-
cavate and preserve at the same time—­you can excavate just a corner of a site, rather
than the ­whole ­thing. Gesturing across the massive site where they w ­ ere working
that day, G. pointed out: If you only dig part of it, you ­don’t get the ­whole picture;
you just have ­little pieces, and ­little ideas that d­ on’t get at the ­whole. Look at how we
do ­things—do you r­ eally think ­we’re taking good care of ­these bones?
S.’s criticism was ethical, not methodological. His team followed clear, es-
tablished procedures as they had been trained to do. Archaeologists working
in the field ­were acutely aware of the importance of following ­these proce-
dures to ensure good evidence. They told me they w ­ ere criticized “constantly”
in the newspapers for ­doing sloppy work, not following proper procedures
in their excavations, not storing bones safely, and in some cases, destroying
evidence due to incompetence or po­liti­cal motivations. ­People ­don’t under-
stand why investigations take so long, P. told me: ­We’re attacked all the time, in the
media—­people say w ­ e’re too young, w ­ e’re lazy, we d­ on’t take the work seriously.
They ­don’t understand how hard it is. . . . ​On a lot of sites, we just d­ on’t have good
information from witnesses, and we have to dig around for a long time before we
find the grave. They d­ on’t understand how meticulous we have to be in order to
recover entire bodies, rather than just a few fragments for identification, like they
did in Bosnia. And then the analy­sis takes forever—we have so few ­people working
in the lab, and we have to check and double-­check every­thing to be sure ­we’ve got
the right person. And then t­ here’s a huge backlog for dna testing. P. described the
daily push by supervisors to go “faster, faster, faster” before the money ran out.
When she first began working with the cmp, she told me, she had heard the
proj­ect would continue for ten years or more—­“as long as it took!” Now, how-
ever, the members w ­ ere suggesting a much shorter horizon, of about three
years. This reduction in the scope of the proj­ect had almost entirely to do with
funding, P. said. The investigations ­were extremely expensive, and the cmp
was wholly dependent on funding from the eu and un, which ­were increas-
ingly spare in their contributions. The lab man­ag­er told me that, given its short
life span, the cmp would consider it an “excellent success” if 80 ­percent of the
missing had been found by the time they shut down.
­Under ­these pressures, one of the excavation supervisors was known to
complain about the extensive documentation required of fieldworkers by

time machines | 225
“proper procedure.” Recording every­thing in field notes and photos slowed
down the excavations, and he could not see the point of collecting all t­ hose
data when the impor­tant ­thing was to recover the bones and return them to
the families as soon as pos­si­ble. B., who had worked for several years in the
field, objected to this. He told me that when it came to field photography, more
is better! The camera can see t­ hings you d­ on’t see. The w
­ hole pro­cess of excavating
has to be recorded so that you can reconstruct it years ­later, if you need to.
That prospect—­reconstructing forensic investigations in the ­future—­was,
perhaps, the crux of the ­matter. At the time of my research, the cmp ensured
the anonymity of witnesses and the confidentiality of forensic data in the pres­
ent, but ­there was no guarantee for the f­uture. Should a po­liti­cal settlement
ever be achieved between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic
of Northern Cyprus, an essentially new state would emerge, with a new jus-
tice system. A truth-­and-­reconciliation pro­cess could be negotiated as part of
this regime change—­and with it, a new form and new role for the cmp, if it
survived at all. Its confidential archives could be opened to the public, or at
least to police and prosecutors. What the cmp treated as po­liti­cally neutral
deaths could become murders and assassinations. Field reports of excava-
tions could become rec­ords of crime scenes; anthropological analyses could
become autopsies. It was with that uncertain ­future of the state itself in mind
that the cmp kept its secrets, even as it compiled a massive archive for ­future
knowledge.

becoming ­h uman

The cmp had a proprietary relationship to the images of gravesites and bones
generated by the forensic teams. The scientists oversaw an im­mense archive of
forensic photo­graphs containing thousands of images, but none of ­these im-
ages can be reprinted ­here. They are encrypted and stored in the cmp’s data-
base, and no one at the cmp has the right to reproduce or transmit them. Only
scientists working on a case and relatives of the missing person in question
would ever see t­ hese images. Even relatives w­ ere shown only a small se­lection
of photo­graphs: an image of the gravesite a­ fter the excavation was complete—­
but none of the excavation, when bones w ­ ere still vis­i­ble in the ground—­and
an image of the bones arranged in the form of a skeleton, as far as pos­si­ble.
One investigator told me that families could be “traumatized” if they w ­ ere
exposed to photo­graphs of bones as they had been found in situ in mass graves,
dispersed and disarticulated. Indeed, I had seen many photo­graphs of skele-

226 | elizabeth a. davis
tons in situ in the archives, and I had noted how dif­fer­ent the bones looked
­after analy­sis, each one vis­i­ble, clean, laid out on a white ­table in a rough ap-
proximation of body, if not quite to scale. The archaeological reports usually
contained many photo­graphs of a grave, unexcavated or in the pro­cess of ex-
cavation, showing bones looking uncannily like dead ­people, practically en-
fleshed: in the midst of action or in fallen positions, heads above feet, arms
raised above heads or wrapped around o­ thers, bodies twisted to one side or
the other, jaws open. Equally upsetting to relatives, however, according to this
investigator, ­were photo­graphs of bones being handled by strangers, even the
scientists who worked with them so carefully. Before a viewing, the cmp
psychologists, who counseled families during the course of an investigation,
often showed relatives photo­graphs of the bones arrayed on a lab ­table, to pre-
pare them for what they would see in person. The photo­graphs ­were intended
as preparation for recognition.
One day at the lab, I followed Y., the forensic photographer, as he, not she
hurried from ­table to ­table. She was taking multiple photo­graphs of the bones
and artifacts from a case, then uploading the best pictures into the database
so the anthropologists working on the case could add captions and incor-
porate the images into their reports. Y. took individual photos of each item
associated with the missing person as well as photos of the “­whole body”—­
that is, as much of an entire skeleton as pos­si­ble. He did the same with the
artifacts, photographing each scrap of clothing separately and then placing the
scraps into a meaningful array. He pointed out to me the case she was work-
ing on now, bodies from a f­amily grave: a f­ather, ­mother, grand­mother, and
two small ­children. He had created a folder in the database where she could
put the photos of their bones and artifacts together—­like a ­family ­album, in a
weird way, he said.
That day, Y. got some help from K., an anthropologist, who had noticed
that Y. was having trou­ble figuring out how the scraps of clothing fit together.
K. knelt on the floor next to the white sheet where the fabric was laid out,
and within half a minute had reconstructed almost an entire shirt, assembling
scraps from the front and back, the breast pocket, the sleeves, the collar, the
buttons. Y. whistled and praised her skills. K. replied that she liked working
with the artifacts; it reminded her of ­house­work and her ­family. If you do
enough laundry, you understand how clothes are put together, she said, gesturing
­toward the old torn shirt on the floor. For whom was this old shirt repaired
and summoned into the pres­ent? K., along with Y., me, and ­others in the lab
who had gathered around for a moment, w ­ ere the only audience for her deft

time machines | 227
handi­work. It was a fleeting moment; the shirt would be disassembled shortly
afterward, the pieces placed in a plastic bag and set aside for a viewing with
the relatives at some point in the ­future. Of the shots taken by Y., the best
one would be uploaded to the digital case file, where, in all likelihood, no one
would ever see it.
The care K. put into piecing the shirt together, which she likened to the care
she put into ­doing her ­family’s laundry, also mirrored the care she put into
piecing skeletons together from bones and bone fragments, the analytic pro-
cedure that ­every anthropologist undertook when “working on a body.” The
scientific pro­cess of associating and ordering bones and bone fragments was
oriented to the visual recognition of bodies. The anthropologists conducted
their analy­sis “blind”—­that is, without external references such as the case
files of missing persons, which usually contained photo­graphs of ­those per-
sons from the time they went missing; descriptions given by relatives, noting
habitual activities like smoking, or forms of l­ abor that might have left traces of
repetitive motion on their bones; and unique physical traits or medical condi-
tions that might aid in identifying their remains. Working first without such
antemortem data, anthropologists proceeded by areas of the body, locating all
the pieces that belonged to each limb, the hands and feet, the pelvis, spine, skull
(including teeth), and ­others, organ­izing them as far as pos­si­ble in the form of
a skeleton on a ­table. They ascertained w ­ hether the bones considered to be
“associated” by the archaeologists who had bagged them at the excavation site
did indeed belong to the same individual, and then they tried to associate any
unassociated bones from the site with that or another individual. They mea­
sured each bone in several ways, using dif­fer­ent metrics for dif­fer­ent kinds of
bones and bone features.24 They provisionally determined the age, sex, stat-
ure, bone pathologies, and nutritional health of the individual, and they noted
abnormalities like growths and discolorations, as well as indications of breaks
and wounds.
Once this picture had been painted in the abstract, the anthropologist
working on a body would consult the archaeological report from the excava-
tion that had yielded the remains, as well as team members working on other
bodies from the same gravesite, to associate the skeleton with a specific case
file. D. told me that, ­after she finished an anthropological report, she would
look at the antemortem data to see how close she had come to the information
already known about the individual in question—­his or her age, stature, medi-
cal conditions, habits, work. That’s the fun part! she said, laughing. Th
­ ese ­were,
­after all, “just bones,” in the context of an analy­sis that she likened to solving

228 | elizabeth a. davis
 a mystery. In another sense, however, the bones ­were deeply and intimately
known by the anthropologists who worked on them. Not only when and how
the person had died, but also much about who he or she had been in life, w ­ ere
written on the bones.
­We’re surrounded by death, F. remarked, another day. She asked me if I
found it strange to be in a room with all ­these bodies around. I told her it did
not feel strange to me, but perhaps that was ­because I knew nothing about
the ­people whose bodies t­ hese ­were; it might be harder if I understood more
about who they had been before they died. We ­don’t know much about them,
­either, F. told me. The archaeologists usually know a lot more, since they some-
times have contact with witnesses at the excavation site. They know the reasons
why the site is being excavated, the expected number of bodies, where they came
from. I said it seemed to me the anthropologists learned ­things about ­these
victims that other ­people could not know, even their closest ­family members
and friends. Even though the bodies w ­ ere strangers, anthropologists knew all
about their illnesses, injuries, and habits. That’s true, F. said: The bones become
more ­human as we look at them.
This becoming ­human of the bones in the hands of anthropologists evokes
a series of rituals surrounding natu­ral death in Cyprus: rituals of washing and
dressing the corpse before the wake and funeral and, for Greek Cypriots,
exhuming and inspecting the bones years l­ater. In her ethnography of Inner
Maniat ­women in Greece, Nadia Seremetakis describes this pro­cess as “adorn-
ment”: “The preparation of the corpse before the burial and, ­later, the clean-
ing and ordering of the bones construct the dead as an effigy, as a ‘doll.’ . . . ​
To remember and to adorn is to embody emotions.”25 In the mortuary rituals
she examines, that adornment is performed by t­ hose who “shar[e] substance”
with the dead—­blood or, with fictive kin, tears.26 In the lab, this adornment
was performed by strangers, on behalf of kin who ­were not permitted to see or
touch the bones during this pro­cess, but for whom they might, at a viewing,
“become tangible emotive substitutes of the absent ‘flesh,’ ” as Seremakis sug-
gests.27 The exhumation of bones would be their first visual encounter with
the dead, unmediated by memories of a corpse or a burial—­a disturbance that
might inhibit their recognition of the bones as an “effigy” of the dead.
For anthropologists at the lab, the work of building a person from frag-
ments was a scientific pro­cess of restoring and reconstructing, a simulation
of the natu­ral development of the ­human body. Yet as F. suggested, this was
also a rehumanization of the dead, and as such a summoning of emotion and
memory, or a semblance of memory. In this imaginary dimension of their

time machines | 229
work, the anthropologists ­were in a sense acting as proxies for the relatives of
the dead, consigned to using guesswork rather than memory, but neverthe-
less conjuring a live person. The association of information from a file with an
array of bones was an act of imagination, enlivening the bones with an image
of the person. In this, the scientists—­more than the relatives, ultimately—­
were the ones who could see a missing person in his or her bones.
Forensic work is thus perhaps not far from the work of divination captured
by Seremetakis. Lamentation, dreaming, and exhumation make up the three
scenes of w ­ omen’s work in what Seremetakis takes as the domain of death.
­These knowledge practices—­composing the biography of a dead person in con-
trapuntal mourning songs, interpreting the “warnings” of death announced in
dreams, and reading the condition of a person’s soul in his exhumed bones—­
are dangerous, Seremetakis argues: polluting, violent, and threatening to the
social order, especially the church. This secret divinatory knowledge—­“a mode
of knowing that looks beyond the immediate and the apparent to absence and
the invisible”—­grows from ­women’s intimacy with death; it is an “instrument
of cultural power” foreclosed in the public space of male power in Inner Mani
(the space of law and property, of honor and murder) yet essential to the repro-
duction of Maniat society in its appropriation of alterity.28 Seremetakis defines
this power­ful mode of knowing as a “fragment” of modernity, disconnected
from other forms of w ­ omen’s work (agriculture, architecture, and hunting)
by the domestication of ­women in the private space of the home and the de-
population of Maniat villages, yet reverberating with the valorization of ­labor,
“helping,” and kinship that they carry as a legacy.29 Could the forensic work
of Cypriot scientists at the cmp constitute some similar fragment of a divina-
tory tradition, from which they have been dislocated to the modern scene of
science without fully knowing it? In this light, their insistence on the scientific
value of their work and its bourgeois appeals—­a decent salary, job security,
social status—­would only underscore their dislocation from ritual tradition.
I recall a visit to the lab by the third member of the cmp, who accompanied
a foreign ambassador and guests on a tour of the facilities. He introduced the
visitors to K., one of the team leaders, who gave them an overview of the fo-
rensic work undertaken at the lab and then a few details of the specific case her
team was working on at the time. The visitors walked around the lab, looking
at the bones and asking questions of the anthropologists at each ­table about
the effects of soil conditions on the remains, the dif­fer­ent colors perceptible
on the surface of the bones, the dif­fer­ent signs of injury. ­Later, when the visi-

230 | elizabeth a. davis
tors had reassembled by the front door, one of them asked the third member
why so many of the anthropologists ­were w ­ omen. He said he ­didn’t know,
but he guessed it might have to do with the “sensitivity” of their work and the
fragility of the bones: It takes a caring person.
This imagination of careful w ­ omen caring for bones was promoted on the
cmp website. The scientists who appeared ­there in photo­graphs of the lab ­were
almost exclusively ­women. During the time I spent at the lab, two men worked
­there, on a team of twelve; another joined shortly before I left. Men ­were much
better represented in cmp photo­graphs of field excavations. A clear visualiza-
tion of gender was at work in t­hese repre­sen­ta­tions: men along with w ­ omen
­were shown ­doing the adventurous and dirty work of toiling in the fields, lift-
ing buckets, wielding shovels and picks, operating machines, climbing hills,
and descending into wells; while scenes of the lab, white and pristine, w ­ ere
populated by w ­ omen in white lab coats, working alone, eyes cast down on
the bones they handled dexterously yet tenderly. Their eyes and their hands
­were the forensic tools that mattered.
Such images of scientists performing this work contained a tension be-
tween scientization and sacralization, and between naturalization and human-
ization. The sober demeanor of the anthropologists, and their generational and
temporal remove from the events of vio­lence, did not fit the image of grief and
mourning long established in the iconography of the missing. But it was pre-
cisely ­these forms of remove that qualified them as scientists and legitimated
their proximity to the bones, an intimacy that might other­wise have been jar-
ring or even wounding to relatives of the missing. That t­hese strangers ­were
­women, already positioned for Cypriot audiences in a legacy of death work,
perhaps tempered the pain of estrangement from the bones that mourners
might experience on seeing them treated so clinically. Moreover, this death
work was secluded in the protected if not private space of the lab, so far from
the public space of state funerals for the missing that w ­ ere dominated by the
presence of clergy and politicians. In both scientizing and gendering forensic
work in ­these ways, images of anthropologists working on bones depoliticized
the knowledge of vio­lence that the bones materialized. But t­ hese images do not
convey a robust picture of their work; caring for the bones was much more
than a repre­sen­ta­tion. The intimate knowledge of the bones developed by sci-
entists was, for some of them, a creative pro­cess, a ­labor of imagination, a work
of empathy—­a relationship between past and pres­ent, and between the dead
and the living.

time machines | 231
learning history

Up u­ ntil the moment of provisional identification, the anthropologist who

had worked so intimately and intricately with an individual’s bones would
not know his or her identity—­nor, therefore, his or her “ethnic” identity. Yet
having communicated with the archaeologists who had exhumed the remains
and the investigators who had located the site, the anthropologist would likely
know at least the general story of how the remains had ended up in that place,
and therefore have a presumption of the victim’s identity as e­ ither Greek Cy-
priot or Turkish Cypriot. Damir Arsenijević, writing in the aftermath of the
genocide in Bosnia-­Herzegovina, describes the moment at which remains are
identified as the moment when “it” becomes “who”—­“a moment of decision;
a moment of naming.”30 His concern is to interrupt that moment, to recapture
the bones of the dead from the multiculturalist politics of reconciliation that
identify and consecrate bones in ethnic terms:

The scientist, the bureaucrat and the priest assume the perspective of the
perpetrator of the crime. For it is in the fantasy of the perpetrator that the
executed person is the ethnic other. . . . ​But whose bone is the bone? Does
it belong to the perpetrators who killed and buried the bodies? Does it
belong to the ­family members of the missing persons? Does it belong to
the diplomat in whose country peace in Bosnia was brokered? Does it be-
long to ­those, like me, who feel ashamed and wince ­every time the bone is
touched? Yes and no. It belongs to all of us. It is a societal t­ hing. It is thus
precisely ­because the suffering and death which resulted from genocide are
the effects of the politics of terror and, as such, are pre-­eminently a public
­matter. The emancipated pro­cess of becoming a subject can only take place
when the subject is freed from the shackles of a victim position or any other
position that is merely focused on the interests of a particularist identity.31

Such identitarian interests weighed on scientists at the cmp, too, who w ­ ere
hired as representatives of ­either the Greek-­Cypriot or the Turkish-­Cypriot
community in the postconflict game of balance and neutrality, and who w ­ ere
tasked with the identification of bones that ­were themselves communal repre-
sentatives. In relation to the bones, scientists w
­ ere positioned as ­either victim or
perpetrator, sometimes forcibly and sometimes indeterminately. H. described
to me the perversity of this positioning during a visit that some members of a
Greek-­Cypriot group had recently made to the lab. One of the visitors, a ­woman
who was about his f­ather’s age—­and thus had been a teenager in 1974—­and

232 | elizabeth a. davis
who knew he was Turkish Cypriot, gestured across the ­whole room of bones
laid out on ­tables and said to him: Imagine, Turkey did all this! H. told me he
had felt that he could not say to her that ­there was not a single Greek-Cypriot
bone in the w ­ hole room—­that the bodies belonged to Turkish Cypriots killed
by Greek Cypriots in 1964. He had kept quiet, but the experience had left him
with a terrible feeling, as if the ­woman ­were accusing him of vio­lence. It’s like
­we’re being punished, he said. Turkish Cypriots have never denied what happened
in 1974, but Greek Cypriots deny what happened before, to us. He could not un-
derstand how someone of this w ­ oman’s age could deny that t­here had been
“trou­ble” in the early 1960s: She was old enough to have lived through it!
H. told me that story one morning just before Easter, when cmp employ-
ees would have a week-­long holiday. (I learned that, in addition to two weeks
off in August, all cmp employees had week-­long holidays for both Easter
and ­Bairam—in the name of balance. We ­don’t take any of the bad nation-
alist holidays on e­ ither side, an archaeologist told me, laughing.) Some of the
anthropologists—­those who would not be celebrating Easter during the
holiday—­were exploring vacation itineraries online during their midmorn-
ing break. S. was looking into a trip to Izmir, and H., who had visited the city
many times, asked if I had ever been. I had, and I told him my impression of its
flatness, its shoddy and anonymous modernism, so unlike nearby cities such
as Boursa—­which made sense, I said, since the old city of Smyrna (now Izmir)
had been burned to the ground in 1923 and rebuilt a­ fter the disastrous Greek
campaign to reclaim Asia Minor from the Ottomans. T. chimed in: Let me ask
you: who burned Izmir? I said, That depends on who you ask! This comment
stirred a conversation among several of the anthropologists. H. and T. ­were of
the opinion that it was the Greek soldiers who had set fire to villages in Anato-
lia and then Izmir as they fled from the Ottoman forces in defeat. R. said this
made no sense to her, since at the time, the city was u­ nder Greek control and
would have been retained by Greece if Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos
had not made the ­mistake of trying to claim more land in Asia Minor. T. agreed
that the ­whole Greek campaign in Anatolia had been a terrible m ­ istake; what
they disagreed about was who had destroyed Izmir. He told us he had heard
that it was actually Armenian gangs who had burned down villages in Anatolia
and killed the ­women and ­children left ­behind by their Turkish husbands who
­were serving in the army, and then moved on to Izmir.
I felt oddly stung by this comment, wanting to correct T.’s perspective on
history, in which I heard ugly echoes of propaganda and conspiracy theory. I
told him that I had studied the burning of Smyrna and had never come across

time machines | 233
a version in which Armenians w ­ ere responsible; that, to my knowledge, the
Armenian quarter of the city was the first to burn, and all the Armenians living
­there had died, so it was difficult to understand how Armenian gangs could
have done it. But I had certainly come across accusations against both the
Greek and Turkish armies. T. kept his patient demeanor as he continued to
argue that the Turks had not burned Izmir. R. grew more visibly frustrated
and upset, laughing uncomfortably: Enough! No more talking about history!
She told T. that they both—­she in Greece, he in northern Cyprus—­had been
given only one side of the story in school. It’s not our fault, it’s how w ­ e’re taught,
she said. When you tell me what ­you’ve learned, I get upset, ­because I’ve learned
the opposite!
The conversation might have ended t­here, but S., who was still online,
mentioned the headlines she was reading just then about the French law ban-
ning denial of the Armenian genocide, which had recently been struck down
by the French supreme court. T. wondered why the court would come to that
decision, ­unless it ­were to acknowledge that t­here had been no genocide. R.
contended that the court’s decision had been based on the constitutional pro-
tection of f­ ree speech: You ­can’t legislate what ­people are allowed to say, it’s absurd
to try and forbid ­people from saying ­things like this, even when ­they’re obviously
wrong. H. pointed out that in Germany, it was illegal to deny the Holocaust. I
suggested that was a dif­fer­ent context, one where the prohibition was enforced
in the same country where the genocide had taken place, so the same citizenry
who had committed the genocide ­were now forbidden to deny it. Passing by
at that moment, the lab man­ag­er, who had served in the Bosnian army during
the war in the 1990s, told us that his country faced the same impasse: When
your population is made of the ­people who committed genocide and the ­people tar-
geted for genocide, it’s impossible to agree on ­whether a genocide has taken place—­
even if every­one knows it. T. asked R. directly if she thought that a genocide
against the Armenians had been carried out by Turkey. R. demurred, trailing
off in a comment about dif­fer­ent perspectives on history. As it turned out,
though, T. was ­after a dif­fer­ent point. He argued that it was soldiers in the Ot-
toman army, and not the Turkish, who had killed the Armenians: The events
took place in 1915, years before the Turkish Republic was founded. How can Turkey
be blamed for this? He reiterated that he thought Armenian gangs had been
killing civilians and burning down villages throughout Anatolia at the time:
Of course the Ottoman army would try to kill them. R. argued that taking up
arms to fight the Ottoman soldiers was a natu­ral reaction to oppression on
the part of Armenian civilians; she drew a comparison with Chechens t­ oday,

234 | elizabeth a. davis
and the way the Rus­sian army had branded them terrorists. T. acknowledged
that Armenians had been targeted, and a million p­ eople could not have been
killed by accident: This happened on purpose. But my question is: can the Turkish
government be blamed for it?
If, for Arsenijević, “becoming a subject” is the path opening ­toward a “hope-
ful politics ­after genocide,” this becoming requires not only the liberation of
survivors from their ethnic identities as perpetrators or victims, but more than
that, a rebuilding of relationships among the living and the dead: a reinvestment
of bones in their relations with o­ thers, to bridge the gap between the remains
of the dead and their names, their “full identity and history.”32 In the lab, it was
bones from 1964, ethnically misnamed, that triggered the movement of ­these
scientists from their workplace in 2012 to mass death in the burning of Smyrna
in 1923 and onward, to the ­dying days of the Ottoman Empire and the Arme-
nian genocide in 1915. ­These movements in time, across sites of ethnic memory
crucial to ­these scientists’ understanding of themselves as inheritors of e­ ither
a Greek or a Turkish legacy of vio­lence, ­were inflected by their work on the
artifacts of death in Cyprus, and their unstated and utterly habitual understanding
of the two-­sidedness of conflict and loss demanded by that work. Their relation-
ship to the bones of the Cypriot missing introduced a kind of indeterminacy into
the legacies of vio­lence that they had inherited and that they read back onto
the bones. In their debate about ­those legacies—­one of the few open argu-
ments I witnessed during my time at the lab—­they positioned themselves
with deliberate distance, even if they could not sustain it; and in d­ oing so,
they participated, momentarily, in a reor­ga­ni­za­tion of ethnic history.

conclusion

For some Cypriots, forensic knowledge of the deaths of the missing inad-
equately stands in for knowledge of the c­ auses and circumstances of t­hose
deaths, hindering the closure offered to relatives by the cmp and leaving their
desire for truth and justice unsatisfied. But the ­matter of that knowledge—­the
bones and belongings of the missing—­can open a dif­fer­ent experience for the
scientists who work with them so intricately and intimately: an experience of
uncertainty and possibility in regard to the other­wise overdetermined history
and ­future of conflict.
What significance do such experiences among forensic scientists have for
Cypriot society and politics? Do their encounters with time machines bear
on broader possibilities for recovery and reconciliation in the ­future? In her

time machines | 235
seminal work on classical law and politics, The Divided City, Nicole Loraux
dwells on the question of reconciliation in the aftermath of a brutal war for
Athens, probing the amnesty granted to the Thirty Tyrants by the demo­crats
following their return from exile and their restoration of democracy in 403
bce. Taking the sacred oath not to recall the war, on pain of death, was the
procedure by which individuals became citizens ­after the war, and by which
the city could once again be ­imagined “as a ­whole,” devoid of division.33 In Lo-
raux’s reading, the city as a po­liti­cal form is necessarily and essentially divided;
it comes into being through division, which it must continually overcome by
forgetting so as not to rekindle wrath and resentment in ­every demo­cratic de-
bate, since “recollection itself is a wound.”34 She warns that the “silence” that
“surround[s]” kratos35—­a term that, in Homeric sources, denotes “superiority
and thus victory,” or “to have the upper hand,”36 but that, in modern Greek, sim-
ply means the state—­marks the “repression” or “denial” of conflict, but not, in
fact, its forgetting.37 Indeed, she argues, the victorious demo­crats remembered
all too acutely the vio­lence, horror, and injustice of the war, and “it is precisely
­because they remembered the past that they forbade anyone to recall it.”38 But,
she writes, “conflict cannot be forgotten without consequences . . . ​the prohi-
bition of memory may affect the very definition of memory; and the ­will to
memory may take refuge in recalling why memory limited its own existence.”39
In orations ­after the amnesty, she finds recurrent, insistent traces of this fixa-
tion on memory in the demo­crats’ exhortations to all citizens of Athens to
remain loyal to the amnesty, and in their ambivalent double-­negations justify-
ing it: “We ­were not unjust. . . .”40
The resemblances between Athens in 403 bce and Cyprus in 2012—in the
politico-theological under­pinnings of the city-­state, in the reckoning of citi-
zens with civil war, and in their anxiety and ambivalence about their memory
of war—­are robust and easy to overstate. To identify con­temporary Cyprus
with the Athens of the amnesty would be to allegorize rather than analyze its
po­liti­cal situation. I introduce Loraux’s work ­here not to suggest such an easy
comparison, but rather to extend her reflections on the dangers of forgetting
conflict, even in the interest of peace. If amnesty in Athens wrought a distor-
tion and hypertrophy of memory, fixing on the civil war as an event whose
ever-­present potential to recur required constant vigilance to avert, then what
are the dangers of the closure to which the cmp is so committed? The work of
healing the wounds of war by putting the dead to rest, rather than letting them
lie, might appear to be a work of memory rather than forgetting; the public
funerals of the missing ­after their remains are found and returned to families

236 | elizabeth a. davis
certainly emphasize this dimension of the cmp’s mission. But in destroying or
concealing evidence of vio­lence in the name of po­liti­cal neutrality, the cmp
does as much work to forget the conflict and to forgo justice.
An understanding of bones as t­ hings that tie the past to the f­ uture was im-
plicit in the cmp’s ideology of closure; digging up bones was widely promoted
as “digging for a f­ uture”—­the title of a documentary film commissioned by the
cmp about its work.41 This par­tic­ul­ ar ­future is pos­si­ble to imagine only when the
past is conceived of in terms of loss, such that the ­future may be apprehended
through healing—­a f­uture anterior contingent on forensic investigation. The
temporality of po­liti­cal impasse in Cyprus is a historical temporality, punctu-
ated by surges of hope for change ultimately reabsorbed into history as repeti-
tion, ever recurring to a closed set of past events in relation to which the f­ uture
­will have arrived (­future anterior) when a po­liti­cal settlement is reached. Time
machines made it pos­si­ble to conceive of the f­ uture differently—­not in the te-
leological terms of reconciliation but in terms of becoming something dif­fer­ent
in the pres­ent, which might also mean having been something ­else in the past.
Thinking about the f­ uture in this way positions becoming as a supplement to
secrecy—­a closed hermeneutic, writing a script for infinitely unfolding ­future
iterations of the “drama of revelation,” in Michael Taussig’s words.42 I have fo-
cused on the temporality of forensic work ­here to show how this work was
engrained in a history of vio­lence concealed through secrecy, but also to show
how the experience of time that forensic artifacts summoned for the scientists
who worked with them, and for the relatives of the missing who ultimately
claimed or disclaimed them, might open a dif­fer­ent f­ uture.
In writing about the cmp, I have tried to avoid miming knowledge produc-
tion as public exposure and thereby reproducing the ideology of secrecy. I
have sought instead to capture the positivities of knowledge production at the
cmp by documenting the contours and shadings between knowledge and its
many obverse sides: what is known in relation to what is suspected; what is
disclosed in relation to what is withheld; what is publicized in relation to what
is kept confidential; what is concealed in relation to what is revealed; what is
already known in relation what is new; what is evidence in relation to what
is mere information; what is nonknowledge in relation to what is “deliberate
deceit,” in Taussig’s formulation of public secrecy.43 In the face of secrecy,
ethnography has the assiduity and the durability to manifest such relational
shadings—­offering neither a fully paranoid nor a fully reparative interpreta-
tion, in Sedgwick’s terms, but rather showing a complex oscillation between
secrecy and becoming.

time machines | 237
 In this oscillation, ­there is room for both a critical analy­sis of the history
of secrecy in Cyprus and the imagination of a ­future that diverges from the
repetition of that history. In a dif­fer­ent idiom, this might appear as an oscil-
lation of myth and history, as Claude Lévi-­Strauss pres­ents them in Myth
and Meaning: myth being “static,” comprising combinations of a closed set of
ele­ments, in contrast to the “open system” of history.44 As soon as he offers
this distinction, however, Lévi-­Strauss begins to unwrite it, showing the very
same range of both variation and repetition among lineage accounts by na-
tive Canadians and historical accounts of French and North American wars.
“I am not far from believing,” he writes, “that, in our own socie­ties, history has
replaced my­thol­ogy and fulfils the same function, that for socie­ties without
writing and without archives the aim of my­thol­ogy is to ensure that as closely
as pos­si­ble—­complete closeness is obviously impossible—­the ­future ­will re-
main faithful to the pres­ent and to the past. For us, however, the ­future should
always be dif­fer­ent, and ever more dif­fer­ent, from the pres­ent, some difference
depending, of course, on our po­liti­cal preferences.”45
The vanishing distinction Lévi-­Strauss finds ­here between myth and history
turns on the “aim” of t­ hose undertaking to express them, e­ ither to reproduce the
past with a ­little difference or to create “ever more” difference. He identifies that
normative stance not as a cultural feature—­since all of “us” are included in his
“should”—­but rather as a po­liti­cal disposition. Archives, in this imagination of
history, operate like the time machines I have been writing about ­here: objects
with the capacity to stop time, to stop its repetition and overdetermination,
and to open experiences of uncertainty, possibility, and difference, even if only
temporarily. Archives are also dif­fer­ent from t­hese other time machines, of
course. The bones of the missing have distinctive, intrinsic, organic qualities
that qualify them to tell time—­and in telling time, they impinge in specific
ways on the emotions and imaginations of the ­people who work with them.
­These artifacts can become ­human; they can become ethnic, and then unbe-
come it; they can become the effects of histories of conflict outside (yet still
inside) Cyprus. Their activity is vitally po­liti­cal.
Arsenijević writes of the disturbance exerted by bones, imagining himself
at the edge of a mass grave, wanting to “bear witness to anything resembling a
­human” and finding a “limit-­experience” of the ­human in “the unpleasant
corporeal remainder that, ­after genocide, stays with you, one which resists
all the ideological mechanisms of quantification, identification, burial and
sacralising—­the excess of scattered bones, the dead-­but-­alive organic ­matter.”46
I hesitate to suggest that the re­sis­tances time machines bear to being successfully

238 | elizabeth a. davis
scripted in the cmp’s drama of revelation and its ideology of closure are im-
manent in the ­matter itself—as Bennett, for example, argues for the “force”
or “vitality intrinsic to materiality” exceeding complete semiotic capture.47 In
telling time, in killing time and filling time, the artifacts of the missing in
Cyprus activate affects of hope, fear, and resentment and obligations ­toward
the dead as well as the living, in the scientists who hold and behold them; but
I do not presume that this dynamic capacity precedes or exceeds the mean-
ings ­these ­people make of them. I therefore prefer to “vital materialism” the
terminology of “projection” employed by Aslıhan Sanal, for one, to describe
the relations between living persons and the dead.48 The force operated by the
artifacts of the missing lies in their capacity not to exceed but to slip between
semiotic captures, to condense multiple temporalities and thus to accommo-
date discrepant meanings. They are in the right place at the right time to make
­things happen.
I think back, h­ ere, to the argument G. made against excavation, that spring
after­noon on the mountainside—­his assertion that history ­doesn’t belong to
us; it belongs to ­future generations, and his contention that the cmp should be
preserving mass graves u­ ntil proper excavations could be conducted. ­People
in the ­future ­will have better tools, he said: ­They’ll know what to do. And then
A.’s response: How long should we wait? Perhaps among ­these technologies to
come, ­these better tools to be wielded by ­future generations, might emerge
new narrative tools as well—­new ways of linking the pres­ent to the past,
new ways of finding meaningful footholds in the flux of time. Perhaps we
­w ill know the time has come to use ­those tools when we discover that we
already know what to do with them.

notes
1 Ed Sard, quoted in Walter J. Oakes, “­Towards a Permanent War Economy?”
2 Sidney Lens, Permanent War.
3 Vidal Gore, Permanent War for Permanent Peace.
4 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 145.
5 Some 25,000 Turkish Cypriots moved into enclaves throughout Cyprus in 1963–64; ap-
proximately 45,000 Turkish Cypriots moved from the south to the north in 1974 while
about 160,000 Greek Cypriots moved from the north to the south. See Demetriou and
Gürel, “­Human Rights, Civil Society and Conflict in Cyprus,” who note that some of
­these figures are contested. Estimates provided by Nicos Trimikliniotis and Umut Boz-
kurt indicate that the population of Cyprus at the time of publication in 2012 was close to
1.1 million. Of that number, approximately 840,000 ­people lived in the Republic (about

time machines | 239
 200,000 of whom were non-­Cypriot nationals, including undocumented mi­grants) and
perhaps 300,000 ­people lived in the trnc (including 120,000–230,000 mi­grants and set-
tlers) (“Introduction,” 3). The authors note that ­these numbers are approximate and
contested. See also International Crisis Group, “Cyprus.”
6 Bennett, Vibrant ­Matter, 9.
7 Renshaw, Exhuming Loss, 27.
8 On distinctions and affinities between bones and corpses, see Joost Fontein’s discus-
sion of the “agencies and affordances entangled in the affective presence and emotive
materiality” of ­human remains vis-­à-­vis dead bodies in distinct historical moments of
mass death in Zimbabwe (“Between Tortured Bodies and Resurfacing Bones,” 436). He
observes symbolic contrasts between the “dry bones” of the liberation war dead from an-
ticolonial strug­gles in the 1890s and the 1950s–70s and the “fleshy, leaky bodies” of p­ eople
killed in po­liti­cal contestations since the early 2000s (435 and 436)—­but also their shared
involvement in the “pro­cesses by which bones are formed from decaying bodies” in the
“passage of time” from burial to decomposition, and in the transhistorical prophecy by
liberation fighters in 1896–97 that “our bones ­will rise again” (432, 436, and 424).
9 Connolly, Neuropolitics, 2.
10 Connolly, Neuropolitics, 5, 2, and 4.
11 Connolly, Neuropolitics, 8, 5, and 10. João Biehl and Peter Locke take inspiration from
Deleuze’s thinking of becoming—­that is, “­those individual and collective strug­gles to
come to terms with events and intolerable conditions and to shake loose, to what­ever
degree pos­si­ble, from determinants and definitions” (“Deleuze and the Anthropology
of Becoming,” 317). In working through their own research experiences in situations of
individual and social crisis, they urge an emphasis on “desire,” “openness,” and “flux” in
“ethnographic efforts to illuminate the dynamism of the everyday and the literality and
singularity of ­human becomings” (317 and 318).
12 Connolly, A World of Becoming.
13 According to an archaeologist I knew at the cmp, the Turkish-­Cypriot side of the agency
had insisted that the Greek-­Cypriot side conduct investigations into Greek-­Cypriot
graves in the south before the cmp could proceed with investigations into Greek Cypri-
ots’ graves in the north. According to this archaeologist, Physicians for H ­ uman Rights
still had a lab in Cyprus in 2012, but no one was working ­there.
14 For a detailed account of this breakthrough in the Republic’s policy t­ oward the prob­lem
of the missing, see Kovras, “De-­Linkage Pro­cesses and Grassroots Movements in Tran-
sitional Justice.”
15 Two organ­izations of relatives ­were formed in 1975: the Turkish-­Cypriot Association of
Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans, and the Greek-­Cypriot Organisation of Relatives
of Undeclared Prisoners and Missing Persons. The only organ­ization representing both
Turkish-­Cypriot and Greek-­Cypriot families is the Bicommunal Initiative of Relatives of
Missing Persons, Victims of Massacres and Other Victims of 1963–74 Events, which was
founded in 2005.
16 ­These ­were the figures reported on the cmp website as of April 15, 2017, http://­www​
.­cmp​-­cyprus​.­org​/­content​/­facts​-­and​-­figures.

