THE PROMISE 51

The Promise: On the Morality of the

Marginal and the Illicit

Angela Garcia

Abstract Moral engagement in the setting of drug addiction is often at odds with prevailing moral discourse
and is treated in punitive terms. In this article, I explore how one moral gesture—a promise between a heroin-using
mother and daughter—embodies the difficulty and ambiguity of moral experience in the context of addiction
and offers insight into how it is profoundly shaped by social processes. By offering a close description of the
promise over time, I show how morality is lived through sentiments and practices of care and commitment, which
are vulnerable to isolation, punishment, and wounding. The story of the promise thus offers a way to reflect upon
morality as the blurring of these different intensities. [morality, ethics, care, incarceration, addiction]

In my work on addiction and family life, I have encountered experiences that blur the bound-
aries of vice and virtue, alienation and connection, injury and care (Garcia 2010, 2008). In
describing these tensions, I have tried to dismantle the symbolic order that excludes ethical
engagement in discourses of the illicit and have emphasized the “ordinary virtues” of senti-
ments and practices that are typically at odds with normative claims of morality (Todorov
1996; see also Lambek 2010).1 Conceiving the moral and the illicit not as opposites but as
processes coexisting in the life of drug users, I have emphasized the concrete moral concerns
and commitments of subjects living in dense, local worlds. This requires a focus not only
on “the sheer difficulty of actual human deliberation,” but also on the historical context
in which it unfolds (Nussbaum 1986:13). This context is absolutely critical to understand-
ing what constitutes life lived virtuously and well and how processes at once political and
intersubjective shape moral experience (Desjarlais 1997; Kleinman 1998; Walker 1998).

Approaching the moral as a mode of inhabiting the world, I have been interested in the
ethical dimensions of addictive experience and how these gain or lose shape in relation to
intimate and institutional pressures. What is at stake for me is ethnographically attending to
the ways that addicted kin absorb, share, lessen and ignore each others’ pain and how these
responses fluctuate in relation to life conditions. My hope is that such work has the potential
to recuperate the marginalized subject (the drug addicted) within and beyond Western moral
discourse, while also “contributing to collective memory that sustains political community”
through the process of remembering, documenting, and reimagining moral experience (Shari
Stone-Mediatore cited in Code 2002:165; see also Cixous 1981).

ETHOS, Vol. 42, Issue 1, pp. 51–64, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. 
C 2014 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12038

52 ETHOS

In this essay, I turn my attention to a particular figure and expression of moral experience,
rendered here as a promise. The narrative I offer stems from several years of close ethno-
graphic engagement with heroin users living in northern New Mexico’s Española Valley.
Since the early 1990s, this impoverished region has had the highest rate of heroin addiction
and heroin-induced death in the United States.2 Heroin addiction in the Española Valley
primarily affects the Hispano population, which traces its ancestry back to the early Spanish
colonialists. The Spanish began settling the area in the 17th century through a system of
land grants, which remained in the family lineage for generations. These land grants enabled
families to live in close geographic proximity and to work collectively, thereby creating and
sustaining crucial social, material, and affective bonds.

Today, heroin addiction is commonly shared across multiple generations of blood-related

kin, whom often live in a single, shared household. Against the backdrop of entrenched
poverty, isolation from health and social services, and the pervasive experience of heroin
overdose and incarceration, these households carry an overwhelming responsibility for the
fragile survival and strivings of its members. Hispano families contending with addiction
have experienced many generations of economic dispossession and social fragmentation.
Narratives of addiction are thus entwined with those of kinship and loss and are in many
ways constitutive of them; they reveal how Hispano addictive experience is informed both
by memory and morality.

This article focuses on a relationship between a mother and daughter—I call them Eugenia
and Bernadette—because their narrative vividly demonstrates the texture of contemporary
moral life for Hispano families struggling with intergenerational heroin addiction.3 Their
story centers on a promise that I suggest expresses a much larger fabric of moral engagement,
including the conflicting responsibilities and punishing demands to which addicted kin are
often called to respond. By considering their promise over time, I show that morality is shaped
by the exigencies of everyday life, including addiction, mental illness, and incarceration. I
argue that these pressure points are not opposed to morality; rather, they hold it as well.
Morality is manifest in and through these points, yet it too often goes unnoticed or is
undervalued by dominant moral discourses.

Promises can be manifestations of moral experience. The linking of one’s word to one’s life,
as in—I swear to you on my life—mediates between self and other, speech and action. In its
most basic form, the promise represents a commitment, which can be enunciated, broken,
or fulfilled for an endless variety of reasons. In considering the promise in the setting of
addiction, I do not aspire to conceptual universality, nor do I suggest that all Hispano
heroin addicts embody the particular moral narrative that concerns me here. Rather, I
am interested in the interplay in which a particular promise was made, the intimate and
institutional relations in which it was embedded, and the desire for, and challenge of, its
fulfillment. This constellation of concerns is fundamental to thinking about the complexity
of moral experience as it is lived on the margins of what is generally considered “good” or
“right.” The narrative of Bernadette’s promise to her mother may thus provide a conceptual
 THE PROMISE 53

and ethnographic frame for thinking about the characteristics, complexity, and stakes of
living a moral life, especially for those contending with extremely difficult circumstances.

The Life of Promises

The promise has long been an exemplary figure for political and moral philosophy, which
has generally focused on the ethical principles that inform their enunciation and function
(Baier 1985; Foot 2002; Kant 1996). Work on promises is also prominent in the philosophy
of language, feminist theory, and other diverse areas (Austin 1975; Butler 1997; Cavell 1979).
My engagement with the promise moves away from theories that relate it to codified rules
or law-like morality. Rather, I consider it as a mode of living. Time shapes the promise,
as time shapes life, and imbues it with different affects and understandings at different
moments. Attending to the life of promises may provide a rich framework for reflecting on
the fluctuation of human desire, narrative, and relations over time.

As a provisional guide for thinking about Bernadette’s promise, I’ve taken cues from Paul
Ricoeur’s insights on the promise as the attestation of one’s availability to another and as the
grounds for ethics. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur argues that the promise is a commitment
to act in response to the appeal of another: the subject hears the call of the other with who
they are in dialogue and is compelled to respond.4 Crucially, the immediacy of obligation is
presented by the exigencies of one’s embeddedness in relational and pragmatic arrangements
(1992; see also Butler 2005). For Ricoeur, the life of a promise is based within a complex
net of affective, material, and practical relations—what he calls a “constitutive community”
(1992:154). Despite the highly variant context of promises, in the act of promising the subject
expresses their commitment to the other. According to Ricoeur, this commitment presumes
a self-constancy or “holding firm” on behalf of the promise maker.

The implication that I wish to draw out is that, contained within the promise, there is
always the possibility of breaking, and this possibility is closely associated with the passing
of time. Indeed, keeping one’s promise stands as a challenge to time. “Even if my desire
were to change,” Ricoeur writes, “even if I were to change my opinion or my inclination, ‘I
will hold firm’ [‘je maintiendrait’] (1992:124). By emphasizing the faithfulness to a promise
that has been given, the promise remains situated within a context of ongoing need and
responsiveness. For Ricoeur, the ethical subject is constituted in and through their response
to another’s need, and their commitment to it, even in the face of change.

Like the other authors in this collection of essays, I believe that we might best understand
complex moral issues by attending to how they gain expression in language, emotion, and
action, thereby forcing our attention to the hidden and sometimes fraught articulations of
human agency and dependency, care, and need (Mattingly 2012). I would like to evoke
the moral complexity arising from being suspended between a promise’s ongoing demand
and the “work of time,” which unravels and reweaves one’s obligations and capacities (Das
2007). How does one remain responsive to the compelling moral claims of another within
54 ETHOS

and against the demands of the broader social world, one’s own personal needs and desires,
and the passing of time? In what ways does a promise’s endurance or expiration acknowledge
something of the relation of the self to the other and to ethical modes of being? How might
we remain attuned to the possibility that the promise may manifest alternative or shifting
moral projects and expressions of commitment?

Before turning to Eugenia and Bernadette and to how their promise draws our attention to
these questions, let me say that there are aspects of their story that were shared by many of the
heroin-using families that I came to know. During my fieldwork, I listened to many family
members describe what they should or should not do in regards to another, especially as it
concerned feelings or events involving drugs. I witnessed individuals called by state officials
and clinicians to explain enduring commitments to kin and/or substances, usually in an
effort to dismantle these commitments in order to establish presumably normative feelings,
relations, and modes of conduct. I saw families separated and emotions and individual
managed, often through incarceration and forcible medication, as well as how these families
challenged and repelled these interventions through enunciations of dependency, care, and
commitment.

These countervailing gestures were often expressed through the figure of the promise—
the promise to make good on one’s word; to not give or deny one another drugs; to take
care of kin; and to always remember each other and honor one another through long
periods of separation, incarceration, or even death. Such promises, which often emerged
against the backdrop of personal risk and constraint, were something more than mere
availability or obligation. Rather, they exemplified a morality that emerged from, and was
articulated through, the exigencies of everyday life. Through the story of Eugenia and
Bernadette’s promise, I hope to render the moral strivings of those living outside the norms
of what is generally considered a virtuous life and present an understanding of the moral that
expresses itself through narratives of loss and hope, rituals of heroin use, and