240 | elizabeth a. davis
1 7 Εθνική Οργάνωση Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών/National Organ­ization of Cypriot Fighters.
18 Türk Mukavemet Teşkilatı/Turkish Re­sis­tance Organ­ization.
19 See, for example, Angastiniotis, Voice of Blood, and Voice of Blood 2; Evripidou and Nu-
gent, Birds of a Feather; Committee on Missing Persons and Neocleous, Digging for a
­Future; Piault and Sant Cassia, Dead or Presumed Missing?; Tanpınar, Kayıp Otobüs;
Tsiarta, In This Waiting; Zaim and Chrysanthou, Parallel Trips.
20 See Arsenijević, “Gendering the Bone,” and “Mobilising Unbribable Life”; Crossland,
“Buried Lives,” and “Violent Spaces”; Ferrándiz, “The Return of Civil War Ghosts”;
Ferrándiz and Baer, “Digital Memory”; Nelson, Reckoning; Renshaw, Exhuming Loss;
Sanford, Buried Secrets.
21 Ferrándiz and Baer, “Digital Memory,” 5.
22 Whitehead, “The Forensic Theatre.” Ariel Dorfman points to the dependence of this the-
ater on globalization: “We have grown strangely used to them over the last 25 years. . . . ​
­Mothers and d­ aughters, wives and s­ isters, demanding to know the true fate of their men,
demanding that they be returned to their families alive. A widespread, almost epidemic,
image of tragedy and defiance. . . . ​Indeed, ­those marching w
­ omen brandishing a black
and white photo have become so natu­ral to our eyes, so much a part of the mythical
landscape of our time, that we tend to forget that ­there was a time, not very long ago,
when photo­graphs did not constitute an automatic ingredient of that sort of protest”
(“The Missing and Photo­graph,” 255–56).
23 See the cmp’s “Terms of Reference,” item 11, http://­www​.­cmp​-­cyprus​.­org​/­content​
/­terms​-­reference​-­and​-­mandate.
24 Among many sources they consulted w ­ ere Brooks and Suchey, “Skeletal Age Determi-
nation Based on the Os Pubis,” on the pubic symphysis; Isçan, Loth, and Wright, “Age
Estimation from the Rib by Phase Analy­sis: White Females,” and “Age Estimation from
the Rib by Phase Analy­sis: White Males,” on the sternal rib end; Lamendin, “A ­Simple
Technique for Age Estimation in Adult Corpses”; Lovejoy et al., “Chronological Meta-
morphosis of the Auricular Surface of the Ilium,” Osborne, Simmons, and Nawrocki,
“Reconsidering the Auricular Surface as an Indicator of Age at Death,” on the ilium and
auricular surface; and Ubelaker, “Cranial Photographic Superimposition,” on dentition.
Since 2011, when the cmp purchased a license for ForDisc, the anthropologists have
duplicated their mea­sure­ments, recording all the information in their reports and then
entering it again in the ForDisc database to calculate age estimates, which w ­ ere then
entered into the reports.
25 Seremetakis, The Last Word, 215–16.
26 Seremetakis, The Last Word, 216.
27 Seremetakis, The Last Word, 216.
28 Seremetakis, The Last Word, 200.
29 Seremetakis, The Last Word, 223. The association of ­women with death stands, for
Seremetakis, as a “taxonomic linkage” that positions w ­ omen as “iconic representatives
of the dead in the world of the living” (The Last Word, 71 and 74). In writing about death
in con­temporary Athens, Neni Panourgiá perceives the relationships w ­ omen sustain and
build with the dead as artifacts of their ­labor—­their caretaking of the dead before and

time machines | 241
 a­ fter burial—­even though, as she notes, “­women are not the only ones who tend the
graves, nor are they the only ones who feel the pain of the loss” (Fragments of Death,
Fables of Identity, 176).
3 0 Arsenijević, “Gendering the Bone,” 194.
31 Arsenijević, “Gendering the Bone,” 194–95.
32 Arsenijević, “Gendering the Bone,” 194.
33 Loraux, The Divided City, 142, 48.
34 Loraux, The Divided City, 41.
35 Loraux, The Divided City, 57.
36 Loraux, The Divided City, 69.
37 Loraux, The Divided City, 68, 70.
38 Loraux, The Divided City, 263.
39 Loraux, The Divided City, 193, 263.
40 Loraux, The Divided City, 264.
41 Committee on Missing Persons and Neocleous, Digging for a ­Future.
42 Taussig, Defacement, 51.
43 Taussig, Defacement, 149. On the relationship between nonknowledge and public se-
crecy, see also Masco, Theater of Operations.
44 Lévi-­Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 40.
45 Lévi-­Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 43.
46 Arsenijević, “Mobilising Unbribable Life,” 166.
47 Bennett, Vibrant ­Matter, 3. In like spirit, Yael Navaro-­Yashin, exploring the relational
“embroilment” and “codependence and co-­determination” of the “inner and outer
worlds” of ­humans (The Make-­Believe Space, 24), develops a methodology of “sensing”
to grasp the affects discharged by material environments in northern Cyprus—­affects
that are part of ­human experience but “excee[d] or g[o] further and beyond the ­human
imagination” (18).
48 Sanal, New Organs within Us, 139.

242 | elizabeth a. davis
 9

Horizoning

The Work of Projection in Abrupt Climate Change

adriana petryna

The breath you just took contains about 400 parts of carbon dioxide (co 2) per
million molecules (ppm) of air. The safe level is considered to be 350 ppm. ­People
living at the start of the Industrial Revolution would have inhaled about 278 ppm.
Since then, levels of co 2—­the leading green­house gas driving changes in the
climate—­have doubled, and in a worst-­case scenario that many experts believe
is in fact the real scenario, w­ ill reach 1,450 ppm by 2150. In diverse contexts—­
medicine, agriculture, submarine engineering, and even beer making—­experts
control for overexposure to co2 that is deemed toxic. In hospital settings,
excessive levels of co 2, monitored through blood-­gas exchange, are used
to predict death. In factory farm settings, animal welfare advocates prefer
co2 narcotic anesthetization to stunning as a more “humane” way of knocking
­cattle out before their slaughter. Amid the incendiary bombings of World War
II, clouds of toxic gases, including co and co2, killed untold numbers of ­people
seeking refuge in air-­raid shelters, tunnels, and cellars. ­Humans and animals have
experienced unsafe co2 levels in multiple life and death settings. Exposure is not
a distant threat or something happening in a faraway f­ uture; its harmful potential
is being continually exploited or managed ­today.
Excessive atmospheric co 2 is typically absorbed by the atmosphere, land,
and ocean. But what kinds of oxygen-­depleted worlds w ­ ill we inhabit once
 1450
Atmospheric CO2 Concentration (parts per million by volume)

RCP3-PD
1250
RCP4.5
RCP6
1050 RCP8.5
Doubled CO2 (560 ppm)

850

650

450

250
1900 1950 2000 2050 2100 2150
Year

figure 9.1  ​
rcp Scenario Atmospheric co2 Concentrations

the Earth has lost its capacity to absorb this excess? Researchers are simply
not sure where inordinate amounts of co2 ­will go, as the ­future availability of
the Earth’s carbon sinks is uncertain.1 In fact, they note that nearly a third of
all co 2-­offsetting reservoirs have already become fully saturated or have dis­
appeared. This has occurred at a time when co 2 levels have surpassed 400
ppm for the first time since “three to five million years ago—­before modern
­humans existed.”2 How is it pos­si­ble to even describe the dimensions of this
loss of capacity?
­There is no doubt that the world must immediately transition away from
fossil fuels and ­toward energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, and sus-
tainable agricultural practices. Th
­ ere is a burgeoning lit­er­a­ture on resilience,
and policy makers and government officials have ­adopted the term as a key
buzzword. Yet it is at odds with the realities of cultural practice.3 Figure 9.1
shows several scenarios for the trajectories over time of four green­house gas
concentrations, adapted from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That lowest curve represents the luckiest (and increasingly unlikely) sce-
nario, in which decreases in global green­house gas emissions w ­ ill maintain
global average temperatures below a target of a two-degree Celsius temperature

244 | adriana petryna
rise (above pre­industrial levels). That curve is ­really “where we need to be to
be comfortable,” but “culture and cultural practices create a certain real­ity . . . ​
that is nonetheless not ­going to get us into the [lowest curve] of the two-­
degree world in the ­future.”4
In addition to the necessary work of dismantling a global po­liti­cal econ-
omy erected on fossil fuels, contemplating the physical dimensions of proba-
ble trajectories also inspires private terror and a string of associations. What is
resilience, particularly in worlds that are conceivably nonadaptable? To pose
this question is not to say that it is too late to fight climate change, but rather
to open up a conversation about what it means when we look into the ­future
and say we ­don’t fully know. Such associations set the stage for reflection on
what is, arguably, a need for a dif­f er­ent curve—­one that can grasp and proj­ect
the urgent haste “in which evolution fails to furnish an immediate adaptive
mechanism.”5 Yet in this space of haste, cognitive constraints can be signifi-
cant; temporal horizons must be continuously recalibrated, incorporating
the uncertainty of changing conditions while also giving weight to their ex-
istential challenges and moments of social reckoning over time. While stud-
ies on the so-­called selfish agendas driving survival strategies in ant colonies
and schools of fish are in­ter­est­ing, they employ a notion of the social that is
reduced to self-­regulating parts and mechanisms and that lacks such temporal
horizoning. Also, this mechanistic approach to survival does ­little to shed light
on the peculiar comforts of a socially or­ga­nized denial and, hence, to reposi-
tion us in time on a more “comfortable” curve.6
­Today’s conditions beg for a sense of mea­sure and cadence with re­spect
to the kinds of changes that are at stake. The doubling of co 2 beyond pre­
industrial levels is already causing significant disruptions. We know that the
risks are ­here now and that they increase the longer we do not act. Occupa-
tional health specialists, deep-­sea divers, and even submarine engineers have
long known the incremental risks of atmospherically compromised settings.
The U.S. Department of ­Labor, for example, considers 400 ppm the outdoor
norm for co2 exposure and 800 ppm the indoor norm. According to a co2
monitor salesman I spoke with, 1,500 ppm “is when you start to see effects.”
In fact, the majority of his sales ­were to school districts ­because of concerns
about the dangers of co 2 on ­children’s school per­for­mance: “We need to
break up the co2 concentration in schools.”7 At 5,000 ppm, brewery workers
experience narcosis and metabolic stress.
Asking if ­there is a limit to what ­humans can bear with re­spect to spiking
atmospheric co2 seems commonsensical enough; yet it is also, somehow, a

horizoning | 245
far-­fetched thought experiment. This inconsistency suggests a paradox; while
the risks of co2 are mostly considered in the context of global emissions lead-
ing to climate change, an everyday sense of palpable risk—­calculated to a fault
in some occupational domains—­actually dis­appears.
Meanwhile, earth scientists who deal with an ultimate abstraction—­the
planet—­are getting a better ­handle on co 2 as an exposure event, and on what
increases in co2 can mean for a variety of physical systems. Past a par­tic­u­
lar threshold, ocean acidification (caused by the overabundance of co 2 in the
seas) triggers widespread fish extinctions due to diminished coral reef ecosys-
tems (which contain roughly 10 ­percent of the world’s fisheries). Rising tem-
peratures associated with increasing co2 mean that agricultural production in
par­tic­u­lar areas can be wiped out.8
As an anthropologist, I have been interested in the implications of this
accelerated change and in the ability of ­humans (mostly experts and emer-
gency ser­vice workers) to keep up with it. ­Today, ­there is a wide gap between
“available information and how that information is being framed in the con-
text of risk and uncertainty.”9 Stronger storms, more frequent fires, decreases
in Arctic sea ice—­many of ­these changes are not gradual, but are happening
abruptly or within timescales that are much shorter than had been projected
(within a few years or de­cades, not centuries). In a larger proj­ect from which
this chapter draws, I look closely at how the realities of abrupt climate change
are being reckoned with within basic science, applied technical fields, and so-
cial lifeworlds.
One of my empirical tasks is to trace the physics that transforms fires into
megafires and storms into superstorms and accelerates species loss. Juxtapos-
ing scientific uncertainty with the social fabric of emergency response, I reveal
the stakes for the actors who bear the brunt of abrupt change but have been
excluded from top-­down governance models of collective action.
In this chapter, I ask who p­ eoples abrupt change as its conceptualizers, nav-
igators, and first responders, and I track how that change challenges our un-
derstanding of nature, time, and the ­future, as well as the notion of projection
itself. Drawing on shifting understandings in environmental science—­and of
the environment itself—­and the new heuristics and challenges they call forth,
I explore the disconnects and ambiguities that characterize abrupt ecosystem
dynamics for scientists and the rest of us in an “invisible pres­ent”10 uncertainly
projected into an unfamiliar and incompletely knowable ­future. Attuned to
­these uncertain projections, and how we manage and live with them, I argue
for the importance of what I call horizoning work as a par­tic­ul­ar kind of in-

246 | adriana petryna
tellectual ­labor that reconfigures possibilities for knowledge and action. Such
work opens up a space for change in the face of apocalyptic thinking or deni-
alism, reor­ga­niz­ing the moral and epistemological conditions of life on the
brink of vari­ous thresholds or irreversible change, and invites new collectives
in the collective action prob­lem of abrupt change.

abrupt change nature

The year 2015 was the worst wildfire year on rec­ord in the United States. In
California, about 3,400 wildfires ­were fought, a thousand more than the aver-
age number of the previous five years. Fire seasons are now lasting, on aver-
age, eighty-­six days longer than over the last four de­cades. Between 1984 and
2006, a fifth of the southwest’s forests w ­ ere lost to wildfire and bark beetle
outbreaks—­both issues related to a warming climate.11 Ecosystem modelers
from dif­fer­ent U.S. agencies see the fatal flaws of current tools meant to model
­these phenomena. Th ­ ese flaws pose prob­lems not just for average citizens, but
for on-­the-­ground emergency workers for whom the expected risks to life are
falling outside the range of normal experience.
Bill Armstrong, one such worker, is a forest fuels specialist for the U.S. For-
est Ser­vice and a veteran of an elite group of wildland firefighters. In an inter-
view in July 2014, Armstrong described to me the many changes he has seen
in the dynamics of fire.12 He described the 1996 Dome Fire in northern New
Mexico, the physics of which was unlike anything he had ever seen: “In the
eighties, when I started, intense fires ­were anomalies. What we thought was a
freak incident became a wake-up call that nobody woke up to. It was a plume-­
dominated fire—­more like a firestorm, so much energy is released in such a
small period of time. We just ­weren’t expecting that kind of fire be­hav­ior.”13
A plume-­dominated fire is characterized by huge updrafts of burning embers
and material that gets sucked high into clouds. Armstrong told me that “as mate-
rial moves up through the clouds, it cools off, and when it cools off, the weight of
the clouds can no longer sustain itself. Then the clouds collapse, and when they
collapse, they throw shit everywhere.”14 In fact, they can do this many times.
Ten years l­ater, the “freak incident” had become the norm. Armstrong was
a first responder in the 2011 Las Conchas fire, which, like the Dome Fire, defied
the behavioral assessments coming from the Forest Ser­vice’s fire modelers in
Missoula, Montana. Fires usually move with winds, but a plume-­dominated fire
like Los Conchas “burned with greatest intensities and greatest rates of spread
against the wind. It actually managed to push its way up against the wind.”15 This

horizoning | 247
meant that “with the power of the fire and what it was generating, with its own
internal winds and its own weather system . . . ​it was feeding itself.”
Unlike previous fires, the Los Conchas fire burned aggressively: “It burned
into areas where we thought t­ here was absolutely nothing left to burn. It burned
through the Cerro Grande wildfire scar [from 2000]. It burned through the
old Dome Fire scar [from 1996]. We could not have predicted that kind of fire
be­hav­ior.”16 In short, what Armstrong described to me is a potentially fatal
mismatch between what modelers can model and what emergency workers
face. In the absence of knowledge of novel or megafire dynamics, what accu-
mulates is an intricate superstructure of surprise, consisting of overlaid events
whose net physical interactions and intensities are unknown. According to
Armstrong, a tipping point has been reached: “We should be treating t­hese
fires the same way we do hurricanes. Get the hell out of the goddamn way.”

critical thresholds

Critical thresholds of key planetary “life-­support systems” have been crossed.17

Abrupt shifts dominate planetary systems, reengineering ecosystems and the
conditions for life. Tipping ele­ments or bits of planet that could be switched
­under par­tic­u­lar circumstances into “a qualitatively dif­fer­ent state” require urgent
attention.18 A sequence of time-­lapsed images from a film called Chasing Ice shows
one photographer’s trial-­and-­error (and then stunningly successful) attempts
to create a multiyear rec­ord of a bit of planet that has been switched to a qualita-
tively dif­fer­ent state.19 The photographer James Balog set up twenty-­eight cam-
eras atop thirteen glaciers that snapped shots e­ very half hour during daylight for
several years. The time-­lapse images revealed, in Balog’s words, “the horror and
miracle” of the rapidity of retreat of the world’s glaciers (figures 9.2–9.4).20
They captured what scientific lit­er­a­ture on climate change calls abrupt change:
shocks or sudden events that are ­either temporary, like a hurricane, or a shift in
predictable long-­term be­hav­iors, like El Niño events or glacial cycles.21
Glaciers have prob­ably never before moved the way the photographer
showed they are now ­doing: an internal feedback mechanism called the albedo
effect has taken over, and the glacier has passed some kind of critical threshold
or tipping point. The category of abrupt change already entails cognitive losses
and the relative lack of ­human ability to capture them, let alone predict where
they go next. Viewed in fast forward, the photos from Balog’s cameras capture
an ecological field whose baselines are changing, crumpled up by some other
complex of space-­time and consumed by a “disordered chronological real­ity”

248 | adriana petryna
figures 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4 ​Stills from Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice, showing retreating ice
at ­Columbia Glacier, Alaska
of an unfamiliar nature.22 What strikes the senses is a blindsiding movement of
a living and disappearing t­ hing. What metrical concepts can grasp such crum-
pling of realities and render them sensible or vis­i­ble?
I am interested in scientific scenarios, projections, diagrams, and graphs as
material artifacts that render time sensible with re­spect to unknown thresh-
olds or tipping points.23 How do temporal horizons themselves become po­
liti­cal, or how do they demarcate (or dissolve) a space of po­liti­cal action?
The concept of “stabilization wedges” from Prince­ton University scientists
Steven Pacala and Robert Socolow provides a telling example of how environ-
mental risk and pos­si­ble ­futures can be visually presented and practically man-
aged.24 Th ­ ese wedges map a timetable of costs and consequences of inaction
on mitigating carbon emissions, illustrating the divergent outcomes of business
as usual versus more aggressive efforts to curb emissions over fifty years. For
purposes of illustration, imagine a triangle whose base sits on an X-­axis, roughly
corresponding to a lowest emissions curve (discussed previously), and repre-
senting the most desirable or comfortable emissions scenario, in which a dan-
gerous doubling of atmospheric co 2 (as compared to pre­-­industrial levels)
is avoided to ensure that global temperatures do not rise above a two-­degree
Celsius target. The upper trajectory (our triangle’s hypotenuse) represents a
predicted total amount of emissions (based on a “business-­as-­usual” scenario)
that needs to be cut out to reach the temperature target. In the authors’ formu-
lation, multiple lines transect the interior of this triangle, making up “wedges”
of stabilization. Each wedge represents a specific co 2 reduction strategy (such
as increased vehicle fuel efficiency, the use of wind and solar power, avoided
deforestation, carbon sequestration, and so on) with which humanity could
excise a chunk of co 2 from its ­future and ‘buy time’ against an urgent threat.
As initially proposed (in 2004), concerted reduction strategies failed to get
off the ground, and revisions of earlier projections (in 2011 and 2013) led to ex-
panding the number of mitigation strategies (that is, wedges) to compensate for
the unchecked increase in green­house gases in the intervening years. Inertia, in-
transigence, and the politics of old energy technology got so much in the way that
more and more wedges are needed to achieve the same result. T ­ oday, studies
estimate that it might require a staggering thirty-­one wedges to drastically curb
emissions over fifty years. A fifty-­year engineered horizon was meant to act as
a hyperpragmatic tool that would re­orient the policies and ethos of modern en-
ergy consumption. What is concretized, instead, is a very climatologically costly,
delayed trajectory in which the idea of living on borrowed time is no mere meta­
phor. Equally real are the uncertainties of what kind of time reckoning is required.

250 | adriana petryna
The stabilization wedge becomes a parable, of sorts, about a further unmooring
from safety and danger. It begins to embody a situation not of returning to past
co2 levels, but one of an ever-receding horizon of pos­si­ble recoverability.

invisible present

Yet ­today ­there is something ­else making projections falter and time it-
self less linear and more abrupt—an “invisible pres­ent” whose potential for
producing jarring or unexpected change is real. In 1983, the lake ecologist John
Magnuson of the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin and
colleagues introduced the notion of the invisible pres­ent and started the con-
ceptual work that would help capture the Earth as a tipping place.25 The invis-
ible pres­ent is a timescale of observable events, such as “acid deposition, . . . ​
co2-­induced climate warming, and deforestation,” but it also captures pro­
cesses “on multiple spatial and temporal scales to the generation of ecological
pattern.”26 ­These pro­cesses are “hidden from view or understanding ­because
they occur slowly or ­because effects lag years ­behind ­causes.”27
According to Magnuson, the quality of experimental results is influenced
by a choice of temporal frame. Samples taken from lake sediments represent-
ing longer timescales of “hundreds to thousands of years” provide only “a
coarse history of past climatological events,” and short-­term ecological experi-
ments, done without enough knowledge of the natu­ral year-­to-­year variability
of the system studied, make the interpretation of experimental results diffi-
cult.28 To enhance interpretability, Magnuson identified the “invisible pres­
ent” as a new kind of experimental medium—­a meso-­space of experimental
time—­that could capture the kinds of abrupt ecological change that Balog
revealed through time-­lapse photography.
Yet this experimental medium, too, was rife with prob­lems of observation
of and experimentation with “real” ecological change. As Magnuson wrote,
“certain biological and physical pro­cesses simply take time, biological relics
persist even ­after conditions change, movements across the landscape take
time, the simultaneous occurrence of two or more necessary conditions for
an event or pro­cess to occur can be rare, and a chain of events accumulates the
lags between cause-­and-­effect events.”29
Such ­were the indirect aspects of the invisible pres­ent, “the most elusive
to uncover, yet the most in­ter­est­ing.”30 This is ­because phenomena that have
gradually evolved can also be vulnerable to unforeseeable abrupt shifts, pre-
senting a dimension of change that is without dimension. In short, Magnuson’s

horizoning | 251
“invisible pres­ent” captures an urgent kind of scientific nowhere. But it also
requires a new kind of scientific person, someone who is both an experimen-
talist and a seer. Magnuson wrote, “It is the unusual person who observes
changes that occur over de­cades, and even when observed, many of ­these
changes are understood by no one.”31
Yet he argued that the cultivation of science and publics in this pres­ent
was crucial, as it is the “[time] scale within which our responsibilities for the
planet earth are most evident.” The invisible pres­ent thus poses critical moral
and epistemological concerns: moral b­ ecause it is a timescale in which ecosys-
tems change “during our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our c­ hildren and our
grandchildren,”32 and epistemological ­because it is about pro­cesses that we
can only partly observe and can seriously misjudge, and “where a lack of tem-
poral perspective can produce misleading conclusions.”33 Even so, we must
choose to act, even with limited information. In other words, Magnuson’s in-
visible pres­ent, an enigmatic experimental locus, also holds potential as a new
kind of projective medium for reckoning with abrupt ecological change.

nonequilibrium spaces

Unraveling the dimensions of an invisible pres­ent and ecological change became

key challenges for the American limnologist Stephen Carpenter, who joined
Magnuson’s Center of Limnology at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison
in 1990. Carpenter—­whose research explores how lakes, which are not in­
de­pen­dently self-­regulating ecosystems, are affected by a variety of activities
in the landscape (including pollution from toxic agrochemicals)—­won the
Stockholm ­Water Prize in 2011. In July 2013, he told me about a shift in the
1970s that deeply affected his way of seeing ecological change and would begin
to add dimension to a dimensionless invisible pres­ent: “One of the big break
points in my thinking was realizing that the equilibrium models that domi-
nated ecol­ogy for so many years ­were just simply wrong, and that every­thing
that is ­really in­ter­est­ing occurs in relation to some sort of threshold transition
in ecosystems.” ­Those thresholds, Carpenter explained, could be occasioned
by an internal (endogenous) “nonlinearity,” a very large external shock, or the
introduction of a new actor into an ecosystem, such as an invasive species or
a new technology: “­These are ­really the impor­tant events, and the dynamics
around equilibria ­really are not.”34
The dynamics around ­these not-­so-­important equilibria are linked to a
once influential “balance of nature” theory in ecol­ogy. The theory suggests

252 | adriana petryna
that ecosystems are in (or seek to be in) a stable equilibrium. When they are
perturbed by pressures such as ­those linked to h­ uman exploitation, nutrient
loading (pollution), and a rise in temperature, ecosystems tend to self-­correct.
They do so through negative feedback mechanisms that cancel out the pertur-
bation, returning the ecosystem (or the Earth, for that ­matter) to a restored and
balanced state. ­These activities are represented by a smooth and continuous curve
in which forces are said to be canceling each other out to assume a predictable
state.35 Theories of nonequilibrium suggest a dif­f er­ent trajectory. They also allow
for self-­correction through feedbacks, but the results are outcomes and alterna-
tive growth potentials calling for a dif­fer­ent predictive skill. Researchers do not
expect that a perturbed ecosystem w ­ ill always return to a balanced state (nor
do they see lack of balance as a sign of an ecosystem being on the verge of col-
lapse), but study the dynamics around its thresholds or tipping points.
This nonequilibrium idea has several roots, among them the work of the
mid-­twentieth ­century French topologist and mathematician, René Thom,
who developed a mathematical elaboration of what he called “structural sta-
bility.”36 In categorizing some of the ways living systems lose resilience, he
noted that tipping points demarcate the bound­aries between the structurally
stable—­those ­things that are knowable—­and what lies beyond this knowabil-
ity: all the t­ hings that scientists have yet to learn to satisfactorily account for
why and how ecosystems do, or ­don’t, bounce back from a perturbation, and
how they might develop in the ­future.37 Rather than focusing on evolution-
ary questions of why or how they evolve or how they adapt, Thom’s “catastro-
phe theory” explores thresholds of what are called an ecosystem’s “alternative
stable states.”38
Points f2 and f1 in figure 9.5 exhibit such thresholds. Note that t­ here are
not one but two equilibrium curves (theoretically, t­here can be many more)
representing alternative stable states in ecosystems ­under pressure. Depending
on that pressure, each equilibrium curve tips or breaks at some point. For ex-
ample, f2 tips where ­there is too much pressure. It free-­falls into an alternative
stable state (f1) and w ­ ill not return to a prior equilibrium. Why? The answer
lies in the space of nonequilibrium, represented by the dotted line connecting
the two points. The stretch from the outer and most unstable extreme (tipping
point f1) of one stable state to that of another (tipping point f2) demarcates a
space in which, for Carpenter, the most in­ter­est­ing ecological questions arise.
In a nutshell, it shows a theoretical space linked to an abrupt change in nature,
and how that change occurs.

horizoning | 253
 a

Backward
Ecosystem state

shift F2

Forward
F1 shift

Conditions

figure 9.5 ​Regime shift curve. Adapted from Scheffer et al. 2001

If the balance of nature model relies on what the phi­los­o­pher Manuel De-
Landa calls “extensity,” in which gradients are predictably defined and manage
themselves within bounded entities, “far-­from-­equilibrium” states pres­ent an
“intensity” of observation and experimentation.39 Wind currents, hurricanes,
thunderstorms, and cloud formations “inhabit our consciousness as meteoro-
logical phenomena, but we c­ an’t normally perceive the gradients in temperature,
pressure, or speed that are responsible for their genesis.” Th
­ ere is no “perfect
cancellation of forces” ­here, but a change “based on some differential.”40 For
DeLanda, what distinguishes intensity from extensity is the presence of what
he calls “fuel.” In zones of “higher intensity,” DeLanda writes, “we can witness
the birth of extensity.”41 Such zones rely on a host of system-­stabilizing actors
whose work is defined by incomplete information and restless uncertainty,
and that always takes place on the edge of some potential and irreversible loss
of remediating capacity or control of a system (a lake, an ecosystem, a world).
I call ­these intensive actors horizon workers.
The whole-­lake experiments on Lake Mendota in Wisconsin of Carpenter
and his colleagues provided crucial tests of nonequilibrium dynamics ­under
conditions of eutrophication (causing oxygen depletion, or hypoxia). It is
caused by an external shock: in this case, an overabundance of chemical nutri-

254 | adriana petryna
ents (runoff containing nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers) stimulates
excessive plant growth, whose decomposition produces co 2 and depletes
oxygen. A stubborn environmental prob­lem, it makes lakes appear turbid or
become blanketed by thick accumulations of algae, a transformation inimical
to food production and the survival of lake life. It would be all too easy to take
a snapshot of a eutrophied lake and say “­here is its new equilibrium state,” and
then proceed with a top-­down removal of all the chemicals in the hopes of
returning it to a prior, more “balanced,” ecological state. The snapshot would
be deceptive, and the lake would not bounce back. “In theory, eutrophication
is reversible,” says Carpenter, “but from the perspective of a h­ uman lifetime,
once you push a lake over [a] threshold, eutrophication is a one-­way trip.”42
According to Carpenter, ­there ­will always be a disconnect between pro­
cesses of observing a phenomenon of ecological change and thinking and act-
ing coherently about that phenomenon. Observation does not always inform
clear action. The real challenge is what to do about the disconnect. Carpen-
ter states that making accurate assessments of the limits and uncertainties of
ecological forecasting is a core challenge for ecologists: the “most impor­tant
challenge of ecological forecasting is not the projections themselves. Many
features of change are fundamentally unpredictable, so a big part of dealing
with change is building resilience against the unpredictable and retaining
the capacity to adapt when surprising ­things happen.”43 Carpenter collabo-
rates with an interdisciplinary group of international scientists in quantifying
threshold transitions or tipping points for dif­fer­ent kinds of ecosystems u­ nder
threat. Well-­known in their respective fields (which include shallow lake ecol­
ogy, deep lake ecol­ogy, coral reef ecol­ogy, earth systems, and o­ thers), ­these
scientists are developing novel strategies for ecosystem management and are
strongly committed to rapid policy change based on a science of critical tran-
sitions. What concerns t­ hese experts is not proving the existence of climate
change, that is a settled case, but creating strategies for preserving existence in
the face of undeniable threats.
Rather than focusing on specific tipping ele­ments, I would like the reader
to focus on the jarring nature of the “one-­way trip” Carpenter mentions. We
may have witnessed it. One day a lake seems perfectly normal. The next day
it is brown or covered with a thick algae bloom or fish underbellies cover-
ing the lake as far as the eye can see. In this instance of ecological surprise,
we can think of the lake as having crossed a threshold or tipping point. The
relatively small scale of a lake has allowed researchers to see ­these threshold
dynamics experimentally. Arguably, we are arriving at many such threshold

horizoning | 255
moments on a larger scale; yet observations of t­ hese events and quasi-­events
often do not register with current models of scientific understanding and
preparedness. ­There are inevitable disjunctures between the temporal and
spatial modeling of climate change and moments when danger can no longer
be actionably sensed: another kind of invisible pres­ent. In what follows, I
explore the nature of projection in the context of ecosystem changes that are
happening with surprising “speed.” Attuned to the existential hazards at stake
in a science of critical transitions, I argue for the importance of a distinct kind
of intellectual and ethical l­abor, a horizoning work, amid physical worlds on
edge.

projections

unfree associations

We can sample a myriad of abrupt shifts by opening the newspaper. When I

did so one day recently, I found a story in the New York Times about emaciated
sea lions that “washed ashore by the hundreds in California.”44 The ­mothers of
­these starved pups left them as they chased for fish that have been pushed out
of their habitable zones by warming ocean temperatures. Images of pups with
their ribs jutting out, now prey for dogs, show the effects of green­house gas
emissions and associated warmer ocean temperatures. Their abandonment
is a quiet fingerprint of how “ongoing green­house gas emissions can modify
climate pro­cesses and induce shifts in ocean temperature, pH, oxygen con-
centration, and productivity, which in turn could alter biological and social
systems.”45
On another page in the same newspaper, I read that California has only
one year’s supply of ­water left due to the ongoing drought. The lack of surface
­water has spurred an unpre­ce­dented groundwater drilling boom, both ­legal
and illicit. My mind jumps to friends living in the city of São Paulo, Brazil,
where a massive drought means that the city reportedly has only a six-­month
supply of ­water left; and to Texas, where Cargill, a major multinational food-­
processing com­pany, has not long ago shut down a major ­cattle slaughtering
fa­cil­i­ty ­because of lack of w
­ ater; and then to a recent scientific article that pin-
pointed the timing of a so-­called climate departure, or the year when the pro-
jected mean climate of any given place moves beyond its “envelope,” or “outside
the bounds of historical variability u­ nder alternative green­house gas emis-
sions scenarios.” It shows when a “radically dif­fer­ent” (and warmer) climate
could begin for par­tic­ul­ar locations: 2048 for Los Angeles and ­Denver; 2047

256 | adriana petryna
for New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington; 2043 for Phoenix and Ho-
nolulu; 2029 for Lagos; and 2020 for Kuala Lumpur. At ­these dates, ­humans
­will be pushed “beyond historical analogues”—­that is, familiar habitable
zones.46
Such familiar zones suggest a climate envelope, or a range of suitable con-
ditions for environmental adaptability. At the point at which vari­ous species
are tipped into an “outside” existence, that is, unable to find the same range
of suitable climatic conditions, their options are rapid adaptation (a culling
pro­cess almost always involving high mortality), extinction, or migration to
more suitable ecological niches. For h­ umans, one cannot deny that such en-
velopes “may [also] shrink to nothing as conditions change—­i.e., t­ here may
be no suitable conditions for a species in the ­future.”47 Mainstream media
accounts bring images of biogeo­graph­i­cal strug­gle into our daily routines,
while also con­ve­niently separating us from our own (­humans, ­after all, can
‘buy time’). An informed and acknowledging public is at a safe distance from a
fringe ideology of climate change denialists. Yet the sociologist Kari Norgaard
identifies a dif­fer­ent kind of climate denier, beyond the extremist type.48 Even
with the public’s adequate knowledge of climate change, she asks, why has
action not been commensurate with the scale of the prob­lem? Denialism, she
argues, is not just a right-­wing position, but is part and parcel of a deepening
incommensurability between ­human and natu­ral timescales and, I would add,
of an inability to reconcile gradual changes with more recent rapid ones—­
that scientific nowhere in which projections are rapidly faltering. Arguably, we
exist in a social “invisible pres­ent” that becomes a con­ve­nient abstraction in
which many forms of denialism can be inserted. The question is how far ­some
­will attempt to go to “actively normalize climate change” before our envelope
dis­appears.

the work of projection

Projections take us to in­ter­est­ing places, and often to places where we do not

want to go. An in­ter­est­ing photographic coincidence occurred almost five de­
cades ago that captured the Earth’s many fates u­ nder dif­fer­ent atmospheric
conditions. Climate modelers perform “runs” into the f­uture, based on cer-
tain par­ameters. Climate modeling was a nascent enterprise in the early 1970s,
when ecological thinking transitioned in the way Carpenter described. In that
de­cade, Syukuro “Suki” Manabe, a climatologist at the Geophysical Fluid Dy-
namics Laboratory in Prince­ton, NJ, pioneered the use of computers to simu-
late global climate change. When he pumped co2 concentrations of four to six

horizoning | 257
times present-­day concentrations into his computer model, he showed that
such levels would take us into the Cretaceous period.
Manabe’s more famous con­temporary, the physicist James Hansen, pro-
duced yet another place with projection. In 1969, the not-­yet-­Bush-­era whistle­
blower published a study on the atmospheric space of Venus, 97 ­percent of
which is co 2. Through a careful analy­sis of the composition of its surround-
ing molecules and dust, Hansen found that Venus may be the ancient relic
of a planet that looked like Earth billions of years ago. Venus represents the
conquest of a planet by a gas that is increasing on Earth at rec­ord pace. As an
artifact of that runaway pro­cess, Hansen’s Venus undermined the more hope-
ful image of the time, the iconic “blue marble” snapshot of Earth, taken in 1972
at a distance of 28,000 miles by moon-­bound crew members of the Apollo 17
spacecraft.
Both modeling runs take us to very dif­fer­ent places and, indeed, to vari­
ous planetary limits, tipping points, and ends. If the blue marble captures the
­fantasy of a limitless biological regeneration of Earth, Venus is a picture of its
disappearance, a kind of living extinction. Somewhere between t­hese duel-
ing images of deathless life and living extinction lies the troubling temporal
imprecision of extinction events themselves. Answers to questions about ex-
tinction (what does extinction, near-­extinction, or the hour of extinction look
like?) are complicated, but they are critical to making the threat of climate
change a more socially intuitive concept. How is extinction being understood,
witnessed, and/or debated in the early 21st ­century?
Is the earth a wonderland, fertilized by runaway co2 levels, or a waste-
land, suffocated to death by them? ­These choices are of course imaginary.
Yet they speak to what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian called a lack
of “coevalness,” or an intersubjective sharing of the time and space of an
other—in this case, the unknown or absent object of nature—­and the need
to regain proximity to ecological phenomena that are unstably configured,
unfamiliar, or u­ nder stress.49 Perhaps as a symptom of such a lack of shared
time, an out-­of-­time thinking in which some keystone event becomes a
popu­lar image for the “end” of the world becomes common. I encountered
this kind of thinking in my work on the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.50 The
stark realities of the nuclear age and its biopolitics pushed many p­ eople, for
better or worse, into an epochal kind of thinking that I consciously aban-
doned as I learned to examine how po­liti­cal practice and narrative forms of
science ­shaped what was and was not knowable about the complexity of the
disaster’s biological outcomes. “They d­ on’t know how they survived” was a

258 | adriana petryna
common refrain among physicians treating contaminated workers, who had
absorbed six to eight times the textbook definition of a lethal dose of radia-
tion. Such words point to an agonizing lack of knowledge about the ­actual
physical states of t­ hose who survived, and where their survival o­ ught to fit
within larger schemes of knowledge. That is, they w ­ ere at a loss to describe
the dimensions of loss and of knowing how to proj­ect into the ­future: ­a di-
mensionless invisible pres­ent. Surprise, even bewilderment, among beings
“born by accident” captures an aspect of what the phi­los­o­pher Catherine
Malabou calls “absolute existential improvisation” for a self that is literally
“out of time.”51
­Today the epoch called the Anthropocene stands as a new geological
era marking irreversible h­ uman activity on the Earth’s ecosystems and, per-
haps, an irretrievable self frozen in a time “whose ­future harbors nothing
to come.”52 Arguably, the very name, Anthropocene, adds to this sense of
deprivation: as it declares h­ umans to be the central agents of massive dam-
age, it puts the prob­lem of climate change out of the bounds of ­human re-
sponsibility; human cognition is purportedly too limited to make sense of
the causal potentials of our actions, now stretching across dimensions of
geologic time and global space. As such, declarations of new eras run the
risk of instilling fatalism in the face of rapid change and preclude capaci-
ties of calibrating the world with other forms of knowledge or from other
zones of contact or influence. Norgaard’s figure of the “common” climate
change denier is salient ­here, overwhelmed by an invisible pres­ent and
without an experimental and projective medium for forward movement.
Abrupt change and tipping points—­points that, if crossed, mean irrevers-
ible change—­require a countertechnique, a continual capacity for recali-
bration, a horizoning work.

horizoning work

The word horizon derives from the ancient Greek ὁρίζω (horizō), meaning “I
mark out a boundary,” and from ὅρος (oros), meaning “boundary” or “land-
mark.” Across time, p­ eople have used the concept of the horizon as a strate-
gic point of reference in the navigation of va­ri­e­ties of physically incoherent
worlds. Re­nais­sance architects used horizon lines to properly orient objects in
three-­dimensional space. Early modern surveyors devised mercury-­filled “ar-
tificial horizons” to create an image of a level surface against which the “incon-
stancy of the terrestrial horizon” could be judged.53 ­Today, robotics engineers

horizoning | 259
encode predictive horizons in remote machines, such as extraterrestrial rovers
that can use them to make autonomous self-­corrections in navigating craters
on Mars. In meeting such course-­plotting challenges, data from the past are
useful, but only up to a point. And right when data are no longer useful and
prediction capability derived from past or pres­ent information becomes mis-
leading (or yields high computational cost or instability), a new predictive
horizon is put into place.54
As ­these examples suggest, horizoning work is a specific kind of intel-
lectual work undertaken in conditions in which the fate of entire systems
is at stake. It involves the testing and assembly of empirical tools and ap-
propriate “scaling rules”55 for recognizing and “maintaining a safe distance
from dangerous thresholds.”56 Such work requires demarcation or incre-
menting, using known par­ameters, but it is also a practice of continuous
self-­correction ­v is-­à-­v is changing baselines of safety and knowable risk. In
the most extreme conditions, horizoning work entails a fine-­tuned aware-
ness of a system’s exposure to jeopardy, without which navigators w ­ ill in-
evitably be flying blind. Horizons of all sorts make complexity temporarily
actionable within a par­tic­u­lar ­human or technical frame. Horizon thinking
makes good on faulty or fleeting information and allows movement forward
or the prevention of a crash or disappearance of a w ­ hole system.57 The fact
that entire trajectories, machines, or worlds are at stake is precisely what
makes horizons so real.
But what happens when horizons dis­appear? Restoring stability in sys-
tems on the verge of runaway change often starts with the construction of
imaginary increments. Be it the navigation of treacherous seas or thinning
ice, what escapes perception—­a horizon line or a precarious patch of ice—is
precisely what becomes an object of an acculturated thought experiment
in “primitive” navigation. For example, aging mari­ners of the Canadian Bay
of Fundy whom I interviewed in July 2013 w ­ ere quite ­adept in mobilizing
such thought experiments, before electronic direction finders, sonar depth
sounders, and satellite navigation became available. They had crossed the
highest tides in the world, and when they found themselves facing a thick
fog, gale-­force winds, or storms, they employed alternative scaling rules to
determine their position and get themselves to their desired destination.
In their dead reckoning, they constructed imaginary trajectories, deducing
their position by employing their previously estimated location or fix—be
it a view of some island meeting­house, the smell of a certain forest, or pat-
terns in tidal ­waters.

260 | adriana petryna
 Such self-­capacitation-­in-­seeing exercises, many of which w
­ ere learned in
childhood, started to generate an ordering of their own. ­These high-­risk skip-
pers moved along that trajectory on the basis of known or likely speeds over
a specific time. As eighty-­five-­year-­old Captain Burton Small, who holds the
honor of being “the last fisherman in the Bay of Fundy to transport a load of
herring to St.  Johns using dead reckoning,” told me, “chance is all we had.”
For Small, when horizons dis­appeared was when it became time to use dead
reckoning. As dead reckoning suggests, sudden losses of visual imagery do not
have to be “accompanied by impairments in per­for­mance on imagery tasks.”58
But how are t­ hese sudden losses themselves engineered?

origins of extinction

In his essay “Air War and Lit­er­a­ture,” the German writer W. G. Sebald depicts
the totality of destruction linked to the Allies’ aerial carpet bombing of Ger-
man cities in World War II. About the bombings, which left “31.1 cubic me-
ters of rubble for ­every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters of rubble
for ­every inhabitant of Dresden,” he notes that German writers “would not
or could not describe the destruction of the German cities as millions expe-
rienced it.”59 He indicts the German literary establishment for breaking the
correlation between experience and event, contributing to the privatization
of the memory of this singular destruction, which left “bodies unrecogniz-
able.” Of the obliteration of Hamburg, Sebald wrote, “At one twenty a.m., a
firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought pos­si­
ble arose. . . . ​At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings,
flung raf­ters and . . . ​billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground and
drove ­human beings before it like living torches.”60 The description gets much
worse. But it is enough to say that Sebald’s story of a g­ reat glossing over is
also a story of an invisible pres­ent, a foreclosure of learning, and a refusal of
horizoning work.
In my ethnography of the social and po­liti­cal aftermath of Chernobyl, I
encountered this refusal of learning from one catastrophe to address the next,
one that made “how they survived” ever more salient. Th ­ ese words indicate
at least two distinct (yet linked) temporal dimensions—­one linked to the
lives of individual citizens, up close and relatively short term; the other linked
to longer timescales and other events of similar magnitude (for example, in
the case of Chernobyl, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, or events compa-
rable in terms of the magnitude of the public’s refusal to address them). Such

horizoning | 261
events, examined within a broader stretch of historical time, provide examples
of failure, resourcefulness, and recovery (or not). Ideally, along this broader
temporal stretch, one would hope to find lessons learned and opportunities
taken for scientific knowledge to evolve a social science of survival. This social
science would work, however tentatively, ­toward recovery and the creation of
a safe distance, as it ­were, from inherent technological or anthropogenic risk.
It would craft a learning curve that could stretch from one disaster to another.
It would also engage the public in debates about what information is available
or missing but required to produce a more adequate response the next time.
It is about improving templates of data collection about what happened and
using t­ hese data to predict and better respond to imminent threats. But in some
impor­tant re­spects, as the emphatic words of the wildland firefighter (“get the
hell out of the goddamn way”) suggest, we are past this point of learning and
engaging with collective realities that are well beyond the confines of recover-
ability and normal experience—­a real tipping point.
Back in the Chernobyl’s “dead zone,” an area thirty kilo­meters in dia­meter
surrounding the disaster site, it is ironic that we have better knowledge about
recovering ecosystems—in that zone a herd of rare Przewalski’s ­horses now
runs wild, the decrease of certain birds’ brain sizes has been observed, and
information about the variability of species’ response to radiation has been
gleaned—­than we do about how ­people and ­human conditions on the ground
can recover. This absence of robust knowledge of Chernobyl’s h­ uman toxicol-
ogy is part of an invisible pres­ent.61
Ever since that catastrophe in Ukraine, scores of researchers have come to
the zone to explore how the world’s worst accidental release of radiation af-
fected flora and fauna. Abandoned and stripped of ­human activities, the zone
has become a site of heated debate about the long-­term effects of exposure to
radioactive chemicals. The terms of the debate are familiar: Is the zone an eco-
logical wonderland or a technological wasteland? Some claim it is the former,
given its lack of p­ eople and anecdotal sightings of large mammals t­ here, such as
wild boar, moose, and roe deer. No ­matter how contaminated the zone is, the
accident at Chernobyl reconfirmed the fitness of animals in vari­ous ecological
settings. ­Others that say the zone is a dangerous postindustrial wasteland, and
that the fanfare over anecdotal sightings obscures the real chaos a few notches
down in the animal kingdom, where the long-­term presence of radiation acts
as a kind of bio-­ecological solvent in which certain bird species’ reproductive
rates have declined, the recruitment of potential mates is compromised, and
some species have completely dis­appeared.62

262 | adriana petryna
 ­There is an analogous debate ­going on with re­spect to climate change and
about what might be considered competing horizons of expected ends. Con-
servatives promote the myth of infinite adaptability and have long defended
co2 as enriching plants and leading to a richer and more verdant world. Even
Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Nobel prize–­w inning physicist who calcu-
lated the green­house effect in 1896, thought that the doubling of atmospheric
co2 and related warming was “an attractive prospect.” And given his projec-
tion of when such warming would take place (in 3,000  years), he lamented
the fact that humanity had to wait so long to enjoy such prospects. Indeed,
such projections butt up against real biological and geochemical limits in the
amount of carbon the earth’s oceans and forests can absorb—at a certain point
­these crucial carbon sinks may no longer be able to absorb all of the co2 that
­humans, machines, and the earth expire.
In a space of imperfect knowledge and inexorable threat, such origins of
extinction require a radically new set of par­ameters for seeing and reckoning
with nature’s critical transitions and related potential risks. They usher in a
new kind of intellectual ­effort, a horizoning work, involving the construction
of appropriate scaling rules and cultivating “equipment” for modeling, manag-
ing, and facing a complex ­future that is right at hand.63 This chapter has been
about lines, curves, exposure events, points of no return, and recoverable and
irreversible trajectories—­scientific imagery suggesting that t­here is no safe
distance from dangerous thresholds, only questions about the dimensions of
loss and what comes next.
Lines depicting runaway co2 levels capture urgency as much as they do a
sense of the unknown; they contain a form-­blind myopia. Projected thresh-
olds and tipping points have a seductive precision, but they also index an ab-
sence of expert knowledge about alternative states once certain thresholds are
crossed. Post-­threshold states, as suggested by the wildland firefighter’s words
and debates about the Chernobyl zone, suggest a loss of capacity for knowing
the dimensions of loss and imaging form successions. Points-­of-­no-­return oc-
casion discourses on the origins of extinction as much as on the h­ uman art of
horizoning work.
Horizons create a conceptual interiority, generating a space of decision
making out of a line of inevitability, as well as new projective possibilities.
They are age-­old instruments, helping create effective perceptual ranges in
invisible pres­ents. As horizon workers (including ecologists, seafarers, and
social scientists) learn to grasp the kinetics of real and observable situa-
tions in ­these pres­ents, they enact a kind of ­labor in which the life of an

horizoning | 263
entire system (a ship, an ecosystem, or a world) is at stake. Their dead reck-
oning allows for a constant reentry into a potential catastrophic pres­ent
and a way to perform the difficult but necessary task of making the ­f uture
less remote.
The real­ity of unconstrained abrupt change, with it mixes of ­human and
natu­ral ­causes, takes the issue of the unexpected—­and what we do with it
morally and scientifically—to a new level. Highlighting the mismatch be-
tween what modelers can now model and what ­others face, this chapter has
moved the debate on collective action in response to abrupt climate change
(which has largely focused on the failures of international diplomacy) to
the realities of collective imagination on the ground. It has also troubled
economistic cost-­benefit reasoning about when and how to intervene, sug-
gesting that t­ here are hidden costs to a failure to act now, as well real limits
to emergency response.
The centrality of horizoning work cannot be underestimated in ecologi-
cal research and everyday life. The incongruities between what can be known
about abrupt changes in nature tell of the level at which horizoning work
­becomes ever more central to po­liti­cal thought and practice. Never complete,
horizoning work creates new projective possibilities in an “invisible pres­ent”
and, in what is unfolding, a sustaining space for coordinating ­human action
amid physical worlds on edge.

notes
1 Canadell et al., “Contributions to Accelerating Atmospheric co2 Growth from Economic
Activity, Carbon Intensity, and Efficiency of Natu­ral Sinks.”
2 Shukman, “Carbon Dioxide Passes Symbolic Mark.”
3 Norgaard, “Living in Denial,” https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­f51N4​-­tBvVc.
4 Norgaard, “Living in Denial,” https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­f51N4​-­tBvVc.
5 Thom, “Itinerary for a Science of the Detail,” 389. As the mathematician René Thom
noted, “man lives on projections” and must be able to use his “imaginary” faculties “on
an unknown or absent object: nature” (“Itinerary for a Science of the Detail,” 17).
6 Norgaard, Living in Denial.
7 co2 monitor salesman, telephone interview with the author, January 23, 2014.
8 National Research Council, “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.”
9 Kunreuther et al., “Risk Management and Climate Change,” 447.
10 Magnuson, Bowser, and Beckel, “The Invisible Pres­ent.”
11 Williams et al., “Forest Responses to Increasing Aridity and Warmth in the Southwest-
ern United States.”

264 | adriana petryna
 12 Armstrong is an advocate of controlled fires and a critic of the U.S. Forest Ser­vice’s
hundred-­year-­long policy of fire suppression, though he does admit a climate compo-
nent to changing fire patterns.
13 Bill Armstrong, interview with the author, July 2014.
14 Bill Armstrong, interview with the author.
15 Bill Armstrong, interview with the author.
16 Bill Armstrong, interview with the author.
17 Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.”
18 Lenton, “Environmental Tipping Points,” 1.
19 Orlowski, Chasing Ice.
20 Quoted from Chasing Ice. The ice retreated further from 2001 to 2010 than it had in the
previous hundred years.
21 Lenton, “Environmental Tipping Points.”
22 On these other complexes, see Deleuze, Francis Bacon, xix. On “disordered chronological
real­ity,” see Cronon, “A Place for Stories,” 1349.
23 Petryna, “What Is a Horizon?”
24 Pacala and Socolow, “Stabilization Wedges.”
25 Magnuson, Bowser, and Beckel, “The Invisible Pres­ent,” L & S Magazine.
26 First quote from Magnuson, “Long-­Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Pres­
ent,” 495. Second quote from National Research Council, The Bering Sea Ecosystem, 13.
27 National Research Council, The Bering Sea Ecosystem, 13.
28 Magnuson, “Long-­Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Pres­ent,” 497.
29 Magnuson, “The Invisible Pres­ent,” in Ecological Time Series, ed. Thomas M. Powell and
John H. Steele, 454 (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 1995).
30 Magnuson, Bowser, and Beckel, “The Invisible Pres­ent,” L & S Magazine, 5.
31 Magnuson, “Long-­Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Pres­ent,” 495. Now an
emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin, Magnuson was one of the found­ers
of the National Science Foundation–funded Long-­Term Ecological Research Program.
This program has been ­running since 1980, originally involving eleven sites representing a
variety of ecosystems. Its goal is to draw together new expertise for conceptualizing rela-
tionships between scientific observation and the ­causes and effects of ecological change.
32 Magnuson, “Long-­Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Pres­ent,” 495.
33 Swanson and Sparks, “Long-­Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Place,” 502.
34 Stephen Carpenter, interview with the author, July 2013, via Skype.
35 The idea of a self-­regulating and equilibrium-­seeking ecosystem or Earth is reflected in
the Gaia hypothesis.
36 Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis.
37 Petryna and Mitchell, “On the Nature of Catastrophic Forms.”
38 See, for example, Scheffer et al., “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems.”
39 DeLanda, “Space,” 130.
40 DeLanda, Deleuze, 116.
41 DeLanda, “Space,” 82.

horizoning | 265
 42 Stephen Carpenter, quoted in Zagorski, “Profile of Stephen R. Carpenter,” 9999. Th ­ ese
configurations are separated by thresholds, “so, with enough pressure, you can move an
ecosystem across a threshold, into a dif­fer­ent configuration” (Stephen Carpenter, Skype
interview with the author, July 2013).
43 Stephen Carpenter, quoted in Zagorski, “Profile of Stephen R. Carpenter,” 10000.
44 Healy, “Starving Sea Lions,” a12.
45 Mora et al., “Biotic and ­Human Vulnerability to Projected Changes in Ocean Bio-
geochemistry over the 21st ­Century.”
46 See Mora et al., “The Projected Timing of Climate Departure for Recent Variability,” 183.
47 Britannica Guide to Climate Change (2008), http://­www​.­britannica​.­com​/­topic​/­climate​
-­envelope.
48 See Norgaard, “Living in Denial.”
49 Fabian, Time and the Other.
50 Petryna, Life Exposed.
51 Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident, 2.
52 Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident, 2.
53 M. Thomas, The Artificial Horizon.
54 Parunak, Belding, and Brueckner, “Prediction Horizons in Agent Models.”
55 Griffen and Drake, “Scaling Rules for the Final Decline to Extinction.”
56 Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” quoted in Hughes et al., “Liv-
ing Dangerously on Borrowed Time during Slow, Unrecognized Regime Shifts,” 6.
57 Verma, Langford, and Simmons, “Non-­Parametric Fault Identification for Space Rovers.”
58 Zeman et  al., “Loss of Imagery Phenomenology with Intact Visuo-­Spatial Task Per­for­
mance,” 145.
59 Sebald, On the Natu­ral History of Destruction, 4 and 78.
60 Sebald, On the Natu­ral History of Destruction, 27.
61 Williams and Baverstock, “Chernobyl and the ­Future.”
62 See Petryna, “The Origins of Extinction.”
63 Rabinow, Anthropos ­Today.

266 | adriana petryna
VI
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 10

Meantime

peter locke

In summer 2010, two years a­ fter my fieldwork in Sarajevo, I found myself in

rural Sierra Leone with a group of undergraduates, studying and supporting
the community health proj­ects conducted by a small medical nongovernmental
organ­ization.1 While my postdoctoral trajectory took me from one postconflict
world reshaped by global humanitarianism to another—­radically dif­fer­ent in
history, culture, and politics, to be sure—­this was not in pursuit of a universal-
izing humanitarian anthropology that might suspend reflexive critique in the
ser­vice of salvific narratives or a fetishization of suffering.2 Scholarly suspicion
of the kinds of solidarities and sympathies that often develop in fieldwork,
especially among the world’s most vulnerable p­ eople, is impor­tant to sustain-
ing the rigor of our methods and analy­sis; yet such suspicion can too easily
reinforce the questionable assumption that integrating greater empathy and
moral commitment into our proj­ects somehow invalidates the knowledge
that we produce. The alternatives—to not engage, to mask our sympathies
and politics, and to embrace a dispassionate critical distance or assess from an
“armchair” position—­are surely at least as problematic.
Over the course of three summers, my engagement in Sierra Leone helped
me see my work in Bosnia-­Herzegovina in new comparative light, juxtapos-
ing the intersections of global humanitarianism, global health rhe­torics and
practices, and ordinary strug­gles to sustain life in ­these two disparate contexts.
Above all, it illuminated the unevenness of global health’s globalization: the
ways in which reigning logics of aid and humanitarianism continue to map
dif­fer­ent sets of challenges onto dif­fer­ent regions and populations.3 Interven-
tions operating u­ nder the label of global health in regions like West Africa
largely seem to work according to what Peter Redfield has called a “minimal
biopolitics”—­preserving the basic biological conditions of life, and ­little more,
for the majority of humanity that global capitalism treats as disposable or as
market opportunities.4 In contrast, international engagements in the former
Yugo­slavia have consistently stressed issues of demo­cratic, multiethnic gov-
ernance; reconciliation; and market reforms in a way that has neglected, and
often diminished, the sort of “workable infrastructures” for a “livable life”—­
including health services—­that most of my Sarajevan interlocutors told me
they lacked and longed for.5
Recent events have drawn new attention to the consequences of t­hese
modes of global governance and care: in West Africa, in the unfolding of
the Ebola epidemic and the deep deficits in public health infrastructure it
threw into relief;6 and in the Balkans, in bouts of po­liti­cal protests directed
at the neoliberal order instituted in the wake of Yugo­slavia’s disintegration. In
Bosnia-­Herzegovina, a series of initially violent, but l­ater peaceful and well-­
organized, protests against corrupt nationalist politicians began in Febru-
ary 2014 in the northeastern industrial hub of Tuzla, a community long held
up as an exemplar of proletarian solidarity and skepticism t­ oward ethnicized
politics. Workers turned out to protest their sudden loss of jobs and benefits
as privatization stripped five companies of their assets and led them to fold.
­These protests quickly spread throughout the country, spurring cautiously ex-
cited talk of a Bosnian Spring or Bosnian Occupy Movement.7 Government
offices, including the presidential headquarters in Sarajevo, ­were set ablaze,
and ­there was some violent response from police forces in the upheaval’s early
days. Soon, though, the protests ­were consolidated into a set of remarkable,
if relatively short-­lived, experiments in direct democracy. Young activists, in-
cluding the literary scholar Damir Arsenijević, at that time on the faculty of
Tuzla’s university, led the formation of open plenums, drawing in hundreds
of fed-up citizens from across ethnic and demographic groups (including war
veterans, the unemployed, students, retired ­people, and underpaid health
workers and teachers) to formulate, vote on, and issue demands to municipal,
regional, and national government bodies.8
The plenums succeeded in compelling the resignation of several cantonal ad-
ministrators, and canton assemblies acceded to some plenum demands, which
ranged from returning industries to public control and reforming health and

270 | peter locke
pension policies to reducing the inflated salaries of government officials. One
widely circulated image showed protesters holding up a spray-­painted ban-
ner that read, “Neither Serb, Croat, nor Bosniak. H ­ uman beings first!” Slavoj
Žižek, writing in the Guardian, insisted that “what brought the protesters to-
gether is a radical demand for justice. . . . ​The ­people of Bosnia have fi­nally
understood who their true e­ nemy is: not other ethnic groups, but their own
leaders who pretend to protect them from o­ thers. It is as if the old and much-­
abused Titoist motto of the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of Yugo­slav nations ac-
quired new actuality.”9
The journalist Senad Hadžifejzović conducted a fascinating tele­vi­sion
interview with Arsenijević and his colleague Šejla Šehabović about the ple-
nums.10 Hadžifejzović seemed consistently bewildered by the sudden erup-
tion and pace of events, as if they had come out of nowhere, pressing his in-
terviewees to account for this emergent social movement. “It w ­ asn’t sudden,”
Arsenijević insisted. “You keep saying ‘suddenly.’ For twenty years politicians
looked at the p­ eople with contempt. It’s just the blindness of ­people who
­didn’t see what was happening. . . . ​For over twenty years ­people have been
complaining, we ­can’t do this, we c­ an’t do that. Now p­ eople see that they can,
and what a victory! In seven days we have saved one million marks [in gov-
ernment salaries]. That is a possibility achieved. A plenum is a protest for the
creation of possibilities.” He paused and looked directly into the camera for
emphasis, as if trying to speak past Hadžifejzović to the entire country: “Now
in Bosnia-­Herzegovina, ­we’re speaking about what is pos­si­ble, not what is
impossible.” And ­later, he offered another power­ful soundbite: “Bosnia ­today
is a plenum.”
The anthropologist Stef Jansen spent time with the protesters and plenums
each day during this period. Like Arsenijević, he could easily perceive the
roots of what was unfolding, but he also seemed to share the journalist’s awe
at such a dramatic turn of events. In an interview published online, he said:

The rage existed, the protests and the strikes have always existed. E ­ very
month over the last few years you could see protests in Sarajevo, tent cit-
ies in front of the parliaments, farmers, workers. . . . ​But they w­ ere always
standalone protests. . . . ​This time, protesters joined forces. In other words,
it ­wasn’t that the workers from one com­pany wanted one t­ hing, the pen-
sioners another, the farmers another still. It was a wondrous moment, and I
­don’t know where that moment came from. I was surprised by that moment
when all ­those ­people realized that they have the same prob­lem, that they

meantime | 271
 could publicly speak about it and that they could put it on the po­liti­cal
agenda.11

The common thread of won­der that seems to weave through the reactions
of the phi­los­o­pher (Žižek), the journalist (Hadžifejzović), and the anthropolo-
gist ( Jansen) resonates with the po­liti­cal theorist Jane Bennett’s reflections on
“enchantment”—­deep, transfiguring, hard-­to-­anticipate modes of attachment
to or investment in o­ thers and in the world—as a necessary and neglected
precondition for “the enactment of ethical aspirations, which requires bodily
movements in space, mobilizations of heat and energy, a series of choreo-
graphed gestures, a distinctive assemblage of affective propulsions.”12 The
2014 protests w ­ ere perhaps all the more “wondrous” for longtime observers
of postwar Bosnia-­Herzegovina, who have noted that embittered disenchant-
ment with politics—­and certainly with airy aspirations like reconciliation—­
has been deep and widespread at least since the 1995 Dayton Accords. What
are we to make of such striking reenchantments of politics, the countersoli-
darities they build, and their inevitable transience?
Indeed, the protests and plenums seem to have fizzled out a­ fter a ­matter
of months, without leading to a radical revision of the Dayton constitutional
structure and a new postethnic era of Bosnian politics, as some had dared to
hope. The movement was overshadowed in part by catastrophic floods that
struck the region ­later that spring—­though, interestingly, this challenge, too,
seemed to trigger unanticipated forms of intercommunity cooperation that
disrupted any sense of Bosnia’s population as being locked into the same eth-
nic animosities that characterize its politics. “The networks that had emerged
with the uprising and the plenums have now transformed into a sort of hu-
manitarian aid organisation,” Arsenijević commented. “The plenums created
the conditions for this kind of solidarity.”13 Moreover, as the Sarajevan-­born
writer Igor Štiks has argued in proposing the emergence of a post-­Yugoslav
“New Left,” even a­ fter losing steam the protests have triggered “a series of
movements struggling for ‘social justice.’ For the first time in Bosnia ­after the
war, social issues such as inequalities and unemployment, as well as privatiza-
tions and corruption, overshadowed ethnic politics.”14
On a similar note, Žižek, anticipating that the movement might fade, em-
phasized that “even if the protests gradually lose their power, they w ­ ill remain
a brief spark of hope, something like the e­ nemy soldiers fraternizing across the
trenches in the first world war. Au­then­tic emancipatory events always involve
ignoring of such par­tic­ul­ ar identities.”15 Something, in other words, continues

272 | peter locke
to resonate even when movements fade—­the concrete fact of unanticipated
public assembly that, as Judith Butler puts it, “delivers a bodily demand for
a more livable set of economic, social and po­liti­cal conditions no longer af-
flicted by induced forms of precarity.”16
For his part, Gilles Deleuze insisted emphatically on distinguishing pro­
cesses of becoming revolutionary from the becoming of the revolution, and
on the impossibility of assessing the former by the latter: “all revolutions fail,”
he quipped impatiently in the Abécédaire interviews—­“every­one knows
that.”17 Reflecting on the legacies of May 1968—­“a becoming revolutionary
without a revolutionary ­future”—­Deleuze argued that “even if revolutions
fail, go badly, that still never stopped p­ eople or prevented ­people from be-
coming revolutionary.”18 Such becomings, for Deleuze, are prompted not by
aspirations to achieve abstract h­ uman rights or ideal types of government,
but by “situations in which the only outcome for man [sic] is to become
revolutionary”—­situations in which, in other words, the preconditions for
a livable life have become so far out of reach for so many that taking to the
streets is less a result of any one group’s or leader’s intention than an organic
inevitability.19
Butler’s recent reflections on con­temporary social movements, from the
Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives ­Matter, are illuminating.
For Butler, such movements are, at their root, a reaction to the widespread con-
ditions of precarity generated by de­cades of neoliberal politics and economics
that have systematically undermined public infrastructures and services—­the
very preconditions of the rugged self-­reliance and “responsibilization” that
neoliberal ideology demands. “What does it mean to act together,” she asks,
“when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away?”20
The transience of new modes of public assembly, for Butler, is an ele­ment of
their critical function, a way in which they draw attention to the absence of
“workable infrastructures” for demo­cratic politics and “mutual de­pen­dency”
in the world that neoliberalism has wrought.21 “The bodies assembled,” Butler
argues, “ ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently.”22
I hesitate to directly connect the marginal solidarities and becomings I ob-
served in my 2007–8 research with Wings of Hope to ­those on display through-
out Bosnia-­Herzegovina during the spring of 2014. Nevertheless, it is difficult
not to interpret the protests and the grievances and aspirations they channeled
as evidence that an anthropology attuned to becomings might be an especially
helpful approach to better understanding the determinants, destinies, and pos-
sibilities of such social movements and upheavals (however fleeting they might

meantime | 273
be) and to exploring the complex relationships between becoming at individ-
ual, familial, and collective scales.
How, indeed, are small and marginal becomings and potentials related to such
seemingly out of the blue, effervescent moments of radical po­liti­cal engage-
ment and social transformation? Jansen expressed won­der at how splintered
victim and protest groups—­farmers, veterans, workers, retired p­ eople, and
students—­could so suddenly move from competitive atomization to a power­
ful and even world-­altering solidarity. An anthropology of becoming might
explore and illuminate what triggers the shift from the creative, if agonizing, arts
of living practiced u­ nder heavy structural constraints and anomie to politics, to
minor solidarities actualized as social movements. As Deleuze suggested, “the
concrete prob­lem” is not so much what ultimately becomes of ­those revolu-
tions that manage to seize power—­“whoever thought a revolution would go
well? Who?”—­but “how and why . . . ​­people become revolutionary.”23 Thus,
we might need to look for what triggers the movement from protecting the “I”
and its identities, resources, and privileges to recognizing precarity as a shared
experience of the failure of po­liti­cal and economic institutions that crosses
ethnic, regional, and national divisions.
Meanwhile, brief return visits to Sarajevo in 2010, 2015, and 2016 have high-
lighted for me both the vital and deadening potentials of what Jansen has pro-
ductively analyzed as the “yearnings in the meantime” (for a “normal” country
and “normal” life) that w ­ ere crystallized in the 2014 protests and that seem to
characterize so much of Sarajevan sociality.24 The material appearance of the
city has continued to be rapidly transformed, with the most vis­i­ble scars of
the war gradually smoothed over, and the last of the iconic burned-­out husks
of old government buildings and shopping malls demolished and rebuilt
as gleaming new tributes to the postwar reign of ethnonationalist oligarchs
and a recent influx of investment from the Middle East. The enormous new
American embassy, a fortress-­like complex the size of two football fields that
had been ­under construction throughout my fieldwork, has fi­nally been com-
pleted. Hostels are proliferating to accommodate the increasing numbers of
young North American and Australian backpackers passing through on their
way to sunny adventures on neighboring Croatia’s Adriatic coast.
Judging by appearances, one could almost imagine that ­things might be be-
ginning to look up for many Sarajevans. But checking in with some of my old
friends made it clear that ­behind the façades, ­people ­were still seething over
the dysfunctional, byzantine, and ethnically divided government structures left
­behind by the Dayton Accords and still struggling to make ends meet and ac-

274 | peter locke
quire basic necessities amid high unemployment and income in­equality. Such
grievances seemed particularly acute during my visit in the summer of 2015, a
year that saw somber reflection and a renewal of collective grief on the occa-
sion of the twentieth anniversary of the genocide of 8,000 Muslim men and
boys at Srebrenica. At the same time, thousands of refugees from conflicts
in the ­Middle East ­were moving through Serbia in their grueling strug­gle to
reach hoped-­for sanctuary in Western Eu­rope, reminding many throughout
the former Yugo­slavia of their own arduous experiences of displacement,
exile, and return, and their sense that l­ittle justice had been achieved to make
up for what they had lost along the way.
My erstwhile research assistant, Mirza, was a man about my age who had
lived through the siege of Sarajevo as a child; studied lit­er­a­ture in college; and,
during my fieldwork, helped me with interviews and translations while dream-
ing of getting a job as a cook or a cleaner on a Ca­rib­bean cruise ship. When I
found him in 2010, just two years ­later, he had deteriorated considerably, be-
coming buried in alcohol and gambling addictions and deeply ­bitter about his
­future chances. He had given up on Bosnia, he said. But he had also given up
on getting out. In subsequent years we lost touch, but I connected with him
again in the summer of 2016. Still drinking, still gambling, he had stumbled into
a strangely sustainable holding pattern—­keeping his addictions enough in
check to manage his ennui and resignation about life in Bosnia, without losing
support from his ­family or letting his life collapse altogether. He seemed re-
laxed and content, and he contrasted his situation to that of civilians enduring
Syria’s civil war, saying, “­Things could always be much worse.”
My visits to Wings of Hope in the summers of 2015 and 2016 have been
encouraging. Milan, Maja’s young cousin who faced so many difficulties grow-
ing up in postwar Bosnia-­Herzegovina, is now in his mid-­twenties and flour-
ishing. Though he was failing his math classes at the time of my fieldwork,
­after years of support from Maja, Milan has completed his studies in min-
ing e­ ngineering, and he is now the manager of a Prijedor-based NGO that
supports people living with disabilities. Maja herself is like a new person:
frustrated and angry throughout my fieldwork in 2007–8, in the meantime she
has attained significant personal and professional success, as well as a certain
mea­sure of peace and resigned humor vis-­à-­vis the often absurd sociopo­liti­
cal realities that she f­aces daily. Having achieved in­de­pen­dence for Wings of
Hope from the founding organ­izations in Western Eu­rope, Maja seems less
stressed and relieved to be able to run t­ hings her way, without having to de-
fend the value of her local knowledge. “We do use ‘Western’ knowledge, but

meantime | 275
adapted to the Bosnian real­ity,” she told me in August 2016, describing how
Wings of Hope’s deliberately “multisystemic” approach to psychosocial sup-
port folds in multiple therapeutic modalities, biomedical health care, social
work, and ­legal aid. Maja herself—­despite her old distrust of psychologists—
is now training in Gestalt therapy.
International organ­izations, Maja said, now reach out to her for “part-
nership” rather than trying to dictate and police how donor money must
be spent. Accumulating successful programs that have drawn steadier fund-
ing, the organ­ization has expanded its range of staff and specialists, engag-
ing l­ awyers, pedagogues, social workers, counselors, and health care workers
in providing holistic support to beneficiaries. She and her colleagues have
relocated Wings of Hope to a big ­house farther from the city center with
sweeping views of the Miljacka River valley and plenty of yard space for the
­children and teen­agers she and her colleagues counsel and tutor. Word has
spread throughout the city—­and beyond—­that Wings of Hope is a reliable
and effective source of support. An invaluable mentor for me over a decade,
Maja now also teaches the new cohorts of students I bring to join me in the
field each summer.
Maja’s response to my question about what might account for Wings of
Hope’s increasing success was s­ imple: “­because we are actually taking care of
­people.” ­There is a wisdom in this—­a commitment to caring for ­others in their
day-­to-­day strug­gles, their arts of living amid constraint and frustration—­that
can inform and inspire our own commitment to people-­centered approaches
in anthropology, enriching every­thing from our mentoring of new generations
to the effects of our scholarship in the world.

notes
1 Locke, “Anthropology and Medical Humanitarianism in the Age of Global Health
Education.”
2 Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject.”
3 Locke, “Global Health and Its Margins.”
4 Redfield, Life in Crisis, 20. See also Abramowitz and Panter-­Brick, Medical Humanitari-
anism; Biehl and Petryna, When ­People Come First; Livingston, Improvising Medicine;
Nguyen, The Republic of Therapy; Ticktin and Feldman, In the Name of Humanity.
5 Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 18 and 22.
6 See Farmer, “Who Lives and Who Dies”; Frank­furter, “The Danger in Losing Sight of
Ebola Victims’ Humanity.”

276 | peter locke
 7 See Kurtović, “Who Sows Hunger, Reaps Rage”; Majstorović, Vučkovac, and Pepić,
“From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla”; Mujkić, “In Search of a Demo­cratic Counter-­
Power in Bosnia-­Herzegovina.”
8 Arsenijević, Unbribable Bosnia-­Herzegovina.
9 Žižek, “Anger in Bosnia.”
10 Arsenijević and Šehabović, untitled interview by Senad Hadžifejzović.
11 Bosnae, “Stef Jansen.”
12 Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 3 (emphasis in the original). See also Coleman,
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistle­blower, Spy, 395–400.
13 Quoted in Bosnae, “Bosnia Floods.”
14 Štiks, “ ‘New Left’ in the Post-­Yugoslav Space,” 138.
15 Žižek, “Anger in Bosnia.”
16 Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 11.
17 Deleuze and Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z.
18 Deleuze and Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z.
19 Deleuze and Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z.
20 Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 23.
21 Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 22.
22 Butler, Notes ­Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 18.
23 Deleuze and Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z.
24 Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime.

meantime | 277
 11

Hereafter

joão biehl

It was eerie to return to southern Brazil in August 2005 knowing that Catarina

would not be ­there. Catarina had passed away in September 2003, a few weeks
­after I had last seen her. I was shocked by the news, for when I last talked to
Catarina, her physical condition seemed to be improving. Oscar, Vita’s chief
caretaker, had kept his promise and made sure that she was regularly taken to
the ge­ne­tic medicine clinic for medical checkups and speech therapy. She
was excited when I told her that, with the medical report in hand, we would
begin procedures to get her a disability pension. In spite of much pain in her
joints, Catarina kept writing, and she wanted to make sure that I could read
her writing—­which I could. Oscar participated in that last conversation. All
he wanted, he said, was “to build my ­house” in the village around Vita. A pack-
age of cement and sets of bricks made him the happiest of men.
Catarina wanted to get out of her wheelchair, she said, and she began to
weep: “I need to go to Novo Hamburgo, to get my documents. Another per-
son cannot get them for me. . . . ​I want to go home.”
What stayed in my mind as I left that day was Oscar saying: “They ­don’t have
the right to be persons.” And then Catarina’s comment: “I am part of the origins,
not just of language, but of p­ eople. . . . ​I represent the origins of the person.”
Two weeks ­later, Oscar called to tell me of her passing. The ­women in the
dorm told Oscar that during the night, Catarina had called for her ­mother
many times and then fallen ­silent. The next morning, she was found dead.
 Laura Jardim, the doctor who was overseeing Catarina’s treatment, was
positive that she could not have died from complications from Machado-­
Joseph Disease and requested an autopsy. The autopsy revealed that Catarina
died as a result of intestinal bleeding.
The wear and tear of Vita, the ­silent work of killing, I still think.
When I made it back to southern Brazil in 2005, I wanted to get a head-
stone for Catarina’s grave, and I deci­ded to visit Vera and Marino, the adoptive
parents of her youn­gest ­daughter, Ana. The ­couple had helped to or­ga­nize Ca-
tarina’s burial in Novo Hamburgo’s public cemetery. The f­ amily, as Oscar had
told me, “at least took the dead body home.” Ana was helping at the ­family’s
restaurant when I arrived. At thirteen years of age, she had a face and gaze that
­were indeed extensions of Catarina’s.
Vera did most of the talking. She lambasted e­ very single member of Cata-
rina’s ­family, saying how “fake” they had all behaved during the funeral. Only
Nilson, Catarina’s ex-­husband, had shown “re­spect,” by offering to help defray
some of the funeral’s costs.
It was striking how Catarina’s story continued to shift in the years follow-
ing her death. In p­ eople’s recollections, she was no longer seen as “the mad
­woman.” Both Vera and the relatives I saw ­later that week now spoke of Cata-
rina as having “suffered a lot.”
As true as this was, such renderings left unaddressed the everyday practices
that had compounded her intractability—­most obviously, the cold detach-
ment that accompanied care conceived solely as phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal intervention
rather than as a relational practice too. Indeed, the plot of a life story is never
securely in the possession of its subject. It is part of the ongoing moral work
of ­those who live on.
One morning in August 2005, Vera and I drove to the cemetery. I used to
visit this place as a child with Vó Minda, my maternal grand­mother. We would
make hour-­long walks uphill to wash the white pebbles adorning her son’s
grave and to leave flowers from our backyard. Nowadays the cemetery occu-
pies the w­ hole hill, overlooking a city that has also changed beyond recogni-
tion. The cemetery has now become a site of pillage. Anything on the graves
that might have had some monetary value, from the metallic letters spelling
out the names of the deceased to religious icons, had been looted. So much for
the value of memory, I told Vera. She shrugged, not knowing how to respond.
I was not sure what I intended ­either, beyond giving voice to mourning.
The story of a life is always also the story of a death. And it is up to us
to proj­ect the story into the f­uture, helping shape its afterlife. Catarina had

hereafter | 279
figure 11.1  ​Catarina’s tombstone, Novo Hamburgo, 2011

been buried in a crypt together with her ­mother’s remains. I made sure that
the crypt was fully paid for, so that in the ­future their remains would not be
thrown into the mass grave at the edge of the cemetery. And Vera was g­ oing to
oversee the making of a marble headstone with Catarina’s name engraved on
it, along with a photo taken by my longtime collaborator and friend Torben
Eskerod: a beautiful image of Catarina smiling that no one could take away.

tell my story

That winter I also returned to Vita.

Inside the infirmary, ­things had only gotten worse. The bedridden ­were not
even brought into the sun’s meager warmth. I asked for Iraci, Catarina’s good
friend. I found him crouched in bed. He said he was so happy to see me and
began to cry silently. So did I. Yes, Catarina had died “all of a sudden,” as had

280 | joão biehl
India, the young ­woman Iraci called wife and had so dearly looked ­after. He
then asked this ­simple and piercing question, which still haunts me: “Did you
bring the tape recorder?”
I had not. Now it was his time to tell the story.
Iraci—­much like Catarina—­called on the ethnographer to help give shape to
his own life story. In the recent lecture “Tell My Story,” the literary scholar Ste-
phen Greenblatt follows his “compulsive fascination with the power and plea­
sure of stories” to interrogate their stakes and possibilities.1 Through a discussion
of the Judeo-­Christian origin myth, he explores our need for life stories: while
Genesis glosses the lives of Adam and Eve in a few words and gives just sparing
details, denoting only the barest trajectory of the fall and what came a­ fter, Green-
blatt sees in the Apocrypha a response to our deep need for a story. If Genesis
­imagined the origin of life, the apocryphal texts imagine the origin of the story
of a life: “Genesis tells us what it would have been like to be ­human, but not have
­human life stories.” The Apocrypha, he tells us, “grope to supply t­ hese details.”
Also drawing on Shakespeare’s King Lear and attentive to the relationships
between body, history, storytelling, and death, Greenblatt is interested in
­human longevity beyond reproductive life—­“ least relevant to the biological
pro­cesses of life history.” “This consciousness,” he states, “has no claim on the
attention of evolutionary biologists. It is, like the nonreproductive bodies of
the very old, a kind of meaningless leftover.” He goes on: “But for Shakespeare,
and for lit­er­a­ture, the leftover is the ­thing itself.”
It is precisely ­here that the ­human story resides, as does the impulse that
propels the Apocryphal texts to ask not only if Adam and Eve lived, but how.
Where for biology, it is an “epiphenomenon” (at best, a ruse; at worst, an irrel-
evance), in lit­er­a­ture, Greenblatt asserts, “life story is the platform for h­ uman
experience.” Beyond productive and reproductive life, he tells us, what ­matters
most to Shakespeare is “what lies just ahead”—­the rage, grief, madness, and
fantasies of a redemption that ­will never come—­the very stuff of stories.
How, then, does this stuff of our stories continue, drawing our subjects and
ourselves into an ethnographic open system?

“you ­w ill remember my case”

In November 2014, I received an e-­mail message from someone I did not im-

mediately recall: Andrea de Lima.
The subject line read: “Mr. João Guilherme [which is how I am addressed
in Brazil]—­ MJD [which stands for Machado-­ Joseph Disease]—­ family

hereafter | 281
 case—­Vita [where I met Catarina].” ­There was much more at work in that
composite subject than I could immediately apprehend.
“Good morning, Mr. João Guilherme, she wrote, in a youthful, neigh-
borly and respectful manner. “It is a ­great plea­sure to be sending you this
email.”
The message seemed affectively impor­tant to her. “I got your contact
information from Mr. Magnus at Vita, ­here in the state of Rio Grande do
Sul, Brazil,” she informed me. She had gone out of her way and into Vita,
searching to establish contact with the anthropologist whom Catarina had
known.
“My name is Andrea,” she continued.
By then I knew who was writing. In Vita, I had named her Ana.2
A puzzling statement followed: “I’m looking for you for the following . . . ​
you ­will remember my case.”
How could I not? I felt deeply implicated. The character had acquired a
Shakespearean ghostly tone, like in Hamlet: “Remember me.”
Yet this was not just a call for personal recognition. The memory she in-
voked was that of her “case”—­a broader story she was a part of. Andrea was
looking for the ethnographer of Vita. She trusted that he knew of her par­tic­u­
lar situation and that she was not just an anonymous floating sample of some-
thing occurring in the world: “I am the d­ aughter of Catarina Inês Gomes who
spent years living in Vita with Machado-­Joseph Disease and you accompanied
her case.”
My work with Catarina had unleashed something into the world, some-
thing that surfaced all t­hese years l­ater in Andrea. While Catarina had
sought to detach herself from the logics that produced her abandonment,
her ­daughter was, in a sense, trying to attach herself to something—to enter
into the entanglements that brought kin, biology, and anthropologist to-
gether. Now it was Andrea who was trying to reassemble the dismembered
­family.
In her email, she wrote: “I was ­adopted by Vera. So my last name was
changed. My siblings stayed with the blood ­family.”
Catarina once told me that she had never signed the adoption papers. In-
deed, given her supposed madness and recurrent psychiatric hospitalizations,
she never got her day in court to contest her husband’s decision to sign away
custody of Andrea.

282 | joão biehl
opening

Twice in this initial message, Andrea invoked the genre of the case: her own
and her ­mother’s. As the literary theorist Lauren Berlant notes, cases—­legal,
medical, or psychological—­are defined by judgment. Linking the singular to
the general, they express “a relation of expertise to a desire for shared knowl-
edge.”3 But is the case only or always about judgment? And how does anthro-
pological work—­and the systems it engenders over time and space—­enter
into proximity with such cases?
Andrea knew that ­those who had seen her ­mother as unproductive, unfit,
and mad had closed Catarina’s life off. Yet by exploring how Catarina became a
case—of psychosis, expert knowledge, and abandonment—­anthropological
work had made room for thinking real­ity and h­ uman figures other­wise. Eth-
nography brings crossroads (places where other choices might be made, other
paths taken) out of the dustbin of history or the shadow of encased norms
and deterministic analytics—­the “leftovers,” in Greenblatt’s sense, that make
up a life. Through ethnography, t­ here is a refusal of encasing and its confines,
including the values, systems, experts, and institutions through which the case
is constituted. Andrea was curious about how her mother managed to survive
in Vita and what her writing meant to her.
According to Berlant, cases can also trou­ble norms and create openings:
“The case reveals itself not fundamentally as a form, but as an event that takes
shape.”4 By breaking the case open, ethnography creates a spacetime sepa-
rate from the event, which is the very spacetime that Andrea entered. In this
way, a case “raises questions of pre­ce­dent and futurity, of canons of con-
textualization, of narrative elucidation,” writes Berlant, and “a personal or
collective sensorium shifts.”5
While cases can be—­and indeed often are—­domains of normative power
and expert judgment, they are also a means of moving into the unknown.
They offer not so much judgment as an invitation, entry point, or adjacency,
or the becoming of a life story, which is an open system that the ethnographer
in this case has become a part of. Ethnography thus makes the case “an opening
within realism, suggesting where it might travel.”6
In her e-­mail Andrea told me, “I want the ge­ne­tic test so that I can know
­whether I am negative or positive” for Machado-­Joseph Disease.
Part of a dismembered ­family, Andrea knows that she also belongs to a bio-
logical system that exercises its own kind of agency. The knowledge she seeks
is life-­altering. If she tests positive, she ­will be diseased, so to speak, and left

hereafter | 283
without a known treatment. I did not know how to take what I was reading or
how to respond to her search, and I was thrown back to the core tension of my
fieldwork with Catarina: how to sustain a sense of hope, as mortality hovers
beneath the surface.

onward

“I am very grateful that you attended to my ­mother and also to Adriano. For I
know that some years ago, you helped him.”
Andrea was right. A ­couple of years earlier, I had returned to southern
Brazil to work on a visual documentary of the now-­ubiquitous practice of
litigation against the state for access to treatment. Torben had joined me
in the field, and at that time we met with Laura Jardim, the doctor who had
seen Catarina before her death, to discuss the plight of patients who are fil-
ing lawsuits for access to new and high-­cost ge­ne­tic therapies. At the end
of the meeting, Laura mentioned that Catarina’s son, Adriano, had recently
visited her clinic and received the same diagnosis of Machado-­Joseph Dis-
ease as his m­ other had had. He had been invited to enroll in the first clinical
trial for a treatment that the ge­ne­tics team hoped would slow the progres-
sion of the disease.
Fieldwork sets often surprising and unforeseeable pro­cesses in motion,
changing something in the life course of all involved. My work with Catarina
made me a part of what I have come to think of as an ethnographic open sys-
tem. Between fieldwork’s past and f­uture, I was linked to both Catarina and
her offspring. In contrast to the subjects of statistical studies and the figures
of philosophy or social theory, our ethnographic subjects have a ­future, and
we become a part of it in unexpected ways. Their stories become a part of the
stories we tell, and we, too, become a part of their life stories.
I found Adriano, his wife, and their two ­children living in the poorest out-
skirts of the city of Novo Hamburgo, not far from where I grew up. The meet-
ing with Adriano and his ­family taught me much about the dark underside of
Brazil’s ailing public health-­care system. Unable to continue his work in the
local steel factory, Adriano was getting by on a disability stipend that he had
to reapply for e­ very three months. His son had severe learning disabilities.
­After a year of trying, the f­amily was still waiting for an appointment with a
neurologist. His d­ aughter was tiny, apparently undernourished; she had an
umbilical hernia, and they ­were also having trou­ble making the appointment
for her operation.

284 | joão biehl
 Living in the brutal stasis of poverty, Adriano and his wife seemed resigned
to waiting. Their situation reveals the broad real­ity of public health among
Brazil’s poor: ­unless they learn to make themselves vis­i­ble, demand fulfillment
of their rights, and make the system care, they are left to live with their condi-
tions and eventually die on their own.
Despite their difficult circumstances, t­here was something of Brazilian
consumer society in Adriano’s remote shack. The ­children sat on a sofa play-
ing video games. Adriano dreamed of building a h­ ouse with a yard for the
kids to play in, he said, and he had managed to acquire an old Volks­wagen
Beetle—­even though he did not have a driver’s license. Th ­ ese possessions and
desires helped him maintain a sense of worldliness and worthiness, I thought,
as he now fought to escape Catarina’s destiny—­Vita.
“Onward,” he said.

return to vita

Together with Torben, I returned to Vita once more in August 2011.

“Welcome back,” said Magnus, the soft-­spoken se­nior citizen who had been
in charge of Vita’s daily operations for more than a de­cade. “Make yourself at
home.”
Vita has changed along with Brazil. It is now as much a makeshift institu-
tion of care as it is a zone of social abandonment. ­There is a nursing wing for
the el­derly and disabled, separate from the infirmary where I first met Cata-
rina, and a social worker on staff is responsible for triage. Only ­people with
retirement pensions or disability benefits and a certain level of well-­being are
accepted.
I interrupted Magnus to ask if two men seated in wheelchairs next to each
other ­were Vaquinha (literally, “­little cow”) and Caminhãozinho (literally,
“­little truck”), the names I had come to know them by over the years. They
­were severely mentally impaired, and no one knew anything about their lives
before Vita. I had actually written something about the pedagogical role the
abandoned person/animal/object played for inmates who, by informally adopt-
ing men like Vaquinha and Caminhãozinho, ­were trying to rehabilitate and re-
generate themselves as citizens.
In a striking turn of events and in line with Brazil’s new rule of law, the aban-
doned had formally become citizens, I learned. During an audit by the Public
Ministry, officials had demanded that the ­legal situation of every­one living at Vita
be regularized. Vaquinha is now João Paulo Nestore Soares, and Caminhãozinho

hereafter | 285
is Samuel Lopes. They had names and dates of birth in­ven­ted for them and
­were issued social security and identity cards. With t­ hese cards in hand, João
Paulo and Samuel ­were now entitled to disability benefits, which are chan-
neled to the institution. Yes, formal channels of social inclusion are taking root
even in places like Vita, but of course citizenship and care remain a money-
making ­matter.
We found a bedridden man in a small room with an empty chair and a tele­
vi­sion. Caregivers refer to him as “uma antiguidade”—­“an antique” or “a person
of ­those earlier times”—­because he has survived in Vita since its beginnings in
the mid-1980s. Motionless, he was purged of specificity, a sort of h­ uman mineral
with no ­human touch or voice to awaken flight, a person connected to nothing
and no one. I know that no emotion or image within me can represent this life
story, which, like most, ­will remain unknown.
A resident named Vilma beckoned us. She was unable to walk on her own.
Three months earlier, Vilma had been left by her husband at Vita with a few
clothes, a rec­ord of psychiatric prescriptions, and the prospect of a disabil-
ity pension to be collected by Vita. Vita’s administrators ­were adamant that,
by and large, ­people who ­were left at Vita required full-­time care and thus
prevented another ­family member from working. Simply put, in ­today’s
economy, a f­ amily unburdened of day-­to-­day caregiving responsibilities can
generate much more money.
It was uncanny how much Vilma’s story mirrored Catarina’s. As I listened
to her, I was thrown back to the beginnings of Vita (both the place and the
book), to knots of intractability, a real­ity that kills, and the desire to bring this
real­ity to justice and tell it all.
But how?

how literal the virtual figure is

A few days ­later, we ­were back.

“I think that’s Lili,” I told Torben. “She was Catarina’s roommate; you pho-
tographed her in 2001.”
With a shaved head and aged beyond her years, yes, it was Lili, seated on a
bench next to a man with a large build.
“Hi, Lili.”
“Hi.”
“Do you remember me?”
“I cannot remember you, sir.”

286 | joão biehl
 “We talked many times, when Catarina was alive. I did not wear glasses
then,” I said, and I took my glasses off.
“Ah . . . ​yes, now I recall, the times of Catarina.”
“This is Torben, a friend of mine. He also photographed you. You told us
about your ­family.”
“Was it you who took me to the bank to get that money?”
“No,” I said. Most likely it had been a Vita administrator taking her to col-
lect her pension.
Lili then introduced us to Pedro: “I am married to this guy now. It is good
to have someone, and they ­don’t let us sleep together . . .”
Lili added that she had been “ill . . . ​of the nerves . . . ​I d­ on’t recall t­ hings . . . ​
I had not recalled you.”
“Do you take medi­cation?”
“Yes. I am talking the red pill, the blue one, and the ­little white one,
­every day.”
Torben asked to photo­graph the ­couple.
“But I have no money to pay for it,” Lili said, to Pedro’s laughter.
During the photo shoot, Lili asked me: “Are you married?”
“Yes. My wife’s name is Adriana. And we have a son called Andre.”
“I also have a son. Th­ ere he is.” She pointed to a volunteer who was helping
an el­derly man to his wheelchair.
I tried to shift the conversation to what I thought was real and asked: “Do
you miss your son?”
“Now he is living nearby and he often comes to visit. My daughter-­in-­law
also comes and brings me sweets.”
I recalled that Lili had always spoken about ­going to church and quoted
passages from the Bible. I asked her ­whether ­there ­were still worship ser­vices
in Vita.
“No, they d­ on’t let us go to church now. . . . ​I used to go to the Assembly of
God and to the God Is Love Church. I went to both.”
“But you pray . . .”
“Yes, I pray. I think of God, but I never saw God.”
I was puzzled. Lili meant it literally: “I only saw the Son of God on a cruci-
fix. It was in a pamphlet they gave me at the hospital.”
With a ­little trust restored between us, Lili spoke of everyday life in Vita: “I
­don’t even know how long I have been h­ ere. Sometimes life h­ ere is good,
sometimes it is bad.” She lamented the cruel treatment inflicted by volun-
teers, with the exception of her “son.”

hereafter | 287
 She was referring to Jorge, the infirmary’s head caregiver, who joined us.
He had not overheard our conversation and revealed how literal the virtual
figure is for the abandoned: “I am the one who is always joking with her. I tell
her that I am her son.”
And so, through and beyond the times of Catarina, the writing of Vita con-
tinues, amid cruelly optimistic yet sustaining attachments. P­ eople keep claim-
ing the social roles and connections that have been denied to them, attaching
themselves to the potentiality of words to create ties, allowing at least a mini-
mal sense of personhood and ­human value.

unthought

“Please confirm that you received this message,” Andrea pleaded in her e-­mail
to me. “You are very impor­tant in my history and in my ­family. I hope you ­will
remember me or my ­family that you became a part of.”
Besides ­family, biology, history and work (“I’m sending this e-­mail from
work,” she said in a postscript), Andrea was also part of an ethnographic open
system constituted by the cir­cuits of fieldwork and the work of time.
“Thank you,” Andrea concluded the message.
We began a conversation over e-­mail and Skype. Andrea had finished high
school, and when she turned eigh­teen, she said, it was time to leave the home
of her adoptive parents: “Vera and Marino gave me a home and education,
and I always had every­thing I needed. I cannot complain. But it was never an
affectionate relationship.”
Andrea was working as a computing and customer ser­vice assistant at a
transportation com­pany in Novo Hamburgo, and for the past three years, she
had been living with her boyfriend, Anderson, and his working-­class ­family.
“Not a single day goes by that I ­don’t miss my ­mother,” she told me.
She only recalled having seen Catarina once. Her adoptive parents took
her to Vita and “I did not know what to say. All that h­ uman misery. I regret so
much not asking her any questions. I was afraid.” She was ten at the time. Vera
had told me that they had actually taken Andrea to Vita “for her to see what
­will happen to her if she does not start behaving.”
Through the ethnographic complex, Andrea sought an identification with
Catarina. She asked ­whether I could reach out to the same doctor who had
tested and treated her m ­ other and her b­ rother, Adriano—­which I did, al-
though I was ambivalent about d­ oing so. If it w ­ ere me, I would not want
to know if I had such a disease. I worried about what would happen to her

288 | joão biehl
current life, which seemed well-­organized and stable, if she w ­ ere found to
have the ge­ne­tic mutation for Machado-­Joseph Disease. Yet Andrea was de-
termined to know and went through a long pro­cess of evaluation and coun-
seling. It was as if the lethal ge­ne­tic knowledge would confirm that she was
in fact the d­ aughter of the ­mother who, encased in madness and abandon-
ment, she never had.
A year ­later, in November 2015, Andrea e-­mailed me again and asked if we
could talk.
I thought she wanted to tell me the outcome of the ge­ne­tic test. But that
was not it. She had not yet been called to get the results. I knew from my ge­
ne­ticist colleagues that about half the p­ eople who get tested decide not to see
their results, and I told her that this option was available to her.
“My ­sister and I found each other on Facebook,” she told me.
That was the story Andrea wanted to tell. She was over the moon with hap-
piness. The last time Andrea had seen her oldest s­ ister, Adriana (who had been
raised, together with Adriano, by a paternal grand­mother), was at Catarina’s
funeral.
“I saw her message on a Sunday morning when I woke up,” she told me.
“Can you imagine? I cried a lot.”
This is a snapshot of their digital encounter. The En­glish translation of
what they said is: “Hi Andrea, all good?” “I think I found the person I sought
my entire life, the person I loved my entire life.” “You are my ­little ­sister,
right?”

figure 11.2 ​The ­sisters on Facebook, 2015

hereafter | 289
 Adriana does not have Machado-­Joseph Disease, Andrea told me. She has
two ­children of her own and works as a supermarket cashier. “And what a co-
incidence,” Andrea continued: “It was the Day of the Dead, and I had already
bought flowers to take to my ­mother’s grave.”
The ethnographic memorial, an out-­of-­the-­way effort to insist on the
irreducible truth that a ­woman named Catarina Inês Gomes Moraes had
once walked on the earth, was the site where the characters of the “tragedy
generated in life” (in Catarina’s own words) continued. In spite of all the
time and prospects that ­people and institutions had taken from them, they
continue to tell their f­amily story, to live it a bit differently, and to graft
each other anew: “It was ­there that we found each other, ­there in front of
my mom’s remains.”
This is a photo Adriana took of Catarina’s shrine, with the flowers she and
her ­sister had brought. The s­ isters reached out to Adriano, who was now living
by himself on disability benefits. With his disease progressing and conflict in
the ­house, his wife left him for another man, taking the ­children with her. Adri-
ano has found solace and support in the evangelical church he attends daily.
Catarina’s scattered offspring ­were now forming the ties that she always
­imagined, and that had sustained her somehow: “to restart a home,” she used
to say. And now it was Andrea: “This is very impor­tant to me. What is happen-
ing is the brick that was lacking in my construction.”
­There was one more ­thing that Andrea wanted from the anthropologist
who had “accompanied” Catarina’s case: “Can you, please, tell me: what was
my mom thinking in Vita?”

figure 11.3  ​Andrea’s photo­graph of the ethnographic memorial, 2015

290 | joão biehl
figure 11.4 ​Adriana, Adriano, and Andrea, 2016

I recalled Catarina’s words: “In my thinking, p­ eople forgot me.” But I d­ idn’t
repeat her words, for Andrea was now living Catarina’s hereafter. I told her I
would love to meet the reassembling ­family and read parts of Vita and of Ca-
tarina’s dictionary with them.
We met in January 2016 in Novo Hamburgo, the place of my own begin-
nings and departures.
It is such immanent negotiations (of p­ eople, social forms, time, worldli-
ness, desire, storytelling and ethics)—in their impasses, stabilization, tran-
sience, excess, ruination, and creation—­that animate the unfinishedness of
ethnography and the critical work of ­human becomings.

notes
1 Greenblatt, “Tell My Story.”
2 Biehl, Vita.
3 Berlant, “On the Case,” 664.
4 Berlant, “On the Case,” 670.
5 Berlant, “On the Case,” 666.
6 Berlant, “On the Case,” 669.

hereafter | 291
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 Afterword

Zen Exercises

Anthropological Discipline and Ethics

michael m. j. fischer

To catch the moment of becoming, emergence, phase transition, enlighten-

ment, tipping point, switching point, Euclidean point, asymptote is a ­matter
of approximation, finding par­ameters, modeling throughputs, a calculus of
infinities, a receding mirage or fusion between cognition (it must be an il-
lusion) and perception (but I can see, smell, taste, feel, or desire it), the
unfinishedness of living, morph­ing through interactions, artificial life, algo-
rithmic repetitions beyond the powers of understanding, materializations
of seeming impossibilities. ­These are zen moments of enlightenment, zen
exercises.
However, to approximate, triangulate, frame, or restage such moments are
ethical exercises meant to keep t­ hings open to potentials, catch the metal fa-
tigue before breakage occurs, anticipate and head off turbidity and hypoxia,
shift uncontrolled anger into razor-­sharp discipline, channel a mentor into
a form of self-­becoming other (more flexible and stronger), rebalance gut
microbiome sensing, modulate a crowd’s volatility with ­music or a speech,
recognize when a fire’s physics becomes plasma. Th ­ ese are pragmatic skills
and apperceptions in which we can be trained; they are exercises for extreme
environments (space, oceans), beyond anthropocentric hysteria, emotions
for when we need to rely on risky dead reckonings.
 What kind of biopolities and bioecologies ­will we live in, what role ­will vio­
lence play, what role w ­ ill climate change play, what are the temporalities in-
volved in all three of ­these basic anthropological, social-­theoretical, humanistic
questions (emergent forms of life)?1 Does one answer them with ­grand theory,
rapid model prototyping, and mathematical clarity or with microethnography,
pragmatics, and building via imperfect understandings—or how do ­these inform
and disturb each other (pebbles and labyrinths in the way of theory)?2 What are
the roles of writing, the tropes employed in writing, cultural genre forms, and
writing’s nondiscursive effectivities (changing the worlds we inhabit,3 making,
as João Biehl and Peter Locke say, the ethnography and theory “actionable” and,
quoting Gilles Deleuze, making theory “multiple,” a workman’s “tool box”)?
­Until and ­after death—­always unfinished business, lives and afterlives—­I want
to keep the focus on p­ eople (the peopling of cultural technologies, “moral bi-
ographies of action and inaction” as Naisargi Dave puts it, p­ eople “becoming
aggrieved” in Laurence Ralph’s terms)4—­people as biosensing membranes and
biochemical channels; social hieroglyphs written across historical horizons; cal-
ligraphies or embodied inscriptions of experience (characters); poesis and lines
of flight of desire, despair, and hope; inventor-­explorers of life other­wise, gener-
ated from double binds, fostered in social pluralities; experimenters in devising
new ethical plateaus for the time being, in the meantime.
This volume provides an exemplary series of case studies of, and among
the best of intensive ethnographic writing about, such power­ful affective an-
thropological zen exercises: living with ataxia, waiting years for politics to un-
freeze, being forcibly converted to a new religious cosmology and enrolled in
the margins of a strange society, feeling compelled to meditate on slaughter­
houses cruelly run, having sons and neighbors shot without reason, being kid-
napped and enduring coercive therapies in anexos. As in zen exercises, it is not
the extremity of affect that is at issue but the overcoming, the recognition that
more is ­going on in ­these partial accounts or situations; that biopo­liti­cal and
bioecological subjectivities and agencies are at play that we can only partially
understand; that we need, as Adriana Petryna suggests, ­human sciences of un-
certainty rather than hubristic claims to analytic totalities.
I perform rereadings, repetitions with a difference, slippages, slightly dif­
fer­ent perspectives, threadings of other narratives, other horizons (1968, 2016,
and 2036) and milieus, other pairings and juxtapositions, other questions or
critiques in the ser­vice of care, and in the ser­vice, as Biehl and Locke say, of
making our work “part of ethnographic open systems and . . . ​folded into lives,
relationships, and [varied] swerves [tropes] across time and space.”5

294 | michael m. j. fischer
 Seven elementary exercises follow: camaraderies and trajectories; swinging
the pendulum (oscillation, contradiction, double binds); calligraphies; canni-
balizing and indie-­gestion; poisoned histories and dividing cities; horizoning
and emergent forms of life; unfinished exercises and lifelines.

camaraderies and trajectories

Biehl and Locke begin the volume with a musically rich quartet of pieces
centered on, or spiraling outward from, the experiences of long-­term, leaving-­
and-­returning engagements with friends and acquaintances for life. Biehl and
Locke, through the force of their writing, make us all accompaniers6 on life-
lines, lines of flight, and lines of stuckness (avareh in Persian, the word used
by Ira­nian exiles for the feeling of being unable to move back or ahead in their
lives). Only with such long engagements with p­ eople (what anthropologists
call fieldwork in contrast to interviews, Google searches, and quick visits),
Biehl and Locke observe, can one achieve antidotes to “the quick theoretical
fix.” Quick theoretical fixes miss what are often surprising developments.
The ­music—­harmonies, dissonances, developments, and repeats—­emerges
over time: first encounters, meantimes, and hereafters. Thanks to dif­fer­ent
forms of camaraderie and accompaniment, d­ oing what one can, Biehl has in-
troduced Catarina to all readers of Vita as a world-­revealing author, a life force
against the entropy of her ataxia, a composer of poetic dictionaries with such
startling social diagnoses and self-­knowledge as “Desire is phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal. It
is not good for the circus,” “Documents, real­ity, tiresomeness, truth, saliva,
voracious, consumer, saving, economics, Catarina, spirit, pills, marriage, can-
cer, Catholic church, separation of bodies, division of the state, the c­ ouple’s
­children,” and “Medical rec­ords, ready to go to heaven. Dollars, [Brazilian]
Real, Brazil is bankrupted. . . . ​­Things out of justice. ­Human body?” ­These re-
frains bear repetition.
Surprises and developments unfold over time: the ataxia is identified as
Machado-­Joseph Disease, a traceable epidemiology from founder populations
beyond Brazil, allowing corrections of misdiagnosis and mismedication;
a ­daughter reaches out through new media to an anthropologist a continent
away; she reconstitutes a f­ amily with her siblings; and her b­ rother is admitted
to a new clinical trial with hopes for better treatment. Returning to the ­family
and Vita (in 2005, 2006, 2011, and 2016), the anthropologist discovers new
threads, new desires. “Did you bring the tape recorder?” asks Iraci, an elder in
Vita, three years ­after Catarina died. “Should I take the test?” Ana/Andrea asks,

afterword | 295
including the anthropologist in her deliberations, posing an ethical dilemma
for him, but making him part of further unfoldings of the crossing trajectories
of lives and social strug­gles. ­These social strug­gles, importantly, include rights
to medical care, now accessible through new institutional forms of judicializa-
tion supported by activist public prosecutors and judges against the “bank-
rupted” state, as Catarina astutely noted (despite, or perhaps b­ ecause of, her
position in a zone of abandonment, but with radio contact to the world). As
she noted: “­things out of justice” are significant for the “­human body.” H ­ uman
bodies are always in question. Life is fragile.
The counterpoint for Locke is g­oing and coming back to Bosnia-­
Herzegovina—­the region, especially neighboring Serbia and Croatia, flooded
now with other refugees (from Syria, Af­ghan­i­stan, and parts of Africa), further
adding to the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s violent collapse, the unsolved forensics
of bones and graves, and missing ­people—­and being surprised to find in 2014 a
hope-­infused, coordinated protest movement, a Bosnian Spring. ­These ­were no
longer isolated demonstrations but consolidated, if short-­lived, experiments in
direct democracy. The ­music ­here is not that ­these experiments fail—­“all revo-
lutions fail,” Locke quotes Deleuze as saying—­but that experience is created
showing that new solidarities are pos­si­ble (Deleuze’s “one can become revolu-
tionary without a revolutionary ­future”).7 One thinks ­here of the century-­long
repetitions in the revolution in Iran (variously narrated), and in par­tic­u­lar the
demonstrations of 2009 (crushed but never over)8 and of Locke’s note (quot-
ing Biehl from another social context) that ­people in Bosnia-­Herzegovina are
nostalgic for, and waiting for, times of “a shared, against the odds ‘­will to live.’ ”
­Music is but one of the arts of living on, and Locke urges us also to attend to
language in a literary register, citing Deleuze on its distinction from language in
a clinical register. He draws on Deleuze’s line of thought that the unconscious
is more about mobilization of desire than commemoration, as Sigmund Freud
would have it, and that agency pulsates in language: ­people may be psychologi-
cally disturbed but do not simply become the diagnostic categories of quick
theoretical fixes. ­Under the surface, a taxi driver notes, “something is not right,”
and ­people are “explosive” and “temperamental,” “flying into a rage” at the
slightest trigger. But more could be done with this harmonics/disharmonics
and emic/etic diagnostics of clinical versus literary language and shifting cul-
tural discourses of psychological accounting, as perhaps in the case of Iran9 or
Singapore.10
In this first set of zen exercises, becoming and new forms of life are apper-
ceived and even tasted, if not institutionalized or stabilized. This is not to say

296 | michael m. j. fischer
that impor­tant institutional developments are not also happening in ­either
Brazil or Bosnia-­Herzegovina, and that leads to a second aporia and zen exer-
cise in theory making.

swinging (on) the pendulum, shifting the periodicities

The pendulum swings back from times of social order to times of social disor-
der, back and forth, with dif­fer­ent horizons calling up dif­fer­ent re­sis­tances and
dif­fer­ent repressive forces. Inequalities become so gross that the privileged can
neither see straight nor beyond their gated communities and personal automo-
biles. Or they distract and content themselves with attachments to experience-­
far, seemingly bright-­line, moral ­causes elsewhere. Meanwhile the screams of
the marginalized turn from immediate pain to reengaged assertions of “becom-
ing aggrieved”; insistence on ­legal rights to medicine; the hard love of anexos’
incarceration; charged oscillations between exposing and hiding poisonous
histories; and sometimes disinfecting, but sometimes searing, sunlight. The
pendulum is also the counterculture, do-­it-­yourself, punk re­sis­tance to always
recuperating financialization, gentrification, and capital control. The Jetzt­
zeit, to use Walter Benjamin’s term,11 of moments of revolt, euphoria, and
solidarities (like ­those Locke describes in Sarajevo and Tuzla in 2014) result
in afterlives and generational rejections or reappropriations, and occasionally
­there are shifts in collective common sense (like ­those Behrouzan describes in
the discourses of Ira­nian psy­chol­ogy).12
The choice of words, the writing culture of ­today, intends intensities, electric
shocks, and wake-up calls. The words are scalpels and sutures, experience-­near
tools that are not sensational but surgical. They intend to create affective-­material
effects in open wounds. They intend to pierce and lance to generate new skin,
raw tenderness full of new nerve endings, and structures of feeling open to the
biosensibilities of all that is touched and felt through the flesh’s double-­sided
sensing, across membranes of self and other, interiority and recognition.
The affective-­material shifts of life in the early de­cades of the twentieth-­
first ­century provide the matrix of becoming in ­today’s world, the scaffolds of
new metastable forms of socialities that no longer cannibalize themselves but
seek symbiotic metamorphoses and kinships, softening old scars and deaden-
ing ends; and allowing exploratory health, growth, transformation, and even
dead reckoning across unknowable tipping points and horizons. ­These are
the found objects, the creativities of worlds in the ­here and now, the artistry
that turns death back into regenerative biological, affective, and cognitive life

afterword | 297
and ­futures that can be invested in. In worlds of precarity, many of the old
terms of politics have lost their purchase: Is the precariat the new proletariat?
Is the optimism of “­futures to invest in” what Lauren Berlant has called cruel
optimism?13
­These affective-­material shifts or movements, insofar as we can perceive
them, can also become new anthropological figures or templates for mindful
reconstruction of our very cultural and philosophical fabrics, brought to life
sometimes by graffiti and punk, transgressive defacements, and sometimes by
the ­simple exhaustion of defensiveness, hatreds, and narrow c­ auses that cannot
grow beyond themselves or be self-­sustaining, let alone allow mutualities of
self and other.
Finding good examples, case studies, and cases worth study is a second
form of zen exercise. Detachment from the world is not total indifference, but
a meta-stable position from which critique and politics can emerge—­a disci-
pline of strength; breathing deeply, reoxygenating, and expelling the toxins;
and finding ways to do so collectively, shifting the swing of the pendulum.

calligraphies

chicago

Black lives ­matter. Names animate and call to life. Adam (meaning “­human”
in Hebrew), from adamah (meaning “earth” in Hebrew), is accorded the ca-
pacity to name.14 “#Black lives m ­ atter” movements (and “taking the streets
and community back,” social reengagements yet again) grow urgent, pick-
ing up their histories again with con­temporary hashtags, mobilizing over 680
urban demonstrations since the shooting deaths of Mrs. Lana’s son Jo Jo in
Eastwood (2013); Trayvon Martin (2013); Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and
Eric Garner (2014); and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (2016). Unique
individuals carry within themselves stratified and layered histories, m ­ iddle
passages, northward migrations, deindustrializations, blues, jazz, rap, hip
hop, break dancing, footworkin’, and shooting dice. They are social hiero-
glyphs and calligraphies composed of multiple lines: category lines (“radi-
cals” in Chinese calligraphy); supple cartographic lines across multiple mi-
lieus; and lines of flight tracing desire and multiplicities of i­ magined worlds,
utopias in the now, seen other­wise. Many Dannys wear many Cooks’ boots,
not taking them off since Cook was killed (as Laurence Ralph recounts).
The cartographic radicals are not singular, exhaustive, or exclusive. Th ­ ere are
other radicals: freemen artisans, sawmill merchants, Black Atlantic seamen,

298 | michael m. j. fischer
Ca­rib­bean mi­grants, African students, intellectuals, physicians, educators,
and policemen.
It is not the individual characters (from the Greek kharassein, meaning to
engrave or scratch on the body) alone that draw attention, but also third spaces
of interpretation, writings, and reports that awkwardly help try to suture real­
ity. Marla hands police reports and therapy accounts to the ethnographer: she
­doesn’t contest t­hese reports but recognizes them as pos­si­ble interpretable
clues to what is g­ oing on in her m ­ other’s overwrought mind, her paranoia
within reason (hardly irrational, if nonetheless mentally disturbed), and her
need to warn neighbors and other community members about death, insisting
that they protect their heads with hats and duct tape. Friedrich Nietz­sche’s
hallucinatory figures (the rabble) ­were heads with atrophied bodies, dangling
insatiable intestines and genitals.15 Mrs. Lana’s figures (friends and neighbors)
are headless bodies with sounds emanating from their necks, collapsing all
around her. She is mad with anger and apparitions, aggrieved, overwrought
with concerns that her neighbors can recognize and re­spect. She is not outcast.
For all the stress on recognition and care for Mrs. Lana’s mode of being
aggrieved, Ralph narrates two more incidents, in which death at the hands of
the police is the outcome of postpartum depression or bipolar disorder. In the
latter case, ­family members called the police ­because the mentally ill ­woman
became too much for them to ­handle—­a situation not unlike Katkine’s seda-
tion and placement in a zone of abandonment.
In another work, Ralph gives us the hieroglyph of the large population
of young men in wheelchairs, casualties of gang fights, but now serving,
like Mrs. Lana, as elders working to damp down the internecine fighting.16
Their community meetings are reminders of when gangs w ­ ere community
builders—­another utopia, within memory, in t­hese very same neighbor-
hoods, self-­organizing.

mexico city

The calligraphies in Mexico City, described by Angela Garcia, are body tat-
toos and amulets of “Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (the Death Saint)”—­
“patron saint of prisoners, drug dealers and users, sex workers, victimized
­women, and Mexico’s underclass,” a “female personification of the grim reaper”
who promises “deliverance from vio­lence and a safe delivery to the afterlife.”
She is omnipresent, not only in Tepito—­a poor neighborhood of tenement
apartments and a sprawling market for pirated goods, where Magi works in
her ­family’s stall. Thousands of anexos, “informal, coercive residential treatment

afterword | 299
centers for addiction” across the city—­part haven, part therapy, part safe ­house,
part place of extreme rituals of corporal mortification and penance—­are “set
deep within other structures, like apartment buildings, commercial ware­houses,
churches, and even parking garages.” Mexico has become a land of repeated
reengagements of social protest movements (against the 1968 massacre of stu-
dents, the Zapatista social justice movement, the War on Drugs in Mexico as
both re­sis­tance and repression). Th
­ ese are all too easily enumerated, like logical
demonstrations in numbers touted by ­grand phi­los­o­phers and moralistic
­pundits—a  tactic Garcia refuses to use, while still invoking empathetically
obligatory personage-­points-­of-­passage. Garcia brings us up close to Magi,
Cabrito, and Rafa. Magi is kidnapped in open daylight, wrapped in a blanket,
and taken to an anexo to keep her out of the way of the forces that abducted her
cousin, too close for her parents’ comfort, who presumably paid for her abduc-
tion and anexo stay. Cabrito relives and recounts over and over, in vivid pres­ent
tense during the anexos’ forced self-­accounts, his failure to convince his grand­
mother to leave a war-­torn Michoacan town—­where he himself was caught
and injured, but survived a spray of bullets. Rafa is a former small drug dealer
who became addicted and spent long years in vari­ous anexos (paid for not just
by his ­mother and ex-­wife, but also by the drug organ­ization he had worked
for). He now runs an anexo, his wrists tattooed with black chains.
Calligraphy is zen par excellence: the perfect posture of holding the brush,
bringing it down in decisive strokes with the w ­ hole body, concentrating the
mind, becoming one, becoming many. Calligraphies of h­ uman lives, as noted
above, are hieroglyphs of socialities, combinations of category (radical)
lines, supple cartographic lines moving and connecting across milieus (cul-
tural genres, forms, modes of thought), and lines of flight (desire, imagina-
tion, freedom). Individual characters (she’s a piece of work, a character) are
engraved, scratched, and scarred in muscle memory, neurological reflexes,
and microbiomic assemblages, as well as on the skin. Their interpretation
unfolds in storytelling and third spaces, not in one or two consciousnesses
alone. The lines of storytelling disrupt data banks and superficial enumera-
tions; they slow ­things down; they probe into pos­si­ble motivations and the
unseen backstage preparations. They explore the pres­ent tense (Cabrito in the
anexo relives and recounts in the pres­ent tense, making what happened vivid,
reexperienced, embodied), emplot with picaresque plea­sure, and ethically
pass the collective sense of rightness from person to person, acknowledging
that no one person is always wise. Calligraphy and hieroglyphics are the zen
exercises of anthropological method.

300 | michael m. j. fischer
cannibalizing and indie-­g estion

gran chaco, paraguay

­ ere are calligraphic characters on the resource frontiers, too, as shown by

Th
Lucas Bessire: Tié with her fractured story (“I do not know my story. I do not
know what to say.”); her husband, Cutai (Bessire’s “hunting partner, the one
who gave me his first find of the day and who received mine in turn”); Aasi,
who renounced his status as a dacasute (approximately in En­glish, a “war-
rior”), becoming instead an aya-­ajingaque (glossed as a “peacemaker”) who
sang the old songs with his gourd rattle, and was a “ masterful [storyteller]
when the mood was upon him”; Aasi’s nephew, Pejei, with his susceptibility
to attacks of madness; and Rosy, whose vices keep her, she says, from becom-
ing animal. ­These figures, Bessire suggests, using Deleuze’s term, compose
a minority, “a missing p­ eople,” “always in becoming, always incomplete,” and,
says Bessire, “all too often erased from and by much philosophically oriented
anthropology.”
Bessire reads Deleuze and Félix Guattari (authors of Anti-­Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus) as phi­los­o­phers of the bipolar delirium of the Gran
Chaco, where the last of the un-­Christianized Ayoreo are hunted, ingested,
digested, and evacuated by archstate (Urstaat) paranoid Christian missionar-
ies, semantically and materially unable to allow anything or any demonic souls
to remain unincorporated.17 The indigenes, living their indie lives of “socie­
ties of refusal” (refusal of work, overwork, the state, and capitalism) give the
Urstaat indigestion.18 The last of the unconscripted, their lives in the forest
­were “haunted by memories of genocidal vio­lence and the sounds of the bull-
dozers that never stopped” and ­were consumed in the practicalities of hiding
from the violent primitive accumulation of the missionaries and Christianized
Ayoreo who hunted them. For phi­los­o­phers, they are sometimes romantically
seen, following Pierre Clastres’s 1972 Society against the State,19 as socie­ties
of “anticipation-­warding off,” as figures of utopian thought who are made to
stand in for, following Marshall Sahlins’s phrase in his essay using it as a con-
trast to wealthy but constantly scarcity calculating socie­ties,20 original “socie­
ties of affluence,” gaily living their lives of immediate expenditure, feasting and
investing in ritual.
The New Tribes missionaries and Mennonite ranchers fulfill Carl Schmit-
tian nomos of the earth of the Urstaat, the archstate’s princi­ples of land taking,
state forming, and laying down the law. The Ayoreo are told by their my­thol­
ogy that they have been through this before in their original times, when

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amoral humanoids and ­human beings differentiated themselves, and through a
number of earlier cosmic apocalyptic collapses, transformations, and renewals.
So, terrified, they become ichadie (“the New ­People”) finding their way in the
nomos of the cojñone-­gari (the strangers). Their old myths and rites have been
revalued as satanic. And their old ways have been drained of meaning by an-
thropologically illiterate monoculturalists with no understanding of, or time
for, other life-­affirming ritual pro­cesses.
This last group of Ayoreo came in from the forest in 2004, joining rela-
tives who had been hunted and Christianized in 1986 or 1979. The hunt, Bessire
notes, is “the central ritual” of t­hese Christians and of their colonizing proj­
ect. They hunt “to collect Indian souls, or ‘brown gold,’ in lands dominated by
Satan,” complete with the frisson of risky bargaining with the devil involving
them in minor sins like slavery in pursuit of a larger good of saving souls (tough
love). ­After being brought into civilization, some New ­People starve them-
selves to death, or die of ‘sadness,’ not unlike the suicides chronicled by the
anthropologists Maria de Lourdes Beldi de Alcantara and Toni Benites (him-
self a Guarani) among the Guarani of Brazil.21 ­Others suffer attacks of madness
fueled by sniffing glue or consuming alcohol, coca paste, dirt, or bricks, their
skin yellowing like that of the otherworldly iguana.
Bessire sees Ayoreo strategy as one of taking on the apocalyptic as a form
of inverted, negative life and an arduous effort to reconstitute their soul ­matter
to survive in an estranged world. The hallucinatory poesis and third space (of
the New Tribes, of the Ayereo, and of Bessire) is power­ful, disturbing, and
ravaging.
I am more persuaded by Bessire’s charge against erasure “from and by much
philosophically oriented anthropology” than by the Hegelian emphasis on
negation, however true to Deleuze and Guattari’s reworkings of nineteenth-­
century Hegelian and Marxian language for a transformed mid-­twentieth
­century Eu­ro­pean world. Guillaume Sibertin-­Blanc (and ­others) note that
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-­Oedipus originally appeared in 1968 along with
the era-defining urban explosions (“1968”) in the United States, France, and
Mexico, and along with (the slightly ­later) abandonment of the gold stan-
dard in 1971, the apparent freedom of the one being recuperated in the pro­
cesses of the latter.22 A Thousand Plateaus appeared a de­cade ­later, originally
in 1980,23 at roughly the same time as the Ira­nian revolution, the second oil
crisis, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island (all in 1979), and further free-
ing of global financialization (the Big Bang agreement in 1983 and its imple-
mentation in 1986). The hallucinatory analogies of schizo­phre­nia as coding

302 | michael m. j. fischer
the desire-­producing machine of capitalism fits the Gran Chaco ranchers as
well as they fit Eu­rope: “po­liti­cal confrontations shift into an impo­liti­cal di-
mension of vio­lence that nullifies the very possibility of conflict” (the Ayoreo
stand no chance against bulldozers and airplanes); a world capitalism destroys
all exteriority (the turning of the forest into ­cattle lands, with devastating ef-
fects on both local and global ecol­ogy); the nation-­state form is systematized
in Eu­rope ­after World War I, with “the correlated invention of the status of
minority as a ‘permanent institution’ ” (Hannah Arendt 1951), an invention that
generated so-­called ethnic wars in the 1990s and 2000s and new primitive ac-
cumulation and peripheralization within Eu­rope, as well as globally.24

são paulo

The desiring machines of con­temporary art and anthropology are, if not hallu-
cinatory (which they can be), at least recombinatory, cannibalistic, colonizing,
anthropophagic, and often allegorical. What is it that makes “Eyewitnesses,” an
installation of three eyeballs on trays in front of three portraits of the artist (as
indigene, Chinese, and African) more than a ­simple meta­phor of artist-­subject
mutual appropriation or anthropophagy? The anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz
reports that the artist Adriana Varejão appropriates her and her work (albeit
“Adriana thought she had read something in my book that ­wasn’t actually
­there”). Nonetheless, Adriana “cannibalized me and my work” in the same
way she used other sources, and Schwarcz also uses Adriana.
The egg-­shaped eyeballs open or unfold into scenes of cannibal feasting by
indigenous Tupinamba ­women, although they are painted ­here as if white like
witches ­were in sixteenth-­century France. The scenes are taken from a journal
kept by French Calvinist Jean de Léry, who lived among the Tupinamba in
the sixteenth ­century, in a blurry refraction of the Ayoreo story. Driven from
France Antartique, an island in Rio de Janeiro Bay, by French Huguenots in a
dispute over eucharistic theology, de Léry and other Calvinists took refuge
among the Tupinamba. U ­ nder the governance of Nicolas Durand, who was
given the title Chevalier de Villegaignon (and was at times a protector of, and
at times an antagonist to, Protestants), the island was a cap­i­tal­ist entrepôt
meant to export brazilwood (used in construction and to produce red dye). De
Villegaignon became frustrated by the fighting between Catholics and Protes-
tants and ­between Huguenots and Calvinists, and he expelled the Calvinists.
This play of theological and economic gazes, as Michel Foucault might say—or
mirrorings, inversions, and anthropophagies—­confounds ­simple questions of
who colonizes whom. In a similar vein, Varejã­o’s art also includes faux tiles

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signifying the trade in and revaluation of ceramics among China, Brazil, and
Portugal. ­These are lines of multiple cartographic milieus, lines perhaps even of
cultural miscegenation, producing the 136 skin tones that Brazilians list if asked
to describe themselves. The backstory of Villegaignon, intriguing on all sides,
seems to remain hidden from the eyewitnesses, although the island t­oday is
named for him. A knight of the Order of Malta, he is described by Stefan Zweig
as volatile and indulging in fantastic moods.25 Huguenots believed he was a
Catholic, while Catholics believed he was a Huguenot: “Nobody knows
which side he is serving, and he himself prob­ably ­doesn’t know much more
than that he wants to do something big.”26 Still, he would challenge Jean
Calvin to a debate over the eucharist and become an antagonist of both Cal-
vinists and Huguenots.
­After he returned to France, de Léry wrote a response to de Villegaignon’s
accusations against the Calvinists, and in his account of the Tupinambas’ can-
nibalism, de Léry spoke of the parallel anthropophagy of the Catholics’ eating
of the body and blood of Christ. The religious b­ attles raging in Eu­rope over
the eucharist, de Léry claimed, w ­ ere less palatable than the Tupinambas’ can-
nibalism. Similarly, if inversely, the Jesuit José de Anchieta, who lived with the
Tupinamba for some forty years, found their cannibalism preferable to the
heinous Calvinist denial of the literal eucharist.
What is the play of art ­doing in this instance?

new delhi

Only the pain of the Ayoreo’s dispossession, conversion, and marginalization

can match the intensity claimed by such animal protection workers as Maneka
Gandhi (and perhaps her helpers Abodh, Dipesh, and Maya), Carmelia Satija,
and Crystal Rogers (and perhaps less clearly Timmie Kumar; Erika Abrams-­
Meyers; her husband, Jim; and their ­daughter, Claire—­about all of whom we
are told too ­little by Naisargi Dave to know). The intensity ­here is directed
inward, taking the form of an obsessive unwillingness to allow complacency
in themselves rather than necessarily mobilizing ­others (albeit that mobiliza-
tion is an impor­tant by-­product of their activities). It is discipline with recogni-
tion that the work may be futile or may make only a marginal difference for a
few animals. It is a cultural genre of world renunciation and inner discipline
that is familiar in an Indian context. In this context, wearing a worn plain cot-
ton salwar kameez (tunic and trouser) makes perfect sense, just as Mahatma
Gandhi’s khadi (handspun) wrap did, but the inner devotion does not neces-
sarily prevent the devotee from wearing jewels, driving an suv, or having a

304 | michael m. j. fischer
d­ aughter studying at an Ivy League university. Maneka Gandhi’s self-­narration
stresses both the feeling of becoming a machine designed to work unrelent-
ingly and provides a biographical account of “coming to see” (the object of
animal projection, as well as the reasons to surrender the self entirely to the
cause). She stresses the machine of self-­discipline: “I only wish t­ here ­were a
slaughter­house next door. To witness that vio­lence, to hear t­ hose screams . . . ​
I would never be able to rest.”
But Dave stresses also the multiplicity, not always aligned into a singular
perspective, and even the contradictions and double binds of reasons, ratio-
nales, and functions that such life-­forms as Gandhi’s self-­discipline can entail.
First, ­there is Maneka Gandhi’s “moral biography of action and inaction,” as an
estranged member by marriage of a f­ amily of meat-­eating, animal-­protecting
politicians. While they put in place a series of animal protection mea­sures
( Jawaharlal Nehru’s Prevention of Cruelty against Animals Act and Indira
Gandhi’s Proj­ect Tiger initiative), they are also associated with the vio­lence
of sterilization campaigns. Maneka herself joined the Bharatiya Janata Party
(bjp), a Hindu fundamentalist movement that puts religious identity above
reason. And she is not above threatening opponents with vio­lence. Second,
Dave notes the morally ambiguous affective history of liberalism. It is glibly
able to substitute in the same symbolic position as needing protection a
female child or Hindu ­woman, a ­horse or other animal, thereby bolstering
the need for imperial forces (historically) or the state (­today)—­either way,
the Urstaat—in order to claim that they are protecting the vulnerable. Why
is it, Dave muses, that many of ­those claiming to advance animal protection
are also public and ostentatious meat eaters (to c­ ounter the Hindus’ exclu-
sive focus on cows? to express solidarity with Muslims?). It is the liberalism
of a country that exports more leather than any other one in Asia and that
looks the other way as slaughter­houses operate over capacity and with cru-
elty ­toward both the animals and the ­human laborers. Third, she points out,
politics makes strange bedfellows: Doordarshan, the state-­owned broadcast
ser ­v ice ­under bjp ideology, shows slaughter­house footage, filmed secretly
by animal protection activists, “an effort by the government, no doubt, to whip
up anti-­Muslim sentiment ­under the guise of compassion.”
The law in Rajasthan prevents euthanizing a ­dying cow in the name of ani-
mal (especially cow) protection, but in the face of such suffering in d­ ying, the
American Erika Abrams-­Meyers (now a resident of Udaipur) summons work-
ers one at a time or in pairs to sit with the animal, touching it and allowing it to
feel accompanied. It is perhaps the most profound example of trans-­species

afterword | 305
intimacy in Dave’s essay, surpassing the story of Crystal Rogers coming face
to face in 1959 with a ­dying h­ orse that, sensing Cyrstal, turns its head ­toward
her and shows its eyeless sockets pecked by birds, a horrifying, almost
Guernica-­like, scene. It is, however, a second­hand story that Maneka Gandhi
tells as one of her own two experiences of a call to duty and inner need; the
other is of eating meat soup while “pontificating about the treatment of ani-
mals” ­until her husband, Sanjay, unkindly pointed out the hy­poc­risy and told
her to shut up.
What is most impressive about Dave’s essay is its ability to track ­these coun-
tervailing desires and passions, justifications and reasons, and strange po­liti­cal
bedfellows, and her insistence that while she can agree with this or that, she
needs to press on to alternative pos­si­ble interpretations or other perspectives
to remain with the openness of the “moral biographies of action and inaction”
that are always, as this volume insists, “unfinished.”
Of course, the unfinishedness of moral and ethical strug­gles is also a char-
acteristic of moral genre forms such as the Mahabharata, Jain, or Islamic sto-
ries,27 or, as noted above, Benjamin’s observations about storytelling where
moral positionings pass among the characters, not residing in any one of
them.28 The fact that Dave stresses the meta­phor of skin as the membrane
of biosensing and intimacy in the world is a salutary con­temporary libidi-
nal touch, following the experiments with such terminology by Maurice
Merleau-­Ponty,29 Deleuze and Guattari,30 and Jean-­François Lyotard.31 The
fact that she stresses the importance of foreigners, such as Crystal Rogers, in
the animal rights movement, again flags an ambiguous mobile sovereignty
of global humanism (as Mariella Pandolfi has warned of global moralities
and initiatives that can displace local initiatives, understandings, and impera-
tives),32 often admirable in the personal histories of t­hose who take up its
­causes yet also ambiguous in its alliances and local implications. Thus, except
for Maneka Gandhi (a character and a calligraphy of ­great complications),
Carmelia Satija, and Timmie Kumar, Dave dismisses home-­grown animal
protection efforts as often being exclusively for cows (though Jains have bird
hospitals, as well as gaushalas [cow shelters] and panjorapors [animal hospi-
tals], that also care for other animals).
Indeed, what I read in Dave’s essay is less an ode to compassion than, firstly,
an anthropological map of moral conflicts and disagreements and, secondly,
a concern with what I have been calling calligraphies and hieroglyphs, using
camaraderies and trajectories as probes into socialities, politics, and historical
horizons.

306 | michael m. j. fischer
 ­These three or four milieus along with the two earlier ones—­Chicago,
Mexico City, Gran Chaco, Sao ­Paulo-­Rio de Janeiro, and New Delhi—­form a
set of cartographic lines, meta-stable moralities in places with connections and
affinities traceable across time and space. How do they become other­wise?
That is another exemplary zen exercise.

poisoned histories, divided cities

“No, please! Get out!” screamed Rahmi, “I ­don’t know anything! Leave this ­house at
once!” . . . ​“Ma, Mr. Nick is not a historian,” he said in a commanding tone. “He does not
want you to tell him any history.” This stopped Rahmi in her tracks, “Not a historian?”
she whispered, “But you said he was a researcher. Then what . . . ?” Anthropologist, Ma,”
replied Syahrial, “not a historian.” ­There was a long pause, and then Rahmi began to
laugh . . . ​[the] chuckle of relief . . .“I am so sorry,” she gasped, “please forgive me. I mis-
understood. I thought you ­were a historian. I was so scared.”
— nicholas long, Being Malay in Indonesia

cyprus, 2011–2012

Elizabeth Davis beautifully pairs the ancient Athenian sacred oath on pain of
death and as a condition of citizenship to not recall the fifth-­century bce civil
war with the terms of the Cyprus Committee on Missing Persons (cmp) that
forensic scientists not reveal much information about the bones they identify
from the Cypriot civil war (1963–64), which eventuated in a cease-­fire in 1974
and a population transfer. Between 1963 and 1974 a third of the Greek Cypriot
population and half the Turkish Cypriot population were displaced. In 1974
some 45,000 Turkish Cypriots moved north, and 160,000 Greek Cypriots
moved south. Indeed, although the cmp was established ­under the auspices
of the United Nations in 1981, systematic forensic work was stalled ­until 2004,
when it was agreed that such work could proceed only if it was delinked from
any f­ uture po­liti­cal settlement, and only such information as could be quan-
titatively put on standardized forms would be collected and stored, with no
narratives that might give information on ­causes, circumstances, locations,
modes of death, or likely perpetrators. Instead of such information, a ­simple
visitation with the bones, minimal funeral ceremony, return of the bones, and
counseling ­were offered to families upon receipt of the bones for burial.
The ancient Greeks, as so often, provide a mythic charter, and con­temporary
Greeks provide classic and living ritual procedures: ­after the civil war against
the Tyrants, the Erinyes (or Furies, female chthonic deities of vengeance)
­were turned into Eumenides (“seeing [only] good [Greek eu]”), and ­were

afterword | 307
given custody of the poisonous history of the civil war, and they and the citi-
zens ­were warned lest their contained rage be revealed and destroy the peace. As
Davis invokes the study by Loraux, “as guardians of dangerous knowledge, the
Eumenides ­were consigned to live with their own rage and resentment, al-
ways on the verge of wreaking vengeance and thus destroying the peace of the
city.”33 ­Women in ritual mourning, similarly, are custodians of the poisonous
knowledge of intimate affairs encoded in dreams, warned about in mourn-
ing songs, and divined in inspections of the bones. So too, in con­temporary
forensic work, the lab work—­the ­handling and preparation of the bones—is
largely ­women’s work (particularly when shown in publicity pictures), while
both ­women and men do the excavations. But such patterns are not limited to
the Mediterranean cultural area; they have cartographic resonances in other
milieus elsewhere in the aftermath of communal warfare, where histories re-
main contested. The technologies of forensic work have been shared from
Spain and Argentina to Chile, Guatemala, Bosnia-­Herzegovina, and now Cy-
prus, but the rules and dynamics of secrecy and partial revelation vary from
Bali and the Riau Islands to Beirut and Eu­rope, where often perpetrators and
victims must continue to live together. Intracommunal killings in Cyprus have
their forensic experts, too (including both Physicians for ­Human Rights and
the In-­Force Foundation), but lest communal warfare be stirred up anew, this
is rigidly separated from the cmp’s identification of the bones of intercom-
munal killings.
Indeed, Davis makes two key points in terms of this volume’s theme. First,
the goal is not so much reconciliation as becoming something dif­fer­ent in
the ­future, an openness to narrating the past and what is to come differently.
And second, the basis of politics lies in conflict, a kind of ritual pro­cess of
renewal, repeatedly enacted and then repressed through the vote that reas-
serts a collective w
­ ill. Forgetting, not transparency, is the goal. Justice (nam-
ing, punishment) is less needed for the time being than the identification and
return of bones for ­family burial.

urfa, turkey, 2011

Bridget Purcell focuses our attention on another form of historical layering

and simplification. Urfa is claimed by the local ­people to be the birthplace
of Abraham and the place where he broke the idols. The Balıklıgöl shrine—­
with its cave of Abraham (chipped at for relics by pilgrims) and pools with
sacred carp—­has been undergoing restoration since the 1990s. Shrines con-
tain densities of cultural references, and Urfa’s many prior names index some

308 | michael m. j. fischer
of ­these: Urhoi in Syriac, Urha in Armenian, Orrha in Greek, Edessa u­ nder
the Selucids, Justinopolis in Byzantine times, Ruha in Arabic, and Riha in
Kurdish. A caravan stop along the fertile crescent routes, on a tributary of the
Euphrates, it was one of the earliest of Christianized cities (363 ce). It still
has a mixed population of Turks, Arabs, and Kurds; it used to also have Jews,
Yezidis, Syriacs, and Armenians. Now instead it hosts large numbers of Shi’ite
Ira­nian pilgrims (who are neither Sunni nor Alawi, as are the Turks and Arabs
of the region).
Shrines across the M­ iddle East, South Asia, and the Muslim World have
been subject to cleansing and gentrification. Most extreme is the outright de-
struction of shrines, monuments, and other places of worship (by Wahhabis
in the Arabian peninsula, the Taliban in the Bamiyan Valley, the Islamic State
in Palmyra; by Sunni and Shiite forces at each other’s shrines in Iraq, the bjp
of the Babri Masjid in India). More common historically is the building of a
conquering religion’s mosques or churches on top of, or within, ­those of the
conquered: in Cordova, t­ here is a mosque inside the cathedral; in Jerusalem,
the Dome of the Rock is on the Jewish ­temple mount, and the Holy Sepulchre
is claimed by vari­ous Christian factions; in Istanbul, the name of the Sofia
Mosque, with its Shiite inscriptions, reveals its previous identity as a church;
and across Af­ghan­i­stan, Iran, the ­Middle East, and North Africa, mosques
have been built where Zoroastrian ­temples or Buddhist or Greek and Roman
shrines once ­were. Urban renewal and restoration more recently has cleansed
impor­tant shrines of adjoining ­houses and shops, creating green ­belts that can
be more easily policed or occasionally, as in Mecca, increasing the clutter and
congestion with high-­rise ­hotels. A fourth pro­cess, the focus of Purcell’s work,
is the exclusion of folk and heterodox practices in the name of salafi Islam (a
form of literalist fundamentalism).
Urfa sits in the contested South East Anatolia Development Proj­ect,
planned to eventually have twenty-­two irrigation dams, nineteen hydroelec-
tric power plants, and 1.8 million hectares of irrigated land, thus involving the
mass relocation and urbanization of villa­gers. Urbanization, Purcell points
out, brings a certain literacy, and literacy ­under current Islamic conditions
tends to mean (though she does not name it) salafi Islam. Urfa also sits in
the tense borderlands that contain Islamic State fighters, Kurdish militants,
and Turkish soldiers, and the area is now overfilled with half a million Syrian
refugees.
Purcell focuses our attention at the microlevel, on the stresses of cultural
change felt acutely by two w ­ omen from a Kurdish village as they visit the

afterword | 309
shrine. She delightfully analogizes their identity strug­gles to ­those of Alice in
Wonderland, becoming bigger or smaller as their frames of reference e­ ither ex-
pand to encompass vernacular practices and traces of the historical locality, or
contract to exclude folk Islam in ­favor of newly learned salafi refusals of sacred
fish or saint’s tombs. Zehra thus says she cannot explain Islamic ideas in her
native Kurdish, as she has studied the Qur­an and Islamic texts only in Turkish.
Turkish and Arabic literacy thus function both as modernization and as alien-
ation. She is married to an imam who helps enforce the unacceptability of
local practices. ­These microshifts in styles of religiosity are felt at times as em-
barrassing, constraining, or empowering, and they are reflections of broader
changes Turkey has been undergoing ­under President Recep Erdoğan.
Cyprus and Urfa are zen exercises in the mysteries of poisonous histories
and divided polities, where conflict must be contained. They form an oscil-
lating pair of changing ritualization in the con­temporary world, one in a con-
strained space of modern forensic science, the other in a transforming po­liti­cal
economy (from village to industrial irrigated agrarianism). In the interestices
of social change, religious practices cover over or contain, like Eumenides, as
much as they also cause frictions and anx­i­eties among dominating and subor-
dinated forces.
Like zen exercises, adjustments take time, repetition, mindfulness, and
discipline.

horizoning and emergent forms of life

Both ­today’s brave new worlds (worlds of precarity, climate change, big data,
and smart control systems) and t­ oday’s (Lacanian) real that periodically breaks
through the façade of daily life are coming iteratively into focus. They are
populated with calligraphies and hieroglyphs, peopled technologies, experi-
mental models, and cartographies of explorations of milieus not yet understood.
On the positive side, one thinks of President Barack Obama’s administration’s
identification and pursuit of technological “moonshots” such as the $1.5 bil-
lion initiative to explore the brain; the SunShot effort to make solar energy as
cheap as coal by 2020; the support of public-­private manned Mars missions;
the support for machine-­learning technologies; and the support for the proj­ect
of the University of California, Los Angeles, to make Los Angeles a sustainable
city by 2050.
“1968” was an impor­tant pre­de­ces­sor horizon, as ­today (2017) is a hori-
zon for ­today’s ability to foresee; and, say, notationally, 2036 (“36” in Hebrew

310 | michael m. j. fischer
is the double numerological “hai,” or double life) is one of many horizons
for the near and further f­ uture. In 1960, updated in 1968, we get the Fischer
(Mercury) Ellipsoid, a new geodetic world datum,34 following on the 1957–
58 International Geophysical Year, a breakthrough collaboration across Cold
War lines. In 1968, from the first manned Moon orbiter, Apollo 8, William
Anders takes the color earthrise photo that becomes an icon of a new phase
of planetary environmental concern; in 1969, Apollo 11 lands Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. The first models of general circulation of the
atmospheric climate combining oceanic and atmospheric pro­cesses ­were de-
veloped in the late 1960s. The International Biological Program (1964–75),
with prominent collecting of blood and other biological ­human samples
in Brazil and New Guinea for ge­ne­tic mapping (and discovery of prions
from the deadly “laughing disease” kuru in New Guinea) ­were precursors
to t­oday’s genomics revolutions.35 And in oceanography, the International
Ocean Discovery Program began with Proj­ect Mohole (1961) and the Deep
Sea Drilling Proj­ect (1968–83) that continues t­ oday as the Integrated Ocean
Drilling Program.
As Petryna beautifully lays out, ­today’s uncertainties about the ­future
emerge from such modeling efforts to gain a purchase on how the world is
changing around us. The dates 1968, 2017, and 2036 are, of course, arbitrary,
but as a series they register a certain speed of transformations: in pervasive
technologies, migration patterns, types of conflict, and awareness of the fragil-
ity of forms of life. Perhaps most unnerving is the unconsciousness of vari­ous
forms of the real that are not available, or only partially available, to ordinary
perception and, even then, only if one knows how to interpret the clues—­air
pollution, for instance, is partially available to sight in smog and to the lungs
in asthma; and browning gardens ­after petrochemical plant flaring is an indi-
cation of toxic soils and air. Stephen Meyer divides the changing biodiversity
of the globe into three categories: so-­called weedy species comfortable living
with ­humans (cockroaches, coyotes, raccoons, and other plants and animals
evolved or adapted to high disturbance areas); relic or boutique species that
we allow to live in managed enclaves (such as grizzly bears and elephants) but
­will never again have stable ecological niches; and ghost species that seem to
be around but have passed the point of ecological collapse.36
Petryna’s examples are somewhat more hopeful, focused on efforts to
model and respond in the meantime, the now and near ­future. We are, she says,
already breathing air with 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (co 2),
above the safe level of 350 ppm, though t­here’s a way to go for catastrophic

afterword | 311
effects. A salesman for monitors tells her that at 1,500 ppm, one begins to see
the effects on the per­for­mance of schoolchildren; and 5,000 ppm for workers,
who at that level experience narcosis and metabolic stress. Still, Petryna points
out, “occupational specialists, deep-­sea divers, submarine engineers, and even
anesthesiologists have long known the incremental risks of atmospherically
compromised settings.” About a third of all co 2-­offsetting reservoirs are al-
ready saturated. What draws her attention, and should draw ours, are the
efforts of firefighters like Bill Armstrong to understand the physics of new
phenomena of plasma-­like fires that are unlike the worst natu­ral firestorms of
the past (excluding the fire-­bombing of cities in World War II), of time-­lapse
photog­raphers like James Balog to capture the kinetics of rapidly melting gla-
ciers, of lake ecologists like John Magnuson and Stephen Carpenter to show
that lakes suffering hypoxia (oxygen depletion) due to fertilizer runoff and
industrial chemical dumping do not return over time to earlier equilibria for
supporting life merely when the sources of pollution are cut off. Instead they go
through phase transitions to new states, perhaps modeled best by the mathe­
matics of chaos theory.
­These new realities include more nuclear irradiated environments (Han-
ford, Oregon; Chernobyl, Ukraine; southern Belarus; and parts of Fukushima,
Japan) and toxic landscapes full of hormone disrupters (from shale oil and gas
fracking). Too often in the past such realities have been denied, preventing the
kind of learning that we now w ­ ill depend on. Of par­tic­ul­ar interest to Petryna
is the work of Steven Pacala and Robert Socolow in modeling the time we have
left and the costs associated with putting off remediation. They provide sche-
matic timetables of the costs and consequences of inaction. As time goes by,
shifting ratios of costlier strategies (called in the field “wedge stabilization”)
­will be required.
The effort and logic ­here, as Petryna explains, is one of modeling horizons
and tipping points, a­ fter which dif­fer­ent combinations of resources and reme-
diations ­will be required. Horizons, such as self-­coordinated, balance-­seeking
equilibria of the earth (also called Gaia models), are meta-­stable objects, mov-
ing, receding, characterized by recursive modeling, and pushing current un-
derstandings beyond their limits, or seeing as one says colloquially, “over the
horizon.” Models of temporary plateaus of semistabilized biochemicophysical
interactions may allow for presumptively time-­sensitive, but psychosocially
calming, ethical mobilization and time for politics, persuasion, and discovering
new options in material sciences, nanotechnology, undersea living, off-­planet
colonies, and other unexplored milieus.

312 | michael m. j. fischer
 Horizons, Petryna says, constitute what Magnuson calls “meso-­spaces of
experimental time,” and their modelers are new kinds of scientists, experi-
mentalists, and even, she suggests what Magnuson calls, “seers.” Horizons are
zen objects and exercises of deep consequence. Discussing the distant ­future,
she cites James Hansen, who “published a study on the atmospheric space of
Venus, 97 ­percent of which is co2. Through a careful analy­sis of the composi-
tion of its surrounding molecules and dust, Hansen found that Venus may be
“the ancient relic of a planet that looked like Earth billions of years ago.” Thus,
Venus could be one of the f­utures for the Earth. In the meantime, she cites
Svante Arrhenius among ­those who would rather think about shorter time-
frames, such as the scenario of global warming that would make the Arctic
available for agriculture (as well as oil drilling). Horizons are not singular, and
they involve choices and actions as well as multiple scenarios and modeling
efforts, requiring us to bring our best scientific instruments and minds to bear
on prob­lems that at best have solutions in the ­future.

unfinished exercises and lifelines

From pressures and anx­i­eties on all sides, anthropological exercises incre-

mentally trace and illuminate new category lines (“radicals” in Chinese cal-
ligraphy), cartographic lines across multiple milieus, and lines of flight tracing
desire and multiplicities of ­imagined worlds, utopias in the now that are seen
other­wise and made newly pos­si­ble with a push ­here, a shove ­there. In this
sense, anthropologists are like artists: repetitive motions of drawing put one
into meditative zones, emerging again and again for an analytic and evalua-
tive gaze; ­whole body rhythms (of sculpting, printmaking, or painting) move
resistant stone, wood, and metal into new shapes. So, too, the anthropologist
attempts to access and draw out the forces and turbulences within third spaces
beyond dualistic antagonisms and simplistic causal linear arguments.37 The
anthropologist repairs and compares, always using more than two cases, more
than two dimensions, and more than two axes of comparison and contrast—­
shifting, adjusting, creating redesigns, new configurations, and new insights
from ethnographic details, emic categories, tropes, and genres.
When politics freezes into black and white and is locked in place, it is often
helpful to have some artwork38 or anthropological ethnography to break the
frame, reshuffle the pieces, and remind us that t­ here is more g­ oing on; t­ here are
more ways to look at ­things; and from a certain (zen) point of view, the ­human
comedy is as absurd as it is beautiful and inspired. If one can get on into the

afterword | 313
right swing and find the right point of leverage, the pendulum can move just
a bit; the punctum or flash of insight39 can allow us to see the world other­wise,
and how ­little pieces of it can be reworked in the ­here and now. The gift of an-
thropology is a way (Chinese dao, as in zen exercises) of getting to know p­ eople
in situ rather than in a planning document or a statistical ­table. It is a way of
generating other planning documents, other statistical t­ ables. Getting to know
­people in situ can change the tone, the structure of feeling, and the understand-
ing. In all the discussions about climate warming, capitalism’s not having an
outside, and the like, a consensus seems to be emerging that all we can ­really
do is try to live on—­su-­vive, to use a Derridian term.40 That means we must try
to get the ethnographic sensorium, as Biehl and Locke put it in the introduc-
tion, to function as a way finder. Pebbles and labyrinths of h­ uman interactions
(and subjectivities that are raucous terrae incognitae, raucous ­because the un-
conscious and subjectivities are often zones of conflict and turmoil) cannot be
swept out of the way, but they can be pieced together into new theories (ways
of seeing), open to new relations (camaraderies and trajectories), mobilizing
cartographies for social reengagements, and deploying tool boxes of varied
swerves or tropes across time and space. In that work, the essays in this volume
are exemplary: they are intensive points of beginning and so also unfinished,
engaging equally unfinished lives and social forms of life.

notes
1 See the essays in M. M. J. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological
Voice.
2 See M. M. J. Fischer, Anthropological ­Futures, 235–37 and 246.
3 The resonance is with the eleventh thesis from Karl Marx’s “­Theses on Feuerbach”: “The
phi­los­o­phers have only interpreted the world, in vari­ous ways; the point is to change
it” (13). In addition, the sentence is meant to resonate with concerns with writing and
other media of anthropological intervention, from James Clifford and George Marcus’s
Writing Culture on. See especially M. M. J. Fischer, “The Peopling of Technologies” and
“Time, Camera and the Digital Pen.”
4 See also M. M. J. Fischer, “The Peopling of Technologies.”
5 See K. Fortun, “Ethnography in/of/as Open Systems.”
6 I adopt the term accompaniers from the work of Paul Farmer and Partners in Health,
who use it to advocate for active participation in helping patients maintain commitment
through serious side effects of medi­cation.
7 Deleuze and Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z.
8 M. M. J. Fischer, Anthropological ­Futures, and “Repetitions in the Revolution.”

314 | michael m. j. fischer
 9 Behrouzan, Prozak Diaries.
10 M. M. J. Fischer, “Ethnography for Aging Socie­ties.”
11 Benjamin, “­Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
12 Behrouzan, Prozak Diaries.
13 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
14 Genesis 2:19–20. In the Qur­an, Adam is made from “sounding clay” (Sureh 15).
15 Nietz­sche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The tropes and hallucinatory imagery are in­ter­est­ing
­here, deployed differently across communities that need constructive po­liti­cal agency
and activation. Nietz­sche’s power­ful imagery, intended to rouse ­people from habits and
to make them be active in shaping their lives, in the section “Of Redemption” in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, was taken up by many other writers, including the Ira­nian modern-
ist Sadegh Hedayat, when he describes the cowed “rabble—­all identical, their ­faces
expressing greed or money and sex, constructed ‘only of a mouth and a wad of guts
hanging from it’ ” (The Blind Owl, 73). In Nietz­sche, Zarathustra sees “an ear as big as a
man! . . . ​[U]nder the ear t­ here moved . . . ​a thin stalk—­the stalk, however, was a man!
By the use of a magnifying glass one could even discern a l­ittle envious face . . . ​a turgid
­little soul was dangling from the stalk. The ­people told me, however, that the ­great ear . . . ​
was a genius. But I have never believed the p­ eople when they talked about g­ reat men—­
and I held to my belief that it was an inverse cripple, who had too ­little of every­thing and
too much of one ­thing” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 160).
16 Ralph, Renegade Dreams.
17 Urstaat is a term from Carl Schmitt that Deleuze and Guattari use to think about the
power and apparatuses under­lying all forms of the state.
18 Socie­ties of refusal is a term from Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, who
wrote of the Amazonian Indians not as pre­de­ces­sors to sedentarization and the state,
but as ­those who are marginalized by the state and who actively refuse to be incorpo-
rated by it.
19 Clastres, Society against the State.
20 Sahlins, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.”
21 See Beldi de Alcantara, Jouvens indigenas e lugares de pentencimentos; Lyons, “A Brazilian
Tribe’s Suicide Epidemic.”
22 Sibertin-­Blanc, State and Politics. See also Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus.
23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
24 Sibertin-­Blanc, State and Politics, 14–15.
25 Zweig, Brazil.
26 Zweig, Brazil, 43.
27 M. M. J. Fischer, “Urban Mahabharata.”
28 Benjamin, Illuminations.
29 Merleau-­Ponty, The Vis­i­ble and the Invisible.
30 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus, and A Thousand Plateaus.
31 Lyotard, Libidinal Economy.
32 See Fassin and Pandolfi, Con­temporary States of Emergency; Pandolfi, “Contract of Mu-
tual (In)difference.”

afterword | 315
 33 Loraux, The Divided City.
34 See I. Fischer, Geodesy? What’s That?
35 See Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls; M. M. J. Fischer, “In the Science Zone,” and
“In the Science Zone II.”
36 Meyer, The End of the Wild, 7–14.
37 On third spaces, see M. M. J. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological
Voice.
38 I have been working on a series of essays with artists about their artworks, reading their
art anthropologically and as cultural critique. Older pieces w ­ ere done with the Polish
film­maker Maria Zmarz-­Koczanowicz (M. M. J. Fischer, “Filming Poland”), and the
American printmaker Eric Avery (M. M. J. Fischer, “With a Hammer, a Gouge and a
Wood Block”). As yet unpublished pieces are with the Iranian-­American painter Parviz
Yashar, the Indonesian artist Entang Wiharso, and the Singaporean videographer and
photographer Charles Lim. Their work informs ­these paragraphs.
39 The poetics h­ ere resonate with Walter Benjamin’s “aufblitzen” and “illumination” (Illumi-
nations) and with Roland Barthes’s “punctum” (Camera Lucida): the accident or detail
in a photo­graph that jars one into an appreciation that is dif­fer­ent from the staging or
intention of the ­photographer.
40 Su-­viv means not just to survive (bare life) but culturally to “live on.” It also refers to the
spectral “­after life” or “super life,” the “self contestatory attestation [that] keeps the com-
munity alive, i.e., open to something other and more than itself,” “messianicity beyond
any messianism” (Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87).

316 | michael m. j. fischer
 Acknowl­edgments

“The blank page ­won’t let me dream,” the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo
Neto writes: “It incites me to clear and exact poetry. . . . ​Not the form found, like a
seashell, lost . . . ​not the form obtained by a lucky or divine throw . . . ​but the form
attained like the end of a skein, which the spider of careful attention unrolls; like
the furthest point of that fragile thread, inevitably snapped by the weights of huge
hands. Mineral, the paper used for poetry, the poetry it is pos­si­ble not to write.”1
Thank you to all who have helped make this book pos­si­ble.
Unfinished grew out of essay drafts and discussions generated at a work-
shop held at Prince­ton University in March 2014 on the anthropology of be-
coming. The workshop, in turn, was sparked by our 2010 article “Deleuze and
the Anthropology of Becoming” and the fruitful exchanges it inspired with
colleagues and students in subsequent years, including panels at the annual
meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 2010 and 2014. In
the workshop, we returned to that article and our ongoing field engagements
to continue to explore productive tensions between ethnography and criti-
cal theory, and over the intervening years we exchanged drafts of essays with
workshop participants and brought o­ thers into the conversation. The power­
ful work of the artist Adriana Varejão has been an inspiration to all of us, and
we are honored to be able to include her art in the book. Many ­people have
heard or read bits and pieces of the book’s essays throughout the years, and we
thank them for their generous and insightful rejoinders.
Special thanks are due to Naomi Zucker, a trea­sure beyond compare, whose
brilliant thinking, sharp editing, and unwavering support have been absolutely
essential at e­ very stage of this proj­ect. We wish her a wondrous anthropological
journey as she continues her doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our academic institutions have been indispensable sources of support
and stimulation, both material and intellectual, and we thank the faculty, staff,
and students of the departments and programs we are part of: at Prince­ton
University, the Department of Anthropology, the Global Health Program, the
Center for Health and Wellbeing, the Program in Latin American Studies,
and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; and at
Northwestern University, the Program in Global Health Studies, the Depart-
ment of Anthropology, and the Buffett Institute for Global Studies. At Prince­
ton, special thanks are due to the Committee on Research in the Humanities
and Social Sciences for publication subvention. We also wish to thank Jes-
sica Cooper, Sebastián Ramirez, and De’Sean Weber for their indispensable
editorial assistance. Thanks also to the participants in the Princeton seminars
Anthropology of Becoming (2014), Peopling Critical Theory (2014), and
Keywords in Anthropology ­Today (2016) for their critical insights.
At Duke University Press, we have been most fortunate to be able to count
on Ken Wissoker’s luminous thinking and visionary editorial guidance at ­every
step and turn. We are grateful to Duke’s editorial staff, particularly Susan
Albury, Matt Tauch, Chris Robinson, and Maryam Arain, for taking the best
pos­si­ble care of this proj­ect. We also wish to w­ holeheartedly thank the book’s
two anonymous reviewers for their close and generous reading, extraordinarily
insightful feedback, and creative suggestions, which we have integrated to the
best of our ability into the final manuscript.
The essay “The Anthropology of Becoming” is an extensively revised and
updated version of our article “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming,”
published in Current Anthropology 51 (3) (2010): 317–51 (with comments and
a reply). Naisargi N. Dave’s essay “Witness” is a revised version of her article
“Witness: ­Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming,” published in Cul-
tural Anthropology 29 (3) (2014): 433–56. Lilia M. Schwarcz’s essay “I Was Can-
nibalized by an Artist” draws from her collaboration with Adriana Varejão for
the book Pérola imperfeita: A história e as histórias na obra de Adriana Varejão (Co-
bogó, 2014). We are grateful to the wondrous Francis Alÿs for the film still from his
creative video proj­ect Reel/Unreel that graces the cover of Unfinished. The estate of
Alice Neel and the David Zwirner Gallery generously allowed us to include the ar-
resting painting James Hunter Black Draftee in the book’s opening pages.
Our biggest debt is to our families and our interlocutors in the field who
continue to shape us and to the books we love reading. Thank you!

note
1 Cabral de Melo Neto, Education by Stone, 27.

318 | acknowl­e dgments
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This page intentionally left blank
 Contributors

lucas bessire is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Oklahoma. He is the author of the award-­winning book Behold the Black Cai-
man: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (2014), director of the films Asking Ayahai:
An Ayoreo Story and From Honey to Ashes, and creator of the Ayoreo Video
Project. He is currently working on a literary echnography of ground water
and responsibility on the High Plains.

joão biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Woodrow

Wilson School Faculty Associate at Prince­ton University. He is the codirec-
tor of Prince­ton’s Global Health Program. Biehl is the author of the award-­
winning books Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (2005, updated 2013)
and ­Will to Live: aids Therapies and the Politics of Survival (2007). He coedited
the books When ­People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health (with Adri-
ana Petryna, 2013) and Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (with Byron
Good and Arthur Kleinman, 2007). Biehl is also the coeditor of the book se-
ries Critical Global Health (with Vincanne Adams) at Duke University Press.

naisargi n. dave is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University

of Toronto. Her award-­winning book, Queer Activism in India: A Story in the
Anthropology of Ethics (Duke University Press, 2012) explores the relationship
among queer politics, activism, and affect. Her second book, The Social Skin:
­Humans and Animals in India, engages critically with humanism and the privi-
leging of reason to consider myriad facets of working with and for urban and
working animals in India.

elizabeth  a. davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Prince­

ton University, in association with the Program in Hellenic Studies. Her
award-­winning book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece
(Duke University Press, 2012), explores humanitarian psychiatric reform in
the borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently writing a new
book addressing knowledge production about the violent conflicts of the
1960s–1970s in Cyprus, in the domains of forensic science, documentary film,
and “conspiracy theory.”

angela garcia is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford Univer-

sity. She is the author of the award-­winning The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and
Dispossession along the Rio Grande (2010), an ethnographic study of intergen-
erational heroin use, historical loss, and the ethics of care in northern New
Mexico. Garcia is currently engaged in ethnographic research on the intersec-
tion of criminal and therapeutic vio­lence within coercive treatment centers
for drug addiction in Mexico City.

peter locke is Assistant Professor of Instruction in Global Health Studies

and Anthropology at Northwestern University. Locke has conducted field-
work in Bosnia-­Herzegovina, where he explored psychosocial support ser­
vices for poor families living in postwar Sarajevo, and in Sierra Leone, where
he studied medical humanitarian interventions in collaboration with a small
community healthcare organ­ization. He established and directs Northwest-
ern’s summer academic program on comparative public health and post-
conflict studies in the former Yugoslavia, based in Belgrade and Sarajevo. His
work has appeared in the book Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of
Practice (2015) and in the journals Current Anthropology and Intergraph: Jour-
nal of Dialogic Anthropology.
michael m. j. fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities
and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at mit,
and a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at
Harvard Medical School. His books include Anthropological ­Futures (2009),
the award-­winning Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (2003),
Anthropology as Cultural Critique (with George E. Marcus, 1986, 1999), Mute
Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges (2004), Debating Muslims: Cul-
tural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (with Mehdi Abedi, 1990), and
Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (1999). He is the editor (with Byron
Good, Sarah Willen, and Mary-­Jo DelVecchio Good) of A Medical Anthro-
pology Reader: Theoretical Trajectories and Emergent Realities (2010). Fischer is
the coeditor of the book series Experimental ­Futures (with Joseph Dumit) at
Duke University Press.

354 | contributors
adriana petryna is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor
in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the
award-­winning books Life Exposed: Biological Citizens ­after Chernobyl (2002,
updated 2013) and When Experiments Travel: Clinical T ­ rials and the Global
Search for ­Human Subjects (2009). She coedited Global Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals:
Ethics, Markets, Practices (with Andrew Lakoff and Arthur Kleinman, Duke
University Press, 2007) and When ­People Come First: Critical Studies in Global
Health (with João Biehl, 2013).

bridget purcell is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of An-

thropology at Rutgers University. Her research interests include Islam, urban
anthropology, and the ethical and experiential dimensions of state power.
She is currently at work on her first book manuscript, titled “The City That
Hides Itself: Turkish Geographies of the Other­wise,” based on ethnographic
research in a Turko-­Syrian border city. Her work has appeared in the journal
City & Society.

laurence ralph is Professor of African and African American Studies and

Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of the award-­winning
book Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014), and
he has published articles in Anthropological Theory, Disability Studies Quarterly,
Transition, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. As an Andrew
Car­ne­gie Fellow, he is currently studying policing, gun vio­lence, and public
mobilization in Chicago.

lilia  m. schwarcz is Professor of Anthropology at the University of São

Paulo and a Visiting Professor at Prince­ton University. The author of numer-
ous award-­winning books in Portuguese, her books in En­glish include Spec-
tacle of Races: Scientists, Institutions and Racial Theories in Brazil at the End of
the XIXth ­Century (1999) and The Emperor’s Beard: D. Pedro II, a Tropical King
(2004). Her recent books in Portuguese include Brasil: Uma Biografia (2015),
Pérola Imperfeita: A História e as Histórias de Adriana Varejão (2014), Histórias
Mestiças (2016) and Lima Barreto: Triste visionário (2017).

contributors | 355
This page intentionally left blank
 List of Illustrations

plate 0.1 Alice Neel (American, 1900–1984), James Hunter Black Draftee, 1965. Oil on can-
vas. 60 × 40 in. (152.4 × 101.6 cm). comma Foundation, Belgium. © The Estate of Alice Neel.

figure 9.1 rcp Scenario Atmospheric co2 Concentrations, in Dana Nuccitelli, “A Glimpse

at Our Pos­si­ble ­Future Climate, Best to Worst Case Scenarios,” SkepticalScience, Febru-
ary 13, 2013. Accessed February 23, 2017. http://­skepticalscience​.­com​/­climate​-­best​-­to​-­worst​
-­case​-­scenarios​.­html.

figures 9​.­2 , 9.3, and 9.4 Stills from Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice, showing retreating ice
at Columbia Glacier, Alaska.

figure 9.5 Regime shift curve, from Marten Scheffer, Steve Carpenter, Jonathan A. Foley,
et al., “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems.” Nature 413 (October 11, 2001): 591–96. doi:
10.1038/35098000.

figure 11.1 Catarina’s tombstone, Novo Hamburgo, 2011. Photo by Torben Eskerod.

figure 11.2 The ­sisters on Facebook, 2015.

figure 11.3 Andrea’s photo­graph of the ethnographic memorial, 2015.

figure 11.4 Adriana, Adriano, and Andrea, 2016. Photo by João Biehl.

plate 1 Adriana Varejão, Varal [Rack], 1993. Oil on canvas. Photo by Eduardo Ortega,
Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 2 Adriana Varejão, Parede com incisões à la Fontana [Wall with incisions à la Fon-
tana], 2000. Oil on canvas and polyurethane on aluminum and wood support. Photo by
Eduardo Ortega, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 3 Adriana Varejão, O sedutor [The seducer], 2004. Oil on canvas. Photo by Eduardo
Ortega, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 4 Adriana Varejão, Proposta para uma catequese—­Parte I (díptico): Morte e es-
quartejamento [Proposal for a catechesis—­Part I diptych: Death and dismemberment],
1993. Oil on canvas. Photo by Eduardo Ortega, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.
plate 5 Adriana Varejão, Proposta para uma catequese—­Parte II (díptico): Aparição e
relíquias [Proposal for a catechesis—­Part II diptych: Apparition and relics], 1993. Oil on
canvas. Photo by Eduardo Ortega, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plates 6–11 Adriana Varejão, details from Testemunhas Oculares X, Y e Z [Eyewitnesses

x, y and z], 1997. Oil on canvas, porcelain, photography, silver, glass, and iron. Photo by
Eduardo Ortega, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 12 Adriana Varejão, Prato com mariscos [Plate with clams], 2011. Oil on fiberglass
and resin. Photo by Vicente de Mello, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 13 Adriana Varejão, Mãe d’Água [­Water deity], 2009. Oil on fiberglass and resin.
Photo by Jaime Acioli, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 14 Adriana Varejão, Tintas Polvo [Octopus ink], 2013. Mixed media. Photo by Vicente
de Mello, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 15 Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I [Seascape series], 2014. Oil on canvas. Photo by
Jaime Acioli, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 16 Adriana Varejão, Em segredo [Secretly], 2003. Oil on canvas and sculpture in
resin. Photo by Vicente de Mello, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 17 Adriana Varejão, Cadernos de viagem: Yãkoana [Travel log: Yãkoana], 2003. Oil on
linen. Photo by Patrick Gries, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 18 Adriana Varejão, Éden [Eden], 1992. Oil on wood. Photo by Vicente de Mello,
Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

plate 19 Adriana Varejão, Mapa de Lopo Homem II [Map of Lopo Homem II], 1992–2004.
Oil on wood with suture thread. Photo by Jaime Acioli, Acervo Atelier Adriana Varejão.

358 | list of illustrations
 Index

Page references followed by f indicate an illustrated figure or photo­graph.

Aasi (Ayoreo ­people), 201–2, 203 Agamben, Giorgio, 152, 158

abandoned: Biehl on pedagogical role in reha- Ahmed, Sara, 158
bilitation by the, 285; Brazil’s new rule of law “Air War and Lit­er­a­ture” (Sebald), 261
making citizens out of, 285–86 Akineton (biperiden), 1, 45
abandonment: Brazil’s institutionalized zones of, Alice in Wonderland (character), 135, 148
52–53; Catarina’s ­daughter Ana (Andrea de Altamir (Catarina’s ­brother), 54, 61
Lima) reconnecting ­after, 1, 279, 281–84; Ca- Ana. See Lima, Andrea de (Catarina’s ­daughter)
tarina’s narration on her story of, 1, 10, 17, 30, 41, Anatolia (Turkey): dispute over Armenian geno-
44–45, 46, 51–55, 58–65. See also ­family bonds cide history of, 233–35; Smyrna (now Izmir)
Abécédaire interviews (Deleuze), 273 burning [1923] in, 233–34, 235
Abodh (Welfare for Stray Dogs director) Anchieta, José de, 304
[India], 156 Anders, William, 311
Abraham (Old Testament), 133 Andrade, Oswald de, 174, 194
Abrams-­Meyers, Claire, 162–63, 304 anexos residential centers (Mexico): Bar Heav-
Abrams-­Meyers, Erika, 162, 163–64, 166, 304, ens mass kidnapping (2013) and increased
305–6 residents in, 123–24; coercive nature of addic-
Abrams-­Meyers, Jim, 162, 304 tion treatment at, 118; description of the wide-
accompaniers on lifelines, 295, 314n6 spread, 118–19; folding together vio­lence and
accountability and “response-­ability,” 28 religion, 25, 121–22, 126; forced testimonies
Adam and Eve story, 281 central to therapeutic programs of, 119, 121–22,
addiction centers. See anexos residential centers 129n35; kidnappings engaged in by, 124–27;
(Mexico) utopia suggested as potential real­ity by, 127;
adornment of dead, 229 zen exercise on living with, 295, 299–300. See
Adorno, Theodor, 12 also Grupo Centro (Mexico City)
Adriana (Catarina’s ­daughter), 289f, 289–91 Animal Birth Control program (India), 155
Adriano (Catarina’s son), 284–85, 289–91, 295 animals: animal activism po­liti­cal engagement
affective-­material shifts, 297–98 between ­humans and, 152–53; cow protection
African Americans: #BlackLivesMatter as (gauseva) in India, 153–54; Derrida on ­human
response to devalued black lives of, 22, 98–99, action on behalf of, 167n8; epige­ne­tic field’s
273, 298; Butler’s theory of grief to understand understanding of evolution of, 14; Friendi-
systematic dehumanization of, 12, 28, 95, 122; coes animal shelter (India) for, 155; Idgah
“I Am a Man” radical becoming in Memphis slaughter­house (New Delhi) vio­lence against,
(1968), 165. See also Eastwood neighborhood 159–60; the Levinasian, 157–58; multispecies
(Chicago) ethnography on the ­human, material, and,
animals (continued) 135–36; limited lit­er­a­ture on shifting ritual
14–16; Nadasdy on gift of itself to hunter landscape in, 134–35; Turkish “orthodoxiza-
by, 169n52; witnessing as an intimate event tion” of local religiosity, 137–38. See also Islam
followed by becoming an, 160–64; witnessing anthropophagy (symbolic consumption), 175,
the vio­lence against, 156–64. See also Indian 194
animal activism Anti-­Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 301, 302
Anthropocene epoch, 13–14, 259 Apollo 8 (1968), 311
anthropology: bastardized indigenous subject Apollo 17 “blue marble” Earth photo­graph
often erased by philosophically oriented, 200; (1972), 258
conditions leading to incompleteness of un- Appadurai, Arjun, 16
derstanding in, 7–8; and critical theory, 11–13; Apocrypha, 281
Deleuze’s exchanges between philosophy and, “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolor of Brazil), 190
7–10, 17, 47; humanism as the foundation of, Arab Spring, 22, 273
16–17; impact on becomings by concepts and archaeological excavations: becoming h­ uman
theories of, 30–31; Marcus’s assessment of through Cyprus’s forensic, 220, 226–31; public
intellectual health of, 48–49; as science of the criticism of cmp’s, 225–26; revealing time
Other, 193; subjectivities as terrae incognitae machines of moment of a death, 219–20; un-
for inquiry of, 57 derstanding how they destroy culture, 224–25.
anthropology of becoming: on categories See also history
impor­tant to ­human experience, 43–44; Archaeological Museum (Nicosia, Cyprus), 224
commitment to ethnographic empiricism Argentina: Argentine Forensic Anthropology
by, 7, 47–51; crafting stories from instances Team of, 221; ­Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
of, 29–33; ethnographic reclaiming it from in, 222
philosophical uses, 212–13, 214n30; ethno- Armenian genocide: ­legal and historic dispute
graphic sensorium of moments and stories over the, 234–35; Smyrna (now Izmir) burn-
of, 1–3; examining the Eastwood neighbor- ing [1923], 233–34, 235
hood experience as, 96, 109n7; experiences Armstrong, Bill, 247, 248, 312
of time, space, and desire dimension of, 6; Arrhenius, Svante, 263, 313
how anthropological concepts have impacted, Arsenijević, Damir, 232, 235, 238–39, 270, 271,
30–31; illuminating crossroads of assemblage, 272
79–80; informed by Deleuze’s work, 7–10, art: as both object of knowledge and material
14, 42, 62, 148, 199, 213, 240n11; moving from object, 178–82; cannibalization and coloniza-
judgment to constructive questions on, 32–33; tion in, 2, 174–75, 182–94, 303; cultural context
plasticity dimension of, 3–6, 22–23; power of lending meaning of, 179; customs, values, and
art invoking ­human potential by, 84; revela- symbols impacted by material objects and,
tions from disseminating evidence with other 16; ekphrasis (images in words), 192; exploring
disciplines, 81–84; the unknown dimension multiple meanings of, 16, 174–78; learning
of, 6–7. See also becomings; zen exercises from Adriana Varejão about, 16, 173–78;
anthropology of disability: Chicago’s Eastwood reconciling writing and, 178; social life and
neighborhood study, 29, 94–107, 109n5, relations framing, 179–80; as system of action,
298–99; how digital technologies impact the, 180. See also images
24; humanitarian psychiatry and psycholo- “Art as a Cultural System” (Geertz), 179
gization of postwar BiH study, 45–47, 65–81, artistic objects: customs, values, and symbols
295–97; Mexican anexos residential treatment impacting, 16; Gell on the nature of, 180–81;
centers study, 25, 118–27, 129n35, 299–300. See “inferential criticism” of, 181–82; as object of
also medicalization; psychiatric rationality; knowledge, 178–79
Vita (Brazil) Asai (Ayoreo ­people), 3
anthropology of Islam: individuals orient- assemblages: anthropology of becomings as
ing themselves in shifting ritual landscape, illuminating crossroads of, 79–80; Bosnia-­

360 | index
 Herzegovina as an, 79; as concretization of Bachelard, Gaston, 54
power, desire, of territoriality, 55–56; expres- Baer, Alejandro, 222
sions of the collective, 80 balance of nature theory: equilibria association
Athens (403 bce): comparing modern Cyprus with, 252–56; reliance on “extensity,” 254
reconciliation and amnesty of, 236–37, 307; Balikligöl ritual center (Urfa, Turkey): Kadir
Thirty Tyrants amnesty granted by, 236 Gecesi (Night of Power) celebrated in, 133,
ayipie (soul ­matter), 202 140–41; poetic density of overlapping ritual
Ayoreo Cojñone-­Gari aftermath: Aasi’s story on space of, 138–41; politics of purification
living through the, 201–2, 203; drunkenness practiced in, 141–43, 149n28; restoration (late
and substance abuse increase during, 210–11; 1990s) of, 133–34, 137, 142–43; zen elementary
evangelical missionary proj­ect and ethnocide exercise on becoming of, 308. See also Urfa
­after, 204–8; reclaiming capacity of becoming ritual space
in, 201; of the 2004 contact with Ayoreo Balog, James, 248, 312
­people, 197–98, 201–3; urusoi (madness) Bar Daisan, 140
experience ­after the, 208–10 Bar Heavens mass kidnapping (Mexico City,
Ayoreo negative becoming: affirmative negation 2013), 123–24, 125, 126, 127
beginnings of, 201–3; anthropologic of be- Barroso, Ary, 190
coming study of the, 3, 11; bastard delirium of Barton Fink (Connolly), 220
colonial subjection and, 201–8, 211; dehuman- bastard delirium: of Ayoreo’s colonial subjec-
ization of, 211–13; examining the pro­cess of, tion, 201–8, 211; Deleuze on becoming
201–13; missionary ethnocide role in, 204–8, through experience of, 199–200; Tié as
302; reclaiming capacity through affirmative indigenous subject experiencing, 200
rupture with past, 203–4 Bataille, Georges, 31, 207–8, 212
Ayoreo ­people (Paraguay): Aasi of the, 201–2, Bateson, Gregory, 13
203; cannibalizing and indie-­gestion zen Baxandall, Michael, 178, 181, 182, 192
exercise, 295, 301–3; conflict between outside Bay of Funday mari­ners (Canada), 260–61
world-­ordering proj­ects and ­those of the, becomings: bastard delirium as opening us up
200–201; Cutai of the, 197; evangelical mis- to, 199–200; of the colonized subject, 12–13;
sionary proj­ect and ethnocide of, 204–8; driven by unfinished pro­cesses of, 114–15;
examining pro­cess of negative becoming enlarging our sense of what is pos­si­ble, 84;
experienced by, 201–13; land rush over former ethnographic work on dynamism of everyday,
habitation of the, 206–8, 301, 303; living in 43–44; geographies of, 55–57; “I Am a Man”
postcolonial and neo­co­lo­nial vio­lence, 26, radical becoming (Memphis, 1968), 165;
31; Original Time myths of the Ancestory informed by Deleuze’s work, 7–10, 14, 42, 62,
Beings of, 202–3, 302; Pejei of the, 3, 208–9; 148, 199, 213, 240n11; letting go of assumptions
recognizing them as “shadows of men,” 206; on ­human condition to study, 9–10; moving
rejection of former ways of life by postcon- from judgment to constructive questions
tact, 17; Rosy of the, 210–11; susceptible to on, 32–33; negative, 201–13; self turned into
urusoi (madness), 208–9; Tié of the, 197, a question-­machine through, 17, 164; as style
198–99, 200; Totobiegosode-­Ayoreo 1986 of noticing dynamics of power and flight in
contact, 205–6; transforming themselves social world, 10; understanding the nuances
into Ichadie (New ­People), 198, 202, 302; the of the strug­gles of, 17–18; zen exercises on
2004 Cojñone-­Gari (That Which Belongs to catching moments of, 293, 295–314. See also
the Strangers) contact with, 197–98, 201–3; anthropology of becoming; zen exercises
viciosos (Puyedie, or Prohibited Ones) with bedua (curse), 145–46
vices among, 210–11. See also indigenous Behrouzan, Orkideh, 297
populations; Paraguay Being Malay in Indonesia (Long), 307
Ayotzinapa Normal School students’ disappear- Beldi de Alcantara, Maria de, 302
ance (Mexico, 2014), 111, 115, 127n1 Benites, Toni, 302

index | 361
Benjamin, Walter, 12, 297, 306 by ­people in, 73, 74, 78. See also former Yugo­
Bennett, Jane, 16, 219, 239, 272 slavia; Sarajevo (Bosnia-­Herzegovina, BiH)
Berlant, Lauren, 20, 22, 283 Bosnian Spring (or Bosnian Occupy Move-
Bessire, Lucas, 17, 31, 197, 301, 302 ment): hope and strug­gle for social justice
Beverly, Mrs. (Eastwood resident), 104, legacy of, 22, 271–73, 296; open citizens’ ple-
106 nums formed out of the, 270–71, 272; Senad
Bhabha, Homi, 177 Hadžifejzović’s tele­vi­sion interview with
Biehl, Joāo, 1, 21, 30, 41, 44, 51–55, 65, 83, 294, 314 leaders of, 271; Tuzla protests (2014) evolving
Big Bang agreement (1983), 302 into, 270, 297
big data: challenge of understanding societal Bosnian war, 3
changes using, 26–28; Snowden’s revelations Brazil: Adriana Varejã­o’s skin color ink proj­ect
on dark side of, 23–24 in, 2, 182–92; anthropophagy (symbolic con-
biological pro­cesses: epige­ne­tic field’s under- sumption) meta­phor for cultural production
standing of evolution and, 14; multispecies in, 175, 194; Catarina’s story on pharmaceu-
ethnography on ­human and animal, 14–16 ticalization of ­mental health care in, 45;
biopower concept, 55 drought in São Paulo, 256; new regime of pub-
Biosocial Becomings (Ingold and Palsson), 14 lic health in, 59–60; new rule of law formally
biperiden (Akineton), 1, 45 making the abandoned into citizens, 285–86;
Black Chicago. See Eastwood neighborhood Novo Hamburo of, 278f, 278–80, 284–85, 291;
(Chicago) Pesquisa Nacional em Domicílios (pnad)
#BlackLivesMatter, 22, 98–99, 272, 298 survey on skin color in, 183–90; population
Black Power era (Eastwood neighborhood), 96 living in poverty or indigent in, 52; skin color
Bloch, Ernst, 31, 111, 113–15, 117, 120, 126, 128n15 functioning as a language in, 183; volatile
body. See ­human bodies economies and faltering infrastructures of,
bones: cmp image of careful ­women caring for, 41–42; zones of abandonment institutional-
231, 308; Cyprus forensic investigations work- ized in, 52–53. See also Vita (Brazil)
ing with, 227–31; distinctions between corpses British Inforce Foundation, 221
and, 240n8; photo­graphs from Cyprus mass Brown, Michael, 98, 298
graves, 226–27. See also ­human bodies Brown, Wendy, 19–20
Borneman, John, 47 Butler, Judith, 12, 28, 95, 122, 273
Bosnia-­Herzegovina (BiH): as an assemblage,
79; Bosnian Spring or Bosnian Occupy Move- Cabrito (Grupo Centro resident), 121–22, 129n35
ment (2014) eventual failure in, 22, 270–73, California: diminishing ­water supply in, 256–57;
296; comparing global health interventions wildfires (2015) in, 247
in West Africa and, 269–76; confronting the calligraphies: Chicago’s Eastwood neighbor-
effects of international neoliberalism on, 30; hood, 298–99; in Mexico City, 299–300; zen
Dayton Accords (1995) ending the war in, exercise through, 295
67, 272, 274; failure of postwar governance Calvin, Jean, 304
of, 66–67; international protectorate over, Caminhãozinho (Samuel Lopes) [Vita resi-
67; ngos providing psychosocial ser­vices in dent], 285–86
postwar, 66, 67–70; Srebrenica massacre and cannibalization: becoming the Other through
collective grief in, 2, 275; therapeutic gover- artistic, 192–93; comparing concepts of
nance and humanitarian psychiatry in, 45–47, anthropophagy and, 175; “Eyewitnesses”
65–72; un Development Program report on (Varejão) example of, 303–4; prevalent in
“huge de­pen­dency syndrome” of, 73–74; Varejã­o’s art, 174–75, 182–94, 303–4; si­mul­ta­
volatile economies and faltering infrastruc- neously reproducing forms of depiction and
tures of, 41–42; war­time deaths and popula- producing new ones, 194; Varejã­o’s making
tion displacements in, 67; when “it” becomes ink for skin color proj­ect expression of, 2,
“who” in genocide of, 232; “Yugo-­nostalgia” 182–92; as way of managing questions of

362 | index
 transformation, 175; zen exercise through and continuing her story, 290f, 290–91;
indie-­gestion and, 295, 301–3 her writings defining a subjectivity, 80–81;
Capital in the Twenty-­First ­Century (Piketty), 20 highlighting pharmaceuticalization of ­mental
capitalism: Catarina’s story and implications health care in Brazil, 45, 46, 51–55, 59–60,
regarding, 45; “cruel optimism” of, 20–21; De- 63–64; on living with signification through
leuze’s understanding of plasticity of power her memories, 64; Machado-­Joseph Disease
and techno-­, 24, 26; driving land rush over diagnosis and legacy of, 59, 279, 281, 282,
former Ayoreo habitation (Paraguay), 206–8, 283, 284–85, 288–89, 295–96; naming herself
301, 303; ethnographic sensorium to demys- ­after Akineton (biperiden), 1, 45; recalling
tify power and, 22–23; expansion of in­equality her abandonment at Vita, 1, 10, 17, 30, 44–45,
through underregulated, 20; fantasy and 46, 51–55, 58–65; refusal to depict herself as a
attachment in con­temporary, 20; ideologies victim, 64; on society of bodies living at Vita,
and po­liti­cal choices propelling, 22; postwar 52–53; violent response to learning her f­ amily
Sarajevo’s privatization mafia form of, 75; would not visit, 83; visiting Lili, former room-
social reconfigurations of power, discipline, mate of, 286–88. See also missing ­people; Vita
and profit of, 24–28. See also ideologies (Biehl); Vita (Brazil)
carbon dioxide (co2): Arrhenius’s green­house Catarina’s dictionary: capturing the messiness
effect projections (1896) on, 263; Hansen’s of her world, 57–58; Catarina on the world
study on Venus levels of, 258, 313; health risks created in, 44, 295; as ethnographic theory
of, 245–46; Manabe’s climate modeling of of the leftover subject, 62–65; as evidence of
increased levels of, 257–58; rising levels of, strug­gles to define subjectivity, 80–81; failure
243–44, 244f; stabilization wedges for manag- to take her back home, 83; implications of
ing levels of, 250–51, 312; U.S. Department of “separation of bodies” written in, 41, 53; new
­Labor standards on, 245 name and identity created in, 1, 45, 46, 57–58,
Cargill (food-­processing com­pany), 256 59, 60–61, 63. See also stories; writing
Carlos, Luis (Vita resident), 62, 64 catastrophe theory, 253–54, 254f
Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela, 175 cave of Abraham (Turkey), 138–39, 140, 144,
Carpenter, Stephen, 252, 253, 254–55, 312 308
Carroll, Lewis, 135, 148 Center for Limnology (University of Wiscon-
cartography, 7, 56–57, 176. See also geographies of sin), 251, 252
becomings; place (territory) Cerro Grande wildfire (2000), 248
cases (­legal, medical, psychological): Berlant change. See climate change; social
on the way that judgment defines, 283; how transformations
they trou­ble norms and create openings, 283 Chasing Ice (film), 248–49, 249f
caste violence/cow protection (gauseva) as- Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 258–59, 261, 262,
sociation, 153–54 263, 312
Castile, Philando, 298 Chicago. See Eastwood neighborhood
Catarina/Catkine (Catarina Inês Gomes (Chicago)
Moraes): connecting with Catarina’s ­daughter Chris­tian­ity: ­adopted in early Urfa (Turkey),
Andrea, 1, 279, 281–84, 288–91; death and 139–40; “cult of the saints” in Eastern, 140;
burial at Novo Hamburgo cemetery, 278–80, Greenblatt on Judeo-­Christian origin myth
280f; Deleuze’s work used to understand and need for life stories, 281; missionary
strug­gles of, 45; early life and progressive ethnocide of Ayoreo ­people, 204–8
illness of, 58–59; ethnographic memorial of, City of Survivors (Locke), 41
280f, 290f, 290–91; on her detachment from Clastres, Pierre, 205, 301
accepted truth, 30; on her needs and desires, Clifford, James, 48
54, 64, 295; on her “rheumatism,” 61; her climate change: available information on, 246;
strug­gle for understanding and becoming, carbon dioxide (co2) levels and impact on,
44–45, 46, 57–58; her three ­children sharing 243–46; changes in dynamics of wildfires,

index | 363
climate change (continued) ethnocide of the, 204–8; negative becoming
247–48; crossed critical thresholds of plan- of Ayoreo as, 201–8, 211; notion of becom-
etary life-­support systems and, 248–52; deni- ing applied to the, 12–13. See also indigenous
alism of, 257, 261–62; El Niño, 248; exploring populations
the implications of accelerated, 246–47; Fifth Comaroff, Jean, 12
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Comaroff, John, 12
Panel on Climate Change on, 244; horizoning Connolly, William, 31, 219–20
work to ­counter tipping points of, 259–61, control socie­ties: Deleuze on shift ­toward,
263–64, 295, 310–13; “invisible pres­ent” po- 23–24, 27; what Deleuze’s failure to consider
tential for producing unexpected, 251–52, 256, digital media tools and, 25
259, 261; modeling projections of, 257–59, 264; Cook (Eastwood resident), 101, 298
New York Times stories reporting on, 256–57; counterknowledge re­sis­tance, 24
stabilization wedges concept to manage, cow protection (gauseva) [India], 153–54
250–51, 312; tipping points of, 3, 5, 248–50, 253, critical theory: becoming notion and ethno-
255, 258, 263, 311; trajectories over time of four graphic peopling of, 11–14; Comaroffs’ work
green­house gas concentrations, 244f, 244–45. on anthropology and, 12–13; focusing on
See also Earth; ecol­ogy; environment; global ­people’s plasticity and experiences, 11–12
warming Cruel Optimism (Berlant), 20
climate modeling: Arrhenius’s green­house Crutzen, Paul, 13
effect projections (1896), 263; description cultures: Adriana Varejã­o’s art created from
and early history of, 257–58; keystone event subjectivities of, 177–78; anthropology on
image of the “end” thinking, 258–59; Ma- dichotomies of nature and, 14; epigenet­ics
nabe’s carbon dioxide (co2) levels, 257–58; understanding of evolution conditioned by,
mismatch between real­ity and current 14; how archaeological excavations destroy,
capabilities of, 264 224–25; impacting material objects and art,
climate scientists: examining the intellectual 16; inventing new repertoires to translate
­labor and becomings of, 27, 29; horizoning between, 177–78
work by, 259–64, 295, 310–13; quantitating Cutai (Ayoreo ­people), 197
threshold transitions of tipping points, 255, 263 Cyprus: declaring in­de­pen­dence from ­Great
climate tipping points: causing irreversible Britain (1960), 218; eoka-­b paramilitary
change, 3, 5, 250; climate modeling, 258, 311; organ­ization of, 221; forensic examination of
horizoning work to ­counter, 259–64, 295, the mass graves of, 217; Green Line (1958)
310–13; quantitating threshold transitions of, cease-­fire line in, 218–19, 221; ­Mothers of the
255, 263; Thom on structural stability and, 253; Missing in, 222; potential for a truth-­and-­
triggering albedo effect of glaciers, 248, 250 reconciliation pro­cess in, 226, 236–37; repara-
Clóis (Vita resident), 62, 64 tive “ecol­ogy of knowing” framing study of
Cobogó publishing ­house (Rio de Janeiro), 173 perpetual war in, 218; resemblances between
Cojñone-­Gari aftermath. See Ayoreo Athens 403 bce and 2012, 236–37, 307–8. See
Cojñone-­Gari also Republic of Cyprus; Turkish Republic of
Coleman, Gabriella, 24 Northern Cyprus
Collier, Stephen, 55 Cyprus Committee on Missing Persons (cmp),
colonization: combined with cannibalization 220–39, 240n13, 307; accomplishments and
prevalent in Varejã­o’s art, 174–75; subjectivi- number of missing identified by, 221; “digging
ties underpinning our, 177–78; Varejã­o’s art for a ­future” promotion by, 237; ideology of
expressing the ambiguities of, 174, 303 closure and neutrality mandate of, 222–23;
colonized subject: Ayoreo ­people’s bastard image of careful ­women caring for bones used
delirium as, 201–8, 211; Comaroffs’ work on by, 231, 308; learning history through moment
Tswana ­people as, 12; Fanon’s po­liti­cal “I” of naming, 232–35; media coverage of the, 222,
deconstructing real­ity of, 12; missionary 237; mission to identify missing victims, 220;

364 | index
 origins and po­liti­cal representatives in the, and, 281; Inner Maniat ­women adoration
220, 240n13, 307; public criticism of excava- ritual over the dead, 229, 230; story of a life as
tions done by, 225–26; secreting forensic also a story of, 279–80. See also grief; mourn-
evidence of cause of death in work of, 223–26, ing; witnessing
237–39; work limited to inter-­communal vio­ death artifacts: association of ­women with
lence, 221–22. See also witnessing death and, 241–42n29; becoming ­human
Cyprus forensic investigations: becoming through work with Cyprus, 220, 226–31; cre-
­human pro­cess through, 220, 226–31; cmp’s ating time machines of moment of a death,
secreting cause of death in their, 223–26, 217, 219–20, 226–32; distinctions between
237–39; cmp’s work limited to inter-­ bones and corpses, 240n8; image of careful
communal vio­lence, 221–22; “forensic theatre” ­women caring for bones and, 231; Inner
images of international work in, 222, 237, Maniat ­women adoration of the dead ritual,
241n22; functioning as time machine to 229, 230; restoration of Cyprus history and
moment of death, 217, 219–20, 226–31; image collective memory through, 220, 226–39
of careful ­women caring for bones during, Deep Sea Drilling Proj­ect (1968–83), 311
231; photo­graphs of bones from mass graves, dehumanization: of black lives in Eastwood
226–27; public criticism of cmp’s, 225–26; neighborhood, 96–99; #BlackLivesMatter
restoration of history and collective memory as response to black, 22, 98–99, 273; Butler’s
through, 220, 226–39; working with the bones theory of grief to understand systematic black
and bodies during, 227–31 lives, 12, 28, 95, 122; Eastwood’s community-­
Cyprus inter-­communal vio­lence: Committee driven alternative framework of care response
on Missing Persons (cmp) working to identify to, 108–9; impacting the Eastwood neighbor-
victims of, 220–30; events of the, 307; forensic hood residents, 96–99; negative becoming and
examination of the mass graves as time self-­negation as part of, 211–13. See also racism
machines to, 217, 219–20; Green Line (1958) DeLanda, Manuel, 254
cease-­fire line of the, 218–219, 221; potential Deleuze, Gilles: Abécédaire interviews of, 273;
for a truth-­and-­reconciliation pro­cess ending, on benefits of moving from criticism and
226; between Turkish Cypriots and Greek judgment, 32; on cartographic approach to
Cypriots in, 218–19, 221–22 defining subjects, 56–57; Catarina’s capacity
Cyprus time machines: death artifacts function- for living reflecting ideas by, 45; on diseased
ing as, 217, 219–20, 226–32; experience of and bastard types of delirium, 199–200; dis-
becoming ­human through, 220, 226–31. See tinction between clinical language and lit­er­a­
also temporalities ture language by, 74; emphasizing potentials
of desire, transformation of social fields, and
Daily Telegraph (­Great Britain), 71 unfinishedness, 43, 55; “ethical plateaus” of, 13;
Danny (Eastwood resident), 101, 107 ethnography used to explore ideas of, 42–44;
darkness: Bloch’s view of securing a better examining Sarajevo’s social transforma-
­future out of the, 31, 111, 113–15, 117, 120, 126, tion through work by, 46–47; on exchanges
127, 128n15; manifestations of Mexican, 115–16, between anthropology and philosophy on
123–27. See also negativity becoming, 7–10, 17, 47; formulation of the
Das, Veena, 158 minority by Guattari and, 113; on Freud’s phi-
Dave, Naisargi N., 17, 29, 151, 294, 304, 305, 306 losophy of memory, 55–56, 296; his theory of
Davis, Elizabeth A., 16, 31, 217, 307, 308 individuation and formation of social fields,
Dayton Accords (1995), 67, 272, 274 8–9, 55; on how ­people become revolutionary,
death: association of ­women with, 241–42n29, 273, 274; on invoking potentials of ­people, 84;
308; Catarina’s burial and, 278–80, 280f; death on the multiple construction of subjects, 42;
artifacts creating time machines of moment on nature of becoming, 8, 9, 10, 14, 42, 148,
of, 217, 219–20, 226–32; Greenblatt on con- 199, 213, 240n11; on our lack of belief in the
nection between bodies, history, storytelling, world, 18; on plasticity of power and

index | 365
Deleuze, Gilles (continued) drug war. See Mexican drug war
techno-­capitalism, 24, 26; on shift to “control Durand, Nicolas (Chevalier de Villegaignon),
socie­ties,” 23–25, 27; on theory as multiple 303–4
“tool box” for action, 32, 294; value of eth-
nographic microanalysis reaffirmed by ideas Earth: Anthropocene epoch of, 259; Apollo
of, 81; what he might say about Sarajevo’s 17 “blue marble” photo­graph of, 258; global
subjectivity as a milieu, 74; on writing as pro­ warming of, 244f, 244–45, 257–58, 257–59. See
cess of becoming, 62; on writing for benefit of also climate change; environment
a “missing ­people,” 45, 50, 63, 76, 200 Eastwood neighborhood (Chicago):
Deleuze titles: Anti-­Oedipus coauthored with community-­driven alternative framework of
Guattari, 301, 302; Essays Critical and Clinical care for Mrs. Lana by, 104–8; dehumaniza-
by, 41; “Lit­er­a­ture and Life,” 199–200; “Many tion of black lives impacting the, 96–99;
Politics,” 8; A Thousand Plateaus, coauthored demographics and poverty of, 96; “describe
with Guattari, 111, 164, 301, 302; “What your neighborhood” interviews with
­Children Say,” 56 residents of, 100–104; history of economic
Delić, Alma (pseudonym), 71, 72–73, 74–75 decline and hom­i­cide rates of, 97; the “lunch
delirium. See bastard delirium money” corner of the, 100–101, 106–7; medi-
democracy. See liberal democracy calized interpretation of ­mental illness versus
Derrida, Jacques, 157, 167n8, 314, 316n40 the, 94–96; once known as Sacred City, 96;
Descartes, René, 157 providing alternative framework of care for
desire: assemblage concretization of power and, Mrs. Lana, 104–8; as pseudonym for neigh-
55–56, 79–80; becoming through experiences borhood fieldwork, 109n5; relationship
of time, space, and, 6; BiH as assemblage of between mourning and ­mental illness in,
places, ­peoples, hopes, grievances, and, 79; 94; stories of becomings in the inner-­city
Catarina’s story on her needs and, 54, 64, 295; of, 29; symbols of mourning seen in, 101.
Deleuze on potentials of transformation of See also African Americans
social fields, unfinishedness, and, 43, 55; dif- Ebola epidemic (West Africa), 19, 270
ferentiating between hope and, 115 ecol­ogy: balance of nature theory in, 252–53;
Diegues, Isabel, 173–74 horizoning work to restore stability in, 259–61,
digital technologies: Deleuze’s control society 263–64, 295, 310–13; Long-­Term Ecological
concept and implications of, 25; societal Research Program (nsf) on, 265n31; nonequi-
changes due to the, 23–24. See also social librium spaces and dynamics in, 252–56. See
media also climate change
Dipesh (Indian animal activist), 156 “ecol­ogy of knowing,” 218
Dirty War, The. See Mexican drug war economic forces, entanglement of material
disability. See anthropology of disability; ­mental objects with, 16
illness ecosystems: catastrophe theory on thresholds
disciplinary society: evolving modes of control of, 253–54, 254f; DeLanda’s balance of nature
implications for global poverty, 26–27; theory on ecol­ogy and, 252–54; horizoning
reconfigurations of power, profit, and, 24–28; work to restore stability in, 259–61, 263–64,
transition from sovereign to, 23, 25–26 295, 310–13; Lake Mendota experiments
Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 55 (Wisconsin), 254–55
diversity backlash, 18–19 ekphrasis (images in words), 192
Divided City, The (Loraux), 236 El Niño, 248
Dome Fire (1996), 247, 248 encobijado (murdered body) [Mexican drug war
Dome of the Rock, 309 image], 126
domination, Fanon’s po­liti­cal “I” struggling environment: Arrhenius’s green­house effect pro-
over, 12 jections (1896) on the, 263; balance of nature
Dresden bombings (World War II), 261 theory in ecol­ogy, 252–53; Chernobyl nuclear

366 | index
 disaster to the, 258–59, 261, 262, 263; crossed 21–23; revealing transformative visions and
critical thresholds of planetary life-­support potentials, 11
systems of the, 248–52; denialism of damage ethnography: anthropology of becoming’s
to the, 261–62, 275; Fukushima nuclear disas- commitment to empirical, 7; capturing the
ter to the, 261; global warming of the, 244f, implications and impact of theories on real­
244–45, 247–48; Hansen’s study of Venus, ity, 30–32; developing area of multispecies,
258, 313; horizoning work to restore stability 14–15; emerging from unfinished subjects and
in, 259–61, 263–64, 295, 310–13; increase of realities, 31–32, 60; exploring Deleuze’s ideas
nuclear irradiated, 312; “invisible pres­ent” in context of, 42–44; of Inner Maniat ­women
potential for unexpected changes to, 251–52, of Greece, 229, 230; knowledge as “placed” in
256, 259, 261; modeling projections on the, setting of, 179; power of art invoking ­human
257–59, 264; New York Times stories reporting potential by, 84; to understand plasticity of
on changes to the, 256–57; nonequilibrium social fields, 12; value of becomings analy­sis
spaces and dynamics, 252–56; stabilization done through multiple disciplines and, 81–84;
wedges concept on risks and pos­si­ble ­futures as way of staying connected to changing
of, 250–51, 312. See also climate change; social pro­cesses, 10–11
Earth Eumenides (“seeing good”) [ancient Greece],
eoka-­b (Cyprus paramilitary organ­ization), 221 307–8
epige­ne­tic field: on becomings of ­people and Eu­ro­pean Union: BiH international protectorate
ecosystems, 14; on a post-­Darwinian under- role of, 67; doubts about continued viability
standing of evolution, 14 of the, 19; UK’s 2016 Brexit vote to leave, 18
equilibrium dynamics: catastrophe theory on evolutionary epigenet­ics, 14
thresholds of ecosystem, 253–54, 254f; De- experiences: anthropological work on categories
Landa’s balance of nature theory on, 252–56; impor­tant to, 43–44; Butler’s study of self-­
Lake Mendota whole-­lake experiments on, empowerment and role of, 12, 28, 95, 122;
254–56 ethnographic peopling of critical theory
Erdoğan, Recep, 310 through study of, 11–14; Zehra’s story on her
Escobar, Ticio, 205–6 “small-­scale” religious, 143–47, 148, 149n32, 310
Eskerod, Torben, 280, 285, 286, 287 “Eyewitnesses” (Varejão), 303–4
Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze), 41
ethics: Bennett’s “enchantment” investment in Fabian, Johannes, 258
the world as precondition for, 272; challenges ­family bonds: Andrea (Catarina’s ­daughter)
of ethical “response-­ability,” 28; “ethical reclaiming her, 1, 279, 281–84, 288–91; Cata-
plateaus,” 13; Foucault on state power vs. rina/Catkine’s story on ­mental health care
individual, 137–38, 149n20 remaking, 44–45, 46; Catarina’s narration of
ethnocide: of Ayoreo p­ eople through missionary her abandonment and cut, 51–55; how Brazil’s
hunt, 204–8; Clastres on outcomes of, 205; new regime of public health has impacted,
Ticio Escobar on Totobiegosode-­Ayoreo 1986 59–60; psychologization of war aftermath in
contact, 205–6 Sarajevo and remaking of, 46–47; Sarajevo’s
ethnographic empiricism: anthropology of war­time destruction of, 65–66. See also
becoming’s commitment to, 7, 47–51; bastard- abandonment
ized indigenous subject often erased by, 200; Fanon, Frantz, 12
on dynamism of everyday becomings, 43–44; Fassin, Didier, 82
revelations about our world through, 17–18 femicide pandemic (Mexico), 126
ethnographic sensorium: of incomplete mo- Ferguson civil unrest (2014), 98
ments and stories of lifeworlds, 1–3; for Ferrándiz, Francisco, 222
maintaining space for po­liti­cal engagement, Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmen-
22–23; plasticity of the, 3–6, 22–23; provid- tal Panel on Climate Change, 244
ing us a way back into worldliness, 17–18, Fire (film) [India], 165

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Fischer (Mercury) Ellipsoid (1968), 311 a subject path ­toward hopeful politics ­after,
Fischer, Michael M. J., 11, 13, 57, 293 235; Bosnia-­Herzegovina (BiH) war­time
flight: becoming as style of noticing social world population displacements and, 67; denial of
dynamics of, 10; Deleuze’s writing on lines of, Holocaust, 234; Srebrenica genocide anniver-
7, 8–9, 55, 285 sary (BiH), 2, 275. See also vio­lence; war
forensic investigation. See Cyprus forensic geographies of becomings, 55–57. See also cartog-
investigations raphy; place (territory)
“forensic theatre” images, 222, 237, 241n22 Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
former Yugo­slavia: Dayton Accords (1995) (Prince­ton), 257
ending the war in, 67, 272, 274; humanitar- Ginsburg, Faye, 24
ian psychiatry and psychologization of war’s glaciers: Chasing Ice (film) on retreating, 248,
aftermath in, 45–47, 65–81; President Tito of, 249f; tipping point triggering albedo effect
73; prewar foreign debts and economy of, 73; of, 248, 250
“therapeutic governance” of international in- global health interventions: comparing the BiH
tervention in, 67–68; “Yugo-­nostalgia” for the and West African experiences with, 269–76;
prewar, 73, 74. See also Bosnia-­Herzegovina Ebola epidemic and recent revelations of
(BiH); Sarajevo (Bosnia-­Herzegovina, BiH) deficits in, 19, 270; operating at “minimal
fossil fuels. See green­house gases biopolitics” in West Africa, 270. See also
Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish by, 55; humanitarian psychiatry (Sarajevo, BiH);
“heterotopic” space concept of, 138; History medicalization
of Sexuality by, 55; on “philosophy in activity” global warming: Arrhenius’s green­house effect
detachment, 30; on power of state vs. indi- projections (1896) on the, 263; changes in
vidual ethics, 137–38, 149n20; on transition dynamics of wildfires linked to, 247–48; deni-
from sovereign to disciplinary socie­ties, 23 alism of, 257, 261–62; Fifth Assessment Report
Frank, Arthur, 95 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
French Calvinists, 303, 304 Change on, 244; horizoning work to slow
French Huguenots, 303, 304 down, 259–61, 263–64, 295, 310–13; modeling
Freud, Sigmund: on “allo-­plastic” capacity of projections of, 257–59, 264; trajectories over
altering real­ity, 12; Deleuze on philosophy time of four green­house gas concentrations
of memory and unconscious, 55–56, 296; and, 244f, 244–45. See also climate change
­Little Hans study by, 56; “mourning and Gomrich, Ernst, 179
melancholia” distinguished by, 94; oedipal Graner, Eric, 298
theorizing by, 81 Greece: Inner Maniat ­women adoration of the
Friendicoes animal shelter (India), 155 dead in, 229, 230; resemblances between
Fukushima nuclear disaster, 261, 312 Cyprus of 2012 and Athens 403 bce, 236–37,
307–8; Smyrna (now Izmir) burning [1923]
Gaia models, 312 dispute over role, 233–34, 235
Gandhi, Indira, 154, 155 Greek Cypriots: cmp working to identify inter-­
Gandhi, Leela, 167n9 communal conflict victims among, 220–31;
Gandhi, Maneka Anand, 151–52, 153, 154–57, 160, conflict between Turkish Cypriots and,
166, 304–5, 306 218–19, 221–22, 239–40n5, 307; denial of
Gandhi, Sanjay, 154–55, 306 inter-­communal vio­lence (1974) by, 233
Garcia, Angela, 5, 26, 31, 111, 299–300 Greenblatt, Stephen, 281, 283
Garner, Eric, 98 green­house gases: Arrhenius’s green­house
Geertz, Clifford, 18, 50, 179–80 effect projections (1896), 263; barriers
Gell, Alfred, 180–81 to dismantling economy based on fossil
Genesis (Old Testament), 281 fuels, 245; carbon dioxide (co2), 243–46,
genocide: Armenian, 233–35; Arsenijević on 250–51, 258, 263; New York Times stories on
when “it” becomes “who” in, 232; becoming environment effects of, 256–57; stabilization

368 | index
 wedges concept on reductions of, 251–52, 312; lation of myth and, 223–26, 237–39; dispute
trajectories over time of concentrations of over Smyrna (now Izmir) burning [1923],
four, 244f, 244–45 233–34, 235; epigenet­ics understanding of
Green Line (Cyprus, 1958), 218, 219, 221 evolution conditioned by, 14; Greenblatt on
Gregory, Mr. (Eastwood resident), 106 connection between bodies, death, storytell-
grief: Butler’s Precarious Life study reconceptual- ing and, 281; Purcell on per­sis­tence of layered,
izing madness as, 12, 28, 95, 122; a communal 10; when “it” becomes “who” in genocide, 232.
framework of grief for both mourning, mad- See also archaeological excavations
ness, and, 104–8; expressed by Jo Jo’s peers History of Sexuality (Foucault), 55
in care for Mrs. Lana, 105; racial in­equality of Holocaust denial, 234
grievable and ungrievable lives, 122; Srebrenica hope: Bennett’s reflections on “enchantment”
massacre anniversary and expression of collec- investment in the world and, 272; Bloch
tive, 2, 275. See also death; mourning on better ­future through, 31, 111, 114–15, 117,
Grupo Centro (Mexico City): as anexo to ad- 120, 126, 128n15; Bosnian Spring (or Bosnian
diction treatment, 118; Cabrito’s testimony Occupy Movement) legacy of, 22, 271–73,
given at, 121–22, 129n35; description of the, 296; differentiating between desire and, 115;
117; individuals confined (anexados) and Mexico City demonstration (2014) as expres-
living at, 118; Magi’s internment at, 124–27; sion of, 116; negativity linked to positive
Padrino Rafa founder of, 119–20, 124, 125, 300; trajectory of, 117; social movements creating
the twelve anexados living in, 120–27. See also both a demand for better ­future and, 271–73;
anexos residential centers (Mexico) vio­lence as force for annihilation and also
Guattari, Félix: Anti-­Oedipus coauthored with for, 127
Deleuze, 301, 302; on becoming turning the Horace, 192
self into question-­machine, 17, 164; concerned horizoning work: by Canadian Bay of Fundy
with the idea of becoming, 7, 42, 213; “ethical mari­ners, 260–61; description and examples
plateaus” concept of, 13; formulation of the of, 259–60; Gaia models, 312; 1968 pre­de­ces­
minority by Deleuze and, 113; on interpret- sor horizon, 310–11; Obama administration’s
ing symptoms, 74; A Thousand Plateaus by pursuit of, 310; providing space of environ-
Deleuze and, 111, 164, 301, 302; writing with mental decision making, 263–64; for restoring
Deleuze on assemblages, 55, 80 stability in changing systems, 260; World War
Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (gap) [Urfa, II bombing of German cities as refusal of, 261;
Turkey], 148n14 zen elementary exercise using, 295, 310–13
­human bodies: Catarina’s abandonment at Vita
Hacking, Ian, 70 of her, 51–55, 58–59; Foucault’s biopower
Hadžifejzović, Senad, 271, 272 concept on reterritorializing, 55; Greenblatt
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 282 on connection between history, death, story-
Hammoudi, Abdellah, 47 telling and, 281; Vita’s society of abandoned,
Hansen, James, 258, 313 52–53. See also bones
Haraway, Donna, 28 ­human condition: anthropological work on
Help in Suffering shelter (India), 163 categories impor­tant to, 43–44; letting go of
“heterotopic” space, 138 assumptions to study becoming, 9–10
Hindu nationalism, cow protection (gauseva) ­human dignity (“I” strug­gle), 12
association with, 153–54 Humane Society International, 153
Hirschman, Albert, 29, 48 humanism: becomings of Indian animal rights
history: Armenian genocide, 233–35; becoming activists in context of, 17; as foundation of
as not being part of, 8, 10; as belonging to anthropological thought, 16–17; historic
­future generations, 225, 239; Cyprus cmp’s roots of crisis over our world and, 19–20;
forensic work to name missing and restore to, witnessing to become animal or anthropo-
220, 226–39; Cyprus cmp’s secrecy and oscil- centric, 160–64

index | 369
humanitarian psychiatry (Sarajevo, BiH): De- protection (gauseva) association with caste
leuze’s thoughts used to understand “missing vio­lence and Hindu nationalism, 153–54;
­people” of, 46–47; events leading to institu- Friendicoes animal shelter in, 155; how affec-
tionalization of, 45–47, 65–68; language used tive history of liberalism is linked to animal
for interpretation of symptoms, 74–75; legacy activism in, 153–56, 167n9; Idgah slaughter­
of the, 71–72; Locke’s investigation into “miss- house in New Delhi, 159–60; Indian and
ing ­people” in system of, 47, 65–72, 80–81; lesbian activism in, 165, 166; mass steriliza-
ngos (nongovernmental organ­izations) tion program of the poor (1975–77) in, 155;
role in providing, 66, 67–70; psychological Prevention of Cruelty against Animals (pca)
language incorporated into local sense mak- Act of 1960, 154, 305; Proj­ect Tiger conserva-
ing, 68; un’s report on “huge de­pen­dency tion initiative of, 154
syndrome” of BiH reinforcing, 73–74; “The Indian and lesbian activism, 165, 166
War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find the Indian animal activism: Animal Birth Control
Peace They Seek” (Daily Telegraph article) on, program, 155; anthropological lit­er­a­ture on
71. See also global health interventions; ­mental animal politics and, 167n15; Crystal Rogers
health care; psychiatric rationality on event triggering her, 2, 151–52, 153, 158,
Hurtić, Zlatko, 73 160, 306; Help in Suffering shelter, 163; how
affective history of liberalism linked to,
“I Am a Man” radical becoming (Memphis, 153–56, 167n9; influence of foreign ngos on
1968), 165 development of, 153; Kindness to Animals
Ichadie (New ­People): Ayoreo ­people renaming and Re­spect for Environment (kare),
themselves the, 198, 302; creating New Person 158–59; ­People for Animals organ­ization,
by reconstituting ayipie (soul ­matter), 202 155; perceived as having anti-­Muslim senti-
identity: Catarina/Catkine creating a more liv- ments, 153–54; po­liti­cal engagement between
able real­ity and, 1, 45, 46, 57–58, 60–65, 80–81, ­humans and animals through, 152–53; Proj­ect
83; missionary ethnocide fracturing collective, Tiger conservation initiative, 154; Welfare for
205–6; naming the missing to restore history Stray Dogs, 156; zen elementary exercise on,
and, 232–35; reemergence of religion in public 295, 304–7. See also animals
sphere of, 19 Indian animal activists: Abrams-­Meyers ­family,
ideologies: cmp’s neutrality mandate and 162–64, 165, 166, 304, 305–6; Carmelia Satija’s
closure, 222–23; ethnographic fieldwork work as, 158–60, 164, 165–67, 304, 306; Crystal
revelations about, 17. See also capitalism; Rogers’s work as an, 2, 151–52, 153, 157, 158, 160,
neoliberalism 304, 306; Maneka Gandhi as well-­known,
Idgah slaughter­house (New Delhi), 159–60 151–52, 153, 154–57, 160, 166, 304–5, 306; stories
images: cannibalization and colonization of, of becomings from, 29; their becoming in
2, 174–75, 182–94; of careful ­women caring context of humanism, 17; Timmie Kumar, 163,
for bones by cmp, 231; ekphrasis (images in 166, 304, 306; witnessing role of, 156–64
words), 193; of forensic photo­graphs of bones indigenous populations: contradictions in
from Cyprus mass graves, 226–27; “forensic anthropological theory on, 211–13; missionary
theatre,” 222, 237, 241n22; incommensurabil- ethnocide of, 204–8; negative becoming
ity of language and, 194; Mexican drug war among, 211–13; “socie­ties of refusal” among,
encobijado (murdered body), 126; mourning 310, 315n18; vio­lence stalking small, 211. See
­women, 222, 241n22. See also art also Ayoreo ­people (Paraguay); colonized
inclusion: examining social ­orders and exclusion subject
and, 27; growing backlash against progres- individuals: Deleuze’s control socie­ties making
sive, 18–19 “dividuals” out of, 23; Deleuze’s theory of
India: Animal Birth Control program in, 155; individuation and formation of, 8–9, 55; ex-
becomings of animal rights activists in, 17, amining how they orient themselves to multi-
29; Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) of, 154; cow plicity, 28–29; exploring social world through

370 | index
 collaboration of individuals and unified voice, Karadžić, Radovan, 70
51. See also lifeworlds; self; subjects Kearns, Officer, 96, 97
Industrial Revolution, 243 Keller, Catherine, 113
inequalities: Anthropocene geological era on kharassein (engrave or scratch body), 299
global workings of, 13–14; Fanon’s po­liti­cal kidnappings. See Mexican kidnappings
“I” struggling over, 12; fueling the illegal drug Kindness to Animals and Re­spect for Environ-
trade in Mexico, 129n32; underregulated capi- ment (kare) [India], 158–59
talism and expansion of, 20. See also poverty King Lear (Shakespeare), 281
In-­Force Foundation, 221, 308 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 97
Ingold, Tim, 14 Kirskey, Eben, 15
Inner Maniat ­women study (Greece), 229, 230 Kleinman, Arthur, 95
Integrated Ocean Driving Program, 311 knowledge: anthropological use of sociology
International Biological Program (1964–75), 311 and politics of production of, 49–50; art as
International Committee of the Red Cross, 220 construction of material objects and object of,
International Geophysical Year (1957–58), 311 178–82; complexity of secrecy and becoming
International Ocean Discovery Program, 311 in Cyprus cmp production of, 223–26, 237–39;
Internet: Deleuze’s control society concept and Deleuze’s writing on totalizing forms of
implications of, 25; societal changes due to power and, 7–9, 10; openness to the ­Others,
the, 23–24. See also social media 33; as “placed” in ethnographical setting, 179;
intimacy: post-­Enlightenment Western thought subject transformed into the object through
on, 160–61; of witnessing, 152, 160–64 writing, 193. See also scientific knowledge
“invisible pres­ent” concept, 251–52, 256, 259, 261 Kumar, Timmie (Indian animal activist), 163,
Iraci (Vita resident), 280–81, 295 166, 304, 306
Ira­nian revolution (1979), 302 Kurdish militias, 2, 138, 148nn12,13
isis (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria): destruc- kutsal baliklar (sacred fish), 133
tion of ancient ritual sites by, 134; Urfa buffer
zone between Kurdish and Turkish military Lake Mendota experiments (Wisconsin), 254–55
and, 2, 138 Lana, Mrs. (Eastwood resident): arrested for
Islam: salafi, 309; Sunni, 137, 141–43, 149n17. See duct tape incident, 102–3, 299; community-­
also anthropology of Islam; Qur­an driven alternative framework of care for,
Izmir (then Smyrna) burning [1923], 233–34, 235 104–8; driven mad ­after witnessing the
shooting death of her son, 93–94, 97, 101–2,
Jansen, Stef, 271–72, 274 298; examining differing perspectives of
Jardim, Laura, 279, 284 ­mental illness and care of, 1, 10–11, 29, 93–94;
Jetztzeit (moments of solidarities), 297 her refusal to accept son’s death codified as
Jorge (Vita infirmary caregiver), 288 ­mental illness, 103; Marla on challenges of
Joyce, James, 84 ­mother’s madness, 103–4; neighbors invited
Judeo-­Christian origin myth, 281 to visit, 105–6; physician versus neighborhood
judgment: anthropology of becoming moving to perspective on madness of, 94–96, 101–2
constructive questions form, 32–33; Deleuze language: Catarina’s creation of a new identity
on benefits of moving from criticism and, 32; through her dictionary’s, 1, 45, 46, 57–58, 59,
how ­legal, medical, psychological cases are 60, 63; Deleuze’s distinction between clinical
defined by, 283 and literary, 74; for expressing interpretation
Justin (Eastwood resident), 93 of symptoms in Sarajevo, 74–75; expressing
“Yugo-­nostalgia” (Sarajevo, BiH), 73, 74;
Kadir Gecesi (Night of Power), 133, 140–41, humanitarian psychiatry incorporated into
148n1 BiH, 68; incommensurability of image and,
Kafka, Franz, 80, 84 194; translating and inventing new repertoires
Kahlo, Frida, 167 and, 177–78

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Las Conchas fire (2011), 247–48 Loga, Slobodan, 71, 73
Latour, Bruno, 181 Long, Nicholas, 307
Lens, Sidney, 218 Long-­Term Ecological Research Program (nsf),
Léry, Jean de, 174, 303–4 265n31
lesbian activism (India), 165 Look, Listen, Read (Lévi-­Strauss), 179
Levinasian animal, 157–58 Loraux, Nicole, 236, 308
Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 75, 178–79, 181, 182, 193, 238 Lorraine, Tamsin, 146
liberal democracy: Bosnian Spring’s open Lyotard, Jean-­François, 306
citizens’ plenums experiments in, 270–71, 272,
296; declining faith in politics of, 18–19; homo Machado-­Joseph Disease: Catarina’s ­daughter
oeconomicus’s lost capacity for, 21–22; impact Adriana testing negative for, 290; Catarina’s
of neoliberalism encroachment into social life ­daughter Andrea requesting a test for, 283–84,
and, 19–20; Indian animal activism’s relation- 288–89, 295–96; Catarina’s diagnosis of, 28, 59,
ship to, 153–56, 167n9 279, 295; Catarina’s son Adriano’s diagnosis
lifelines (accompaniers on), 295, 314n6 of, 284–85
lifeworlds: affective-­material shifts in, 297–98; Mad Dogs and an En­glishwoman (Rogers),
as always also a story of death, 279–80; 151–52
collective becomings to understand many madness. See ­mental illness
Sarajevan, 65–80; ethnographic sensorium Magi (Grupo Centro resident), 124–27
of incomplete views onto, 1–3; ethnographic Magnus, Mr. (Vita employee), 281, 285
theory as emerging from unfinished subjects Magnuson, John, 251–52, 259, 312, 313
and, 31–32; psychologization of war aftermath Mahmood, Saba, 135
in Sarajevo and remaking of, 46–47; writing Maja. See Šrić, Marija (Maja) [Sarajevo resident]
for missing ­people and their, 45, 47, 50, 63, Makarios, President (Cyprus), 221
65–72. See also individuals; stories; worlds/ Malabou, Catherine, 259
worldliness Malinowski, Bronislaw, 12, 50
Lili (Vita resident), 286–88 Manabe, Syukuro “Suki,” 257–58
Lima, Andrea de (Catarina’s ­daughter): “Many Politics” (Deleuze), 8
connecting with ­sister on Facebook, 289; Marcus, George, 48–49
photo­graph with siblings, 290f; reconnecting Marino (adoptive f­ ather of Catarina’s child),
­after abandonment, 1, 279, 281–84, 288–91; 279, 288
requesting Machado-­Joseph Disease test, Mario (Grupo Centro se­nior anexado), 124
283–84, 288–89, 295–96; sharing ­mother’s Marla (Mrs. Lana’s ­daughter): on challenges of
memorial and continuing story with siblings, her ­mother’s madness, 103–4, 105; on death of
290f, 290–91 ­brother triggering her ­mother’s madness, 93,
line of flight, 7, 8–9, 55, 295 94, 101–2; on her ­mother’s arrest and ­Mental
lit­er­a­ture: on animal politics in India, 167n15; be- Health Court hearing, 102–4, 299; inviting
coming the Other through engagement with the neighbors to begin communal care of her
incompleteness of, 193; Deleuze’s distinction ­mother, 105–8
between clinical language and language of, Martin, Trayvon, 98, 298
74; Margaret Lock’s review of medicalization, mass media: Bosnian Spring coverage on social
87n95–88n95; on racism and poverty increas- media and, 271–73; Cyprus Committee on
ing risk for ­mental illness, 100. See also writing Missing Persons (cmp) coverage by social
“Lit­er­a­ture and Life” (Deleuze), 199–200 media, 222, 237; Deleuze’s failure to consider
­Little Hans study (Freud), 56 control socie­ties and tools of social media
Ljubović, Senadin, 65–66 and, 25; dependence of forensic theatre on
Lock, Margaret, 14, 70, 87–88n95 social media and, 222, 237, 241n22; U.S. presi-
Locke, Peter, 1, 30, 41, 45, 46, 51, 65–72, 269, 294, dential election (2016) role of social media
296, 297, 314 and, 36n88

372 | index
material objects: art as construction of object of ­mental health care: Brazil’s new regime of
knowledge and, 178–82; customs, values, and public health and, 59–60; Catarina’s story on
symbols impacted by art and, 16; multispe- pharmaceuticalization of, 44–45, 46, 51–55,
cies ethnography on the ­human, animal, 59–60, 63–64; Eastwood’s community-­driven
and, 14–16; social, po­liti­cal, and economic alternative framework of, 104–8; enabling
entanglement with, 16 hybrid ways of remaking lives, families, and
Mauss, Marcel, 12 social roles, 44–46. See also humanitarian
Maya (Indian animal activist), 156 psychiatry (Sarajevo, BiH); psychiatric
Mayo, Katherine, 153 rationality
“May you go to the blue lake” (bedua curse), ­mental illness: Ayoreo ­people’s susceptability
145–46 to urusoi (madness), 208–10; a communal
meaning: cultural context in art, 179; Cyprus framework of grief for both mourning, grief,
cmp’s secrecy and oscillation of history and and, 104–8; Eastwood neighborhood vs.
mythical, 223–26, 237–39; multiple nature of medicalized interpretation of, 94–96; Freud’s
art’s, 16, 174–78; of stasis as social death, 12 “mourning and melancholia” distinguished
Médecins Sans Frontières, 71 by, 94; Metzl’s argument on po­liti­cal nature
media. See mass media; social media of treatments for, 99–100; Mrs. Lana’s grief
medicalization: anthropological work to un- triggering her madness, 93–94, 97, 101–2,
derstand politics and ethics of, 46; Catarina’s 298; physician vs. neighborhood perspective
abandonment by ­family facilitated through, on Mrs. Lana’s, 94–96, 101–2; ptsd (post-
1, 10, 17, 30, 41, 44–45, 46, 51–55, 58–65; traumatic stress disorder), 71, 73, 74, 78, 79;
Eastwood neighborhood interpretation of relationship between mourning and, 94; shift
­mental illness versus, 94–96, 101–2; Margaret in diagnosis of schizo­phre­nia in the U.S., 99.
Lock’s review of lit­er­a­ture on, 87–88n95; See also anthropology of disability
Mrs. Lana’s refusal to accept son’s death codi- Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 193, 306
fied as ­mental illness, 103; of ptsd in postwar Metzl, Jonathan, 99, 100
Sarajevan, 71, 73, 74, 78, 79. See also anthropol- Mexican drug war: anexos residential addiction
ogy of disability; global health interventions; treatment centers arising from, 25, 118–27,
psychiatric rationality 129n32, 294, 295, 299–300; apocalyptic visions
medi­cations: Brazilian public health regime and related to, 127n2; considering the brutal toll of
distribution of ­free, 59–60; Catarina’s renam- the, 5; The Dirty War (Guerra Sucia) period
ing of herself ­after Akineton (biperiden), 1, of the, 128n23; encobijado (murdered body)
45; Catarina’s story on pharmaceuticalization image of the, 126; racial in­equality of grievable
of ­mental health, 44–45, 46, 51–55, 59–60, and ungrievable lives evidenced in, 122; re-
63–64 search on ­factors fueling the illegal drug trade,
melancholia vs. mourning (Freud), 94 129n32. See also substance abuse
memories: Athens (403 bce) Thirty Mexican kidnappings: Bar Heavens mass kidnap-
Tyrants amnesty distortion of, 236, 307–8; ping (2013), 123–24, 125, 126, 127; the drug war’s
Catarina on living with signification through increased vio­lence connection to, 123–24;
her, 64; Catarina’s narration of her abandon- engaged in by anexos, 124–27; of forty-­three
ment, 51–55; Cyprus forensic restoration Ayotzinapa Normal School students (2014),
of history and collective, 220, 226–39; 111, 115, 127n1
Deleuze on Freud’s philosophy of psycho- Mexico: Bloch on securing a better ­future out
analysis through, 55–56, 296; Inner Maniat of darkness of, 31, 111, 113–15, 117, 120, 126, 127,
­women’s “adornment of the dead” ritual 128n15; disappearance of Ayotzinapa Normal
of, 229; missionary ethnocide fracturing School students (2014) in, 111, 115, 127n1; eth-
collective, 205–6; of World War II Dresden nographic tracing of crises shaping pres­ent,
bombings, 261; “Yugo-­nostalgia” for prewar, 113; femicide pandemic declared in, 126; as
73, 74, 78 land of repeated social protests

index | 373
Mexico (continued) Mushroom at the End of the World, The (Tsing),
movements, 300; manifestations of darkness 15–16
in, 115–16, 123–27; “Nuestra Señora de la Santa Myth and Meaning (Lévi-­Strauss), 238
Muerta (the Death Saint)” patron saint in, myths: Ayoreo ­people’s Original Time myths
123, 299–300; vio­lence and religion folded of the Ancestor Beings, 202–3, 302; Cyprus
together in anexos of, 25, 119–22, 126, 294 cmp’s secrecy and oscillation of history and,
Mexico City (Mexico): Bar Heavens mass 223–26, 237–39; Judeo-­Christian origin myth,
kidnapping (2013) in, 123–24, 125, 126, 127; 281. See also stories
demonstration protesting missing forty-­three
students in, 1–2, 11, 111–12, 116; Grupo Centro naming: Catarina/Catkine creating a more
anexo for addiction treatment in, 117–27, livable real­ity through, 1, 45, 46, 57–58, 60–65,
129n35, 300; increased vio­lence and kidnap- 80–81, 83; of Cyprus missing through cmp’s
pings in, 123–24; Taibo on 1968 massacre of forensic work, 220–39; restoring identity and
student demonstrators in, 116–17 history by, 232–35; when “it” becomes “who”
Milan (Sarajevo resident), 76–78, 275 in genocide through, 232
Mirza (Sarajevo resident), 275 nation-­states: transition to disciplinary socie­ties
missing ­people: cmp working to identify bod- from sovereignty of, 23, 25–26; Urstaat (state
ies of the Cyprus war, 220–39; Deleuze on power) of, 301, 305, 315n17. See also po­liti­cal
writing for benefits of a, 45, 50, 63, 76, 200; sphere
“forensic theatre” media coverage of, 222, Nature (journal), 13
237, 241n22; restoring to history by naming negative becoming: Ayoreo’s affirmative nega-
the, 232–35; writing for Sarajevo’s, 47, 65–72, tion beginnings of, 201–3; cap­i­tal­ist land rush
80–81. See also Catarina/Catkine (Catarina and exploitation role in, 206–8, 301, 303; dehu-
Inês Gomes Moraes) manization of, 211–13; missionary ethnocide
missionary ethnocide: of Ayoreo ­people role in, 204–6
(Paraguay), 204–8, 302; Clastres on outcomes negativity: positive trajectory of hope linked to,
of, 205 117; as revelatory practice replacing darkness,
Mitchell, W. J. T., 192 113. See also darkness
Moraes, Nilson (Catarina’s husband), 58, 279 Negri, Antonio, 18
­Mother India (Mayo), 153 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 154, 305
­Mothers of the Missing (Cyprus), 222 neoliberalism: humanitarian psychiatry and
­Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), psychologization of postwar Sarajevo, 45–47,
222 65–81; impact of encroachment into social
mourning: Black Chicago understanding of life, 19–20; Sarajevo’s confrontation of the
­mental illness and, 94; a communal frame- effects of international, 30; self-­reliance and
work of care for both grief, madness, and, “responsibilization” demanded of, 273. See
104–8; Eastwood neighborhood vs. medical- also ideologies
ized interpretation of, 94–96, 101–2; Freud’s New York Times: diminishing California ­water
distinguishing between melancholia and, 94; supply story in, 256–57; emaciated sea lions
images of ­women in, 222, 241n22; symbols story in, 256; travel writer of the, 72
vis­i­ble in Eastwood neighborhood, 101. See ngos (nongovernmental organ­izations): Argen-
also death; grief tine Forensic Anthropology Team, 221; India’s
Muhammad, Prophet, 133, 141, 142 ­People for Animals, 155; influence on animal
multiplicity: Deleuze on construction of sub- activism in India by foreign, 153; In-­Force
jects, 42; examining how individuals orient Foundation, 221, 308; Kindness to Animals
themselves to, 28–29; of meanings of art, 16, and Re­spect for Environment (kare) [India],
174–78; reworking classification schemas of 158–59; legacy of therapeutic governance
race, 29–30 and humanitarian psychiatry in BiH, 70–72;
multispecies ethnography, 14–16 Médecins Sans Frontières’s psychosocial

374 | index
 programs, 71; Physicians for ­Human Rights, Pacala, Steven, 250, 312
221, 240n13, 308; providing psychosocial ser­ Palsson, Gisli, 14
vices in postwar Sarajevo, 66, 67–70; Wings of Pandolfi, Mariella, 67, 306
Hope (Sarajevo, BiH), 66, 69, 76–77, 78–79, Paraguay: land rush over former Ayoreo habita-
273–76 tion in, 206–8, 301, 303; New Tribes Mission
Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 8, 298, 314n15 spotting a camp of forest Ayoreoa, 201; the
Nimrod, King (Old Testament), 133, 140 2004 Cojãnone-­Gari contact with Ayoreo
Nogueira, Oracy, 183 by, 197–98, 201–3. See also Ayoreo ­people
nonequilibrium dynamics: balance of nature (Paraguay)
theory ecol­ogy on, 252–56; catastrophe theory Pearl, Mrs. (Eastwood resident), 107
on thresholds of ecosystem stability, 253–54, Pearl, Pete (Eastwood resident), 107
254f; Lake Mendota whole-­lake experiments Pejei (Ayoreo ­people), 3, 208–9
on, 254–56 ­People for Animals (India), 155
Norgaard, Kari, 257, 259 ­People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Novo Hamburo (Brazil), 278–80, 280f, 284–85, (peta), 153
291 perpetual war: distinguishing malleable from
Noy, Benjamin, 113 intractable aspects driving, 218; reparative
nuclear disasters: Chernobyl, 258–59, 261, 262, “ecol­ogy of knowing” framing study of, 218;
263, 312; Fukushima, 261, 312; more nuclear study of artifacts of death and Cyprus state of,
irradiated environments due to, 312; Three 218–39. See also war
Mile Island, 302 Pesquisa Nacional em Domicílios (pnad)
“Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerta (the Death survey [Brazil], 183–90
Saint),” 123, 299–300 Petryna, Adriana, 5, 27, 29, 243, 287, 294, 311–12,
313
Obama, Barack, 310 phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals. See medi­cations
objects: artistic, 16, 178–79, 180–81; cartogra- philosophy: Deleuze’s exchanges between
phy, 7, 56–57, 176; material, 14–16; subject anthropology and, 7–10, 17, 47; ethnographic
of knowledge transformed by writing into reclaiming of anthropology of becoming
the, 193 from, 212–13, 214n30; Foucault on displace-
Occupy Wall Street, 22, 273 ment from accepted truth through, 30
Ong, Aihwa, 55 Physicians for ­Human Rights, 221, 240n13,
Orientalism (Said), 177 308
Orlowski, Jeff, 249 Piketty, Thomas, 20
Ortiz, Irene, 210, 211 place (territory): assemblage as concretization
Oscar (Vita’s chief caretaker), 278, 279 of power, desire, and, 55–56, 79–80; BiH as
Other, the: alterity as suspicion of self and assemblage of desire, ­peoples, hopes, griev-
discovery of, 193; anthropology as a science of ances, and, 79; land rush over former Ayoreo
the, 193; artistic cannibalization for becoming habitation (Paraguay), 206–8, 301, 303. See
the, 192–93; Fabian on lack of intersubjective also cartography; geographies of becomings
sharing of time and space of, 258; “mimetic plasticity: anthropology of becoming on sub-
faculty” or capacity to become the, 12; jects and lifeworlds, 3–6, 22–23; anthropology
openness to knowledge of the, 33; when “it” of becoming’s study of, 7; Butler’s study of
becomes “who” in genocide naming the, 232; self-­empowerment through experience and,
writing that becomes the, 193 12, 28, 95, 122; consequences of disregarding
Ottoman Empire: dispute over Armenian geno- in individual and collective strug­gles, 80–81;
cide history of, 233–35; Smyrna (now Izmir) Deleuze’s understanding of techno-­capitalism
burning [1923] in, 233–34, 235 and power’s, 24; ethnographic peopling of
Özlem (Islamic theology student), 2, 134, critical theory through study of, 11–14; Freud
135 on “allo-­plastic” capacity to alter real­ity, 12

index | 375
po­liti­cal sphere: animal activism relationship psychiatric rationality: abandonment by
to India’s, 153–56; becoming a subject path Catarina’s ­family excused through, 44–45,
­toward hopeful post­genocide, 235; challenges 46, 59; anthropological work to understand
of using big data to predict the, 27; declining politics and ethics of, 46; Brazil’s new regime
faith in liberal demo­cratic, 18–19; entangle- of public health leading to condition of,
ment with material objects, 16; ethnographic 59–60; Catarina’s narration of her abandon-
sensorium maintaining the space for engage- ment through, 1, 10, 17, 30, 41, 44–45, 46, 51–55,
ment in, 22–23; Fanon on the “I” in the, 12; 58–65; Deleuze’s thoughts used to understand
Metzl’s argument on treatment of ­mental Sarajevo’s “missing ­people,” 47, 65–72, 80–81.
illness framed by, 99–100; reemergence of See also anthropology of disability; humani-
religion in public sphere of, 19; “switching tarian psychiatry (Sarajevo, BiH); medicaliza-
points” moments of po­liti­cal maneuvers in, tion; ­mental health care
13; the uncounted and ambiguous in the, 21– ptsd (posttraumatic stress disorder): collective
22. See also nation-­states; social movements depression among Sarajevan lives along
Poniatowska, Elena, 115 with, 79; “The War Is Over but Sarajevans
poverty: Brazil’s population living in, 52; Cannot Find the Peace They Seek” article
Deleuze on capitalism’s role in maintaining, on, 71; “Yugo-­nostalgia” as symptom of, 73,
26; Eastwood neighborhood demographics 74, 78
and levels of, 96; evolving modes of control Pupavac, Vanessa, 67
implications for, 26–27; lit­er­a­ture on ­mental Purcell, Bridget, 10, 28, 133, 308, 309–10
illness risk ­factors of racism and, 100. See also
inequalities question-­machines (self), 17, 164
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 17, 152, 160 Qur­an: Kadir Gecesi (Night of Power) celebrat-
power: Anthropocene geological era on global ing revelation of, 133, 140–41; treating wart
workings of, 13–14; assemblage concretization by tying a string and reading verse of, 146;
of desire and, 55–56, 79–80; becoming as style Zehra’s story on reading the, 144, 310. See also
of noticing the dynamics of, 10; Deleuze’s Islam
writing on totalizing forms of knowledge
and, 7–9, 10; epigenet­ics understanding of Rabinow, Paul, 9, 49
evolution conditioned by, 14; ethnographic race: Butler’s theory of grief and systematic
fieldwork revelations about, 17; ethnographic dehumanization role of, 12, 28, 95, 122; color
sensorium to demystify capitalism and, (prejudice of mark) categorizing, 183; in­
22–23; Foucault on individual ethics vs. state, equality of grievable and ungrievable lives
137–38, 149n20; social reconfigurations of and, 122; multiplicity reworking of classifica-
discipline, profit, and, 24–28; Urstaat (state tion schemas of, 29–30. See also skin color
power), 301, 305, 315n17 racism: #BlackLivesMatter strug­gle against, 22,
Precarious Life (Butler), 95 98–99, 272, 298; lit­er­a­ture on ­mental illness
Prevention of Cruelty against Animals (pca) risk ­factors of poverty and, 100; progressive
Act [India, 1960], 154, 305 strug­gle against, 19. See also dehumanization
Prince­ton University, 250 Rafa, Padrino (Grupo Centro founder), 119–20,
Princi­ple of Hope, The (Bloch), 111, 128n15 124, 125, 300
prisons and discipline, 25 Ralph, Laurence, 5, 21, 29, 93, 294, 298, 299
projection modeling. See climate modeling Rancière, Jacques, 21, 22
Proj­ect Mohole (1961), 311 Rapp, Rayna, 24
Proj­ect Tiger conservation initiative (India), Raw and the Cooked, The (Lévi-­Strauss), 179
154 realities: Catarina’s creation of a new identity
Prometheus, 181 for more livable, 1, 45, 46, 57–58, 60, 63; eth-
Protest Psychosis, The (Metzl), 99 nography revealing unfinished subjects and,
Proust, Marcel, 84 31–32, 60; Freud on “allo-­plastic” capacity

376 | index
 to alter, 12; of Vita (Brazil) as one that kills, São Paulo (Brazil): Adriana Varejã­o’s skin color
278–79, 286 ink proj­ect, 2, 182–92; drought in, 256; mutual
reason: denialism of climate change, 257, 261–62; appropriation and cannibalization in art of, 303
detachment from accepted truth and, 30. See Sarajevo (Bosnia-­Herzegovina, BiH): confront-
also scientific knowledge ing the effects of international neoliberalism
Redfield, Peter, 270 on, 30; continuing trauma of war­time rape
religion: Chris­tian­ity, 139–40, 204–8; Eu­ro­pean victims living in, 65–66; examining becoming
religious ­battles over the Eucharist, 304; experience of, 75–77; failures of postwar gov-
gentrification of shrines across the world, ernance of, 66–67; humanitarian psychiatry
309; isis destruction of ancient ritual sites of, and psychologization of war’s aftermath in,
134; Islam, 137, 141–43, 149n17, 309; Mexico’s 45–47, 65–81; Koševo Hospital caring for
anexos folding together vio­lence and, 25, traumatized war victims, 65; local ngos left
121–22, 126, 294; missionary ethnocide to help ­people of, 66, 67–70; Locke’s observa-
through, 204–8, 302; reemergence in public tions on the continued strug­gles of, 274–76;
spheres of identity and politics, 19; Turkish the “missing ­people” of, 47, 65–72, 80–81; New
“orthodoxization” of local religiosity and, York Times travel writer on condition of post-
137–38; Zehra’s story on her trajectory in war, 72; outward evidence of normalcy hiding
belief and, 143–47, 148, 149n32, 310. See also continued prob­lems in, 274–75; residents
ritual landscape; Urfa ritual space longing for lost collectivities and solidarities,
Renshaw, Layla, 219 71–72; revisiting Mirza, Milan, and Maja (2015
Republic of Cyprus, 226. See also Cyprus and 2016) in, 275–76; a subjectivity defined
revolutions: Deleuze on failures of, 273; Deleuze by collective strug­gles in, 80–81; subjectiv-
on how ­people become revolutionary, 273, ity of a milieu, 72–74; using Deleuze’s work
274; Ira­nian revolution (1979), 302; precondi- to understand social transformation of, 45,
tions required for a, 273. See also social 50, 63, 76; Wings of Hope’s psychosocial
movements ser­v ices for youth of, 66, 69, 76–77, 78–79,
Rice, Tamir, 298 273–76; “Yugo-­nostalgia” for prewar, 73, 74, 78.
Rieff, Philip, 67 See also Bosnia-­Herzegovina (BiH); former
Rimbaud, Arthur, 9 Yugo­slavia
ritual landscape: anthropology of Islam’s limited Sard, Ed, 218
study of shifting, 134–35; examining how Šarić, Marija (Maja) [Wings of Hope director],
individuals orient themselves in shifting, 69, 72, 76–77, 275–76
135–36; Zehra’s story on her trajectory in the, Satija, Carmelia, 158–60, 164, 165–67, 304, 306
143–47, 148, 149n32, 310. See also religion; Urfa Schmittian, Carol, 301
ritual space Schwarcz, Lilia M., 16, 29–30, 173, 303
Rogers, Crystal, 2, 151–52, 153, 157, 158, 160, 304, scientific knowledge: denialism of climate
306 change, 257, 261–62; horizoning work of
Rohit (Indian animal activist), 163 climate scientists, 259–64, 295, 310–13; negoti-
Rorty, Richard, 18–19 ating climate threat with imperfect, 27, 29. See
Rosy (Ayoreo ­people), 210–11 also knowledge; reason
Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 193 Scott, Pastor (Eastwood neighborhood), 106, 107
Sebald, W. G., 261
Sacred City (Eastwood neighborhood, Chi- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 218, 220, 237
cago), 96 Segal, Judah, 149n28
Sahlins, Marshal, 177 Šehabović, Šejla, 271
Said, Edward, 177 self: Adriana Varejã­o’s art representing parody
salafi Islam, 309 of the, 174; alterity as discovery of Other
Sanal, Ashhan, 239 and suspicion of, 193; existential improvisa-
Santa Muerte (the Death Saint), 123 tion for “out of time,” 259; turned into a

index | 377
self (continued) (cmp) coverage by mass media and, 222, 237;
question-­machine by becoming, 17, 164. See Deleuze’s failure to consider control socie­ties
also individuals and tools of, 25; dependence of forensic theatre
self-­empowerment: Butler’s study of plastic- on mass media and, 222, 237, 241n22; U.S.
ity and experience role in, 12, 28, 95, 122; presidential election (2016) role of, 36n88. See
Eastwood’s community-­driven alternative also digital technologies; Internet
framework of care, 104–8 social movements: Arab Spring, 273; #Black-
Seremetakis, Nadia, 229, 230 LivesMatter, 22, 98–99, 272, 298; as full of
sexuality: Catarina’s narration on her own, becomings, 164–65; moment of hope for
54, 64; Foucault’s History of Sexuality better ­future created by, 271–73; Occupy Wall
on, 55 Street, 273; politics and antipolitics played out
sexual minorities: lesbian activism in India, through, 22; witnessing by, 156–64; Zapatista
165; progressive strug­gle for rights of, 19 social justice movements (Mexico), 300.
sexual vio­lence: Catarina’s story on her ex-­ See also po­liti­cal sphere; revolutions; social
husband’s, 53–54; Sarajevo’s Koševo Hospital’s justice
care for war­time victims of, 65 social pro­cesses: entanglement with material
“shadows of men,” 206 objects, 16; ethnographic work on dynamism
Shakespeare, William, 281, 282 of everyday becomings and, 43–44; ethnogra-
Shalins, Marshall, 301 phy as way of staying connected to changing,
Sibertin-­Blanc, Guillaume, 302 10–11
Sierra Leone, 269–70 social roles: Catarina/Catkine’s story on ­mental
’68 (Taibo), 116–17 health care remaking, 44–45, 46; psycholo-
skin color: “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolor gization of war aftermath in Sarajevo and
of Brazil) song on, 190; Brazil’s Pesquisa remaking of, 46–47
Nacional em Domicílios (pnad) on, 183–90; social theories. See theories
functioning as a language in Brazil, 183; “pig- social transformations: anthropology of dis-
mentocracy” creating hierarchies based on, ability on, 24; cannibalization in art use to
183. See also race; Tintas polvo (Octopus ink) manage question about, 175; challenge of
series [Varejão] understanding through quantitative models,
Small, Burton, 261 26–28; Deleuze on shift ­toward “control
Smyrna (now Izmir) burning [1923], 233–34, 235 socie­ties,” 23–25, 27; examining implica-
Snowden, Edward, 23 tions of Anonymous’s po­liti­cal tools for, 24;
social bonds: Catarina/Catkine’s story on experienced by Sarajevans through neoliberal
­mental health care remaking, 44–45, 46; rationalities, 30; general longing for, 2;
psychologization of war aftermath in Sarajevo Sarajevo’s urban poor still waiting for, 2–3;
and remaking of, 46–47 using Deleuze’s work to examine pro­cess of
social death of stasis, 12 Sarajevo’s, 46–47
social fields: Deleuze on potentials of desire, social worlds: Adriana Varejã­o’s art created from
unfinishedness, and transformation of, 43, subjectivities of culture and, 177–78; becom-
55; Deleuze’s theory of individuation and ing as style of noticing dynamics of power
formation of, 8–9, 10; ethnographic fieldwork and flight in, 10; collaboration of individual
to understand plasticity of, 12 narrators and unified voice to explore, 51; criti-
social justice: #BlackLivesMatter demands for, cal theory’s focus on ­people’s plasticity and
22, 98–99, 272; Bosnian Spring legacy of hope experiences in, 11–18; examining how individu-
and strug­gle for, 22, 271–73, 296. See also social als orient themselves to overlapping multiple,
movements 28–29; impact of neoliberalism encroachment
social media: Anonymous’s po­liti­cal use of, 24; into our, 19–20; inclusion and exclusion in,
Bosnian Spring coverage on mass media and, 27; multispecies ethnography on the ­human,
271–73; Cyprus Committee on Missing Persons animal, and material, 14–16; “poetic density”

378 | index
 of space shaping and reshaping, 139. See also unexpected findings through, 81–82; pieced
worlds/worldliness together into new theories and relationships,
socie­ties: of “anticipation-­warding off,” 301; 314; Sarajevo’s subjectivity as a milieu, 72–74
Deleuze on monetarial and ideological flows subjects: anthropology of becoming on plastic-
of, 9; Deleuze on the shift to “control,” 23–25, ity of lifeworlds and, 3–6, 22–23; archaeology
27; Foucault on transition from sovereign versus cartographic approach to defining,
to disciplinary, 23; “socie­ties of refusal,” 310, 56–57, 62; becomings of the colonized, 12–13;
315n18 Catarina’s “dictionary” as ethnographic
Society against the State (Clastres), 301 theory of herself as, 41, 44, 45, 51, 52–53,
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 57–58, 60–61, 62–65; Deleuze on the multiple
(spca), 151 construction of, 42; ethnographic theory
Socolow, Robert, 250, 312 as emerging from unfinishedness of, 31–32;
Sofia Mosque (Istanbul), 309 how their stories become part of researcher’s
South East Anatolia Development Proj­ect, 309 stories, 284; Tié as indigenous and bastard-
Soviet Union fall (1990s), 19 ized, 200; witnessed animal as “spectacle for a
space: becoming through experiences of time, specular,” 157. See also specific individuals
desire, and, 6; created by Turkish “orthodox- substance abuse: Ayoreo Cojñone-­Gari after-
ization” of local religiosity, 137–38; “poetic math and increase in, 210–11; Mexican anexos
density” shaping social life, 139; Urfa’s residential treatment centers for, 25, 118–27,
Balikligöl center as a ritual, 133–34, 137, 138–41; 129n35, 299–300; Mirza’s loss of hope in Bos-
Urfa’s “heterotopic,” 138 nia and life of, 275. See also Mexican drug war
Spanish civil war, 219 Sunni Islam: espoused by modern Turkey,
Spectacle of the Races, The (Schwarcz), 173, 177 137, 149n17; local reformer intermediaries
Srebrenica genocide anniversary (BiH), 2, 275 between Urfa citizens and state-­sanctioned,
stabilization wedges, 250–51, 312 142; Turkish politics of purification of, 141–43.
standardized testing, 25 See also Qur­an
Stasch, Rupert, 139 su-­vive (to live on), 314, 316n40
Sterling, Alton, 298 Sweig, Stefan, 304
Stewart, Kathleen, 10
Štiks, Igor, 272 Taibo, Paco Ignacio, 116–17
Stockholm ­Water Prize, 252 Taussig, Michael, 12, 212, 237
stories: Aasi (Ayoreo ­people), 201–2, 203; Telles, Edward, 183
Catarina’s ­children sharing and continuing “Tell My Story” (Greenblatt lecture), 281
her, 290f, 290–91; crafted from instances of temporalities: understanding ­people in dif­fer­
becoming, 29–33; Greenblatt on Genesis and ent kind of, 82–83; value of research that is
Apocrypha’s origin and ­human life, 281; how receptive to dif­fer­ent, 83. See also Cyprus time
ethnographic subjects become part of the re- machines
searcher’s, 284; Iraci (Vita resident), 280–81; territory. See place (territory)
of life as also a story of death, 279–80; Pejei Testmunhas oculares, x, y, z (Eyewitnesses, x, y, z)
(Ayoreo), 3, 208–9; Rosy (Ayoreo ­people), [Varejão], 175–77
210–11; Tié (Ayoreo ­people), 197, 198–99, theories: balance of nature, 252–56; catastrophe,
200. See also Catarina’s dictionary; lifeworlds; 253–54, 254f; contradictions in indigenous
myths populations, 211–13; critical theory, 11–18; De-
subjectivities: Adriana Varejã­o’s art created from leuze’s theory of individuation, 8–9; ecological
social and cultural, 177–78; Catarina’s writings nonequilibrium, 252–56; ethnographic, 30,
and Sarajevo postwar strug­gles as defining 31–32; ethnography’s capture of the implications
kinds of, 80–81; Deleuze on desire as undoing and impact of, 30–32; Hirschman on long-­term
forms of power and, 55; Fischer’s terrae incog- engagement with ­people as antidote to, 48;
nitae of, 57; how ethnographic analy­sis reveals impact on becomings by anthropological,

index | 379
theories (continued) 310; cave of Abraham in, 138–39, 140, 144,
30–31; as a multiplying “tool box” for action, 32, 308; relationship between Urfa province and,
294; new materialisms of con­temporary social 136–37; Smyrna (now Izmir) burning [1923]
theories, 16; subjectivities pieced together into in, 233–34, 235; state secularism (laiklik) and
new, 314 regulation of religious life in, 137; Sunni Islam
theory of individuation (Deleuze): on becom- espoused by modern, 137, 141–43, 149n17. See
ings as the second line, 8, 55; on line of flight, also Urfa (Turkey)
8–9, 55, 295; on segmentary line defining Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, 226. See
categories of ­people, 8, 55 also Cyprus
Thirty Tyrants amnesty (Athens 403 bce), 236, Turkish Cypriots: cmp working to identify inter-­
307–8 communal conflict victims among, 220–30;
Thom, René, 253 conflict between Greek Cypriots and, 218–19,
Thomas, Jo Jo (Mrs. Lana’s son), 93–94, 98, 221–22, 239–40n5; vio­lence by Greek Cypriots
101–2, 105, 298 (1974) against, 233, 307
Thomas the Apostle, St., 140
Thompson, Officer, 96 Undoing the Demos (Brown), 19–20
Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), unfinishedness: anthropology of becoming’s
111, 164, 301, 302 study of, 5–7; Deleuze on potentials of desire,
Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 302 transformation of social fields, and, 43, 55;
Tié (Ayoreo ­people): as indigenous and bastard- disposition for becoming driven by, 114–15;
ized subject, 200; on not having her own ethnographic theory as emerging from, 31–32;
story, 197, 198–99 openness to knowledge of ­Others and ethos
Tiko (Eastwood resident), 107 of, 33; power of art to invoke the ­human
time machines. See Cyprus time machines potential of, 84; zen elementary exercise on,
Tintas polvo (Octopus ink) series [Varejão]: 295, 313–14
background of the, 182–83; drawing from United Kingdom Brexit (2016), 18
Brazil’s pnad survey, 183–90; En­glish United Nations (un): BiH international
translation for NYC exhibition (2014), 192; as protectorate role of, 67; Cyprus’s Commit-
expression of cannibalization, 2, 182–92; social tee on Missing Persons (cmp) established
function of skin color in Brazil expressed in, ­under auspices of, 220–39, 307; Cyprus Green
183. See also race; skin color Line (1958) cease-­fire line established by,
tipping points. See climate tipping points 218, 219, 221; reporting on “huge de­pen­dency
Tito, Josip Broz, 73 syndrome” of BiH, 73–74
Totobiegosode-­Ayoreo. See Ayoreo ­people United States: backlash against progressive
(Paraguay) inclusion in the, 18–19; changing dynamics of
transformation. See social transformations wildfires in the, 247–48; election of Trump to
Travis (Mrs. Lana’s son), 102, 103–4, 105, 106 presidency of the, 18; institutional transforma-
Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-­Strauss), 179 tions ­going on in, 25; shift in diagnosis of
Trump, Donald J., 18 schizo­phre­nia in the, 99; social media role in
truth-­and-­reconciliation pro­cess: comparing 2016 presidential election of the, 36n88
Athens (203 bce) and Cyprus potential for, University of Sarajevo (BiH), 69, 71
236–37, 307–38; question of pos­si­ble Cyprus, University of Wisconsin’s Center for Limnology,
226 251, 252
Tsing, Anna L., 15–16 Urfa (Turkey): description and population
Tswana ­people (southern Africa), 12 of, 136; early history of “Orhay” or, 139–40;
Tupinamba ­women cannibal feasting (sixteenth Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (gap) in,
­century), 303, 304 148n14; “heterotopia” space of, 138; Kadir
Turkey: Armenian genocide disputed by, 233–35; Gecesi (Night of Power) celebrated in, 133,
broad changes ­under President Erdoğan in, 140–41, 148n1; relationship between Turkey

380 | index
 and province of, 136–37; rise of Islamic revival vio­lence: Ayoreo ­people living in postcolonial
in, 141–42; state “orthodoxization” of local and neo­co­lo­nial, 26, 31; Bloch on construc-
religiosity in, 137–38; state-­sponsored Sunni tion of better ­future and role of, 31, 111, 113–15,
Islam in, 137, 141–43, 149n17; zen elementary 117, 120, 126, 127, 128n15; cow protection
exercise on becoming of, 295, 308–10. See also (gauseva) association with caste, 153–54; as
Turkey force for annihilation and also hope, 127;
Urfa ritual space: Chris­tian­ity ­adopted into, Idgah slaughter­house (New Delhi) animal,
130–40; layered nature of, 140–41; ­Mother 159–60; increase of Mexico City kidnappings
Mary Church, 140; “poetic density” of the, and, 123–24; Mexican darkness manifested by,
139; politics of purification in the, 141–43, 115–16; of Mexico City demonstration (2014),
149n28; state “orthodoxization” of local 112; Mexico’s anexos folding together religion
religiosity and, 137–38; Zehra’s story on her and, 25, 121–22, 126; stalking small indigenous
trajectory in, 143–47, 148, 149n32, 310. See populations, 211; witnessing of, 156–60. See
also Balikligöl ritual center (Urfa, Turkey); also genocide; war
religion; ritual landscape Vita (Biehl), 41, 59, 291, 295. See also
Urstaat (state power), 301, 305, 315n17 Catarina/Catkine (Catarina Inês Gomes
urusoi (madness), 208–10 Moraes)
U.S. Department of ­Labor, 245 Vita (Brazil): Clóvis and Luis Carlos residents
U.S. Forest Ser­vice, 247 of, 62, 64; death of Catarina at, 278–79;
utopia: Bloch on central function of, 115, 127; emergence as part of institutional transforma-
socie­ties of “anticipation-­warding off ” and fig- tion, 25, 59; Iraci’s story, 280–81, 295; Jorge’s
ures of, 301; suggested by anexos as potential work as infirmary caregiver at, 288; mentally
real­ity, 127 impaired Vaquinha and Caminhãozinho who
live at, 285–86; origins and description of,
Valmir (Catarina’s dictionary), 62 51, 52; Oscar, chief caretaker at, 278, 279; as
Vaquinha ( João Paulo Nestore Soares) [Vita a real­ity that kills, 278–79, 286; return trip
resident], 285–86 (2011) to, 285–88; society of bodies of the
Varejão, Adriana: cannibalization and coloniza- abandoned living at, 52–53; visiting Lili at,
tion in art of, 174–75, 182–94, 303; exploring 286–88; visiting Vilma at, 286; as zone of
multiple meanings of art with, 16, 174–78; abandonment, 52, 53. See also anthropology of
“Eyewitnesses” by, 303–4; incorporating idea disability; Brazil; Catarina/Catkine (Catarina
of cartography in art of, 176; learning about Inês Gomes Moraes)
art from, 173–78; Testmunhas oculares, x, y, z Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 175
(Eyewitnesses, x, y, z) by, 175–77; Tintas polvo
(Octopus ink) series by, 2, 182–92; under- war: Bosnia-­Herzegovina (BiH) deaths and
standing her art as parody, 174 population displacements during, 67; Cyprus
“Varejar, ladrilhar: uma cartografia ladrilhada da inter-­communal conflict, 217–39; Locke’s
obra da artista” (Schwarcz), 175 work on postwar psychologization of, 45–47,
Venizelos, Eleftherios, 233 65–81; “permanent war economy” of, 218;
Venus study (Hansen), 258, 313 Spanish civil war, 219; World War II, 234,
Vera (adoptive ­mother of Catarina’s child), 279, 243, 261. See also genocide; perpetual war;
280, 282, 288 vio­lence
Vibrant ­Matter (Bennett), 16 “The War Is Over but Sarajevans Cannot Find
viciosos (Puyedie, or Prohibited Ones) [Ayoreo the Peace They Seek” (Daily Telegraph
­people], 210–11 article), 71
Vidal, Gore, 218 War on Drugs. See Mexican drug war
Villegaignon, chevalier de (Nicolas Durand), Way of the Masks, The (Lévi-­Strauss), 179
303–4 wedge stabilization, 250–51, 312
Vilma (Vita resident), 286 Welfare for Stray Dogs (India), 156

index | 381
West Africa: Ebola epidemic and revelations World War II: allies’ bombings of German cities
of global health deficits in, 19, 270; global during, 261; carbon dioxide (co2) and toxic
health’s “minimal biopolitics” operations in, gases released during, 243; Holocaust of, 234
270; Sierra Leone, 269–70 wounded ­horse encounter (India): Crystal Rog-
“What ­Children Say” (Deleuze), 56 ers’s activism triggered by, 2, 151–52, 153, 158,
white flight, cities reshaped through, 25 160, 306; description of the, 151–52
Whitehead, George, 222 writing: becoming the Other through, 193;
wildfires: California (2015), 247; Cerro Grande Deleuze on benefits for missing ­people, 45, 50,
wildfire (2000), 248; changing dynamics 63, 76, 200; ekphrasis (images in words), 192;
of, 247–48; Dome Fire (1996), 247, 248; Las reconciling art and, 178; for Sarajevo’s missing
Conchas fire (2011), 247–48 ­people, 47, 65–72, 80–81. See also Catarina’s
Wings of Hope (Sarajevo, BiH): evolution from dictionary; lit­er­a­ture
“psychodetraumatization” to ­family support Writing Culture (Marcus and Clifford), 48–49
ser­vices, 69, 76–77, 78–79; Locke’s fieldwork
at, 66, 69, 76–77, 78–79; Maja’s work as “Yugo-­nostalgia” (Sarajevo, BiH), 73, 74, 78
executive director of, 69, 72, 76–77, 275–76; Yugo­slavia. See former Yugo­slavia
multisystemic approach to psychosocial sup-
port now used at, 276; observations of small Zapatista social justice movements (Mexico),
and marginal becomings in, 273–74 300
witnessing: Carmelia Satija on her, 159–60, Zehra (Urfa citizen), 143–47, 148, 149n32, 310
166–67; Crystal Rogers’s on the event of her, zen exercises: catching moments of becom-
151–52, 153, 158, 160; Derrida’s cautions about, ings, 293; examples of power­ful affective
157; Erika Abrams-­Meyers’s experience with anthropological, 294–95; New Delhi (animal
death, 163–64, 166; as intimate event followed rights activists) example of, 304–7; restaging
by becoming animal, 152, 160–64; obligation zen moments of becoming through, 293;
to live ­after, 158; significance and implica- São Paulo (cannibalized art) example of,
tions of, 157; three ele­ments of, 156–57; time 303–4. See also anthropology of becoming;
machine function of Cyprus death artifacts becomings
form of, 217, 219–20, 226–32. See also Cyprus zen exercises list: calligraphies (Eastwood
Committee on Missing Persons (cmp); death neighborhood, Chicago), 298–99; calligra-
­women: association of death with, 241n29– phies (Mexico City anexos), 295, 299–300;
42n29, 308; cmp image of caring for bones by camaraderies and trajectories (Brazil and
careful, 231, 308; how the dead are adorned by Bosnia-­Herzogovina), 295–97; cannibalizing
the Inner Maniat, 229, 230; images of mourn- and indie-­gestion (Ayoreo ­people, Paraguay),
ing, 222, 241n22; Mexican drug war image of 295, 301–3; horizoning and emergent forms
encobijado (murdered body), 126; Mexican of life (climate change), 295, 310–13; poisoned
femicide pandemic, 126; progressive strug­gle histories, divided cities (Cyprus), 295, 307–8;
for rights of, 19; Tupinamba w ­ omen cannibal poisoned histories, divided cities (Urfa,
feasting (sixteenth ­century), 303, 304 Turkey), 295, 308–10; swinging the pendulum
World Health Organ­ization, 19 (affective-­material shifts or movements), 295,
worlds/worldliness: ethnography sensorium 297–98; unfinished exercises and lifelines,
providing a way back into, 17–18, 21–23; 295, 313–14
historic roots of crisis over our humanity and, Zimmerman, George, 98
19–20; po­liti­cal sphere of the uncounted and Žižek, Slavoj, 271, 272
ambiguous in the, 21–22. See also lifeworlds; Zuhal (Islamic theology student), 2, 134,
social worlds 135

382 | index
plate 1 (above) Adriana Varejão, Varal [Rack], 1993

plate 2 (opposite, top) Adriana Varejão, Parede com incisões a la Fontana, 2000

plate 3 (opposite, bottom) Adriana Varejão, O sedutor, 2004

plate 4  ​Adriana Varejão, Proposta para uma catequese—­Parte I (díptico): Morte e esquartejamento, 1993
plate 5 ​Adriana Varejão, Proposta para uma catequese—­Parte II (díptico): Aparição e relíquias, 1993
plates 6–11 ​Adriana Varejão, details
from Testemunhas Oculares X, Y e Z, 1997
plate 12  ​Adriana Varejão, Prato com mariscos, 2011
plate 13 ​Adriana Varejão, Mãe d’Água, 2009
plate 14 (opposite) ​Adriana Varejão, Tintas Polvo, 2013

plate 15 (above) ​Adriana Varejão, Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series), 2014

plate 16 (above) ​Adriana Varejão, Em segredo, 2003

plate 17 (opposite) ​Adriana Varejão, Cadernos de viagem: Yãkoana, 2003

plate 18 ​Adriana Varejão, Éden, 1992
plate 19 ​Adriana Varejão, Mapa de Lopo Homem II, 1992–2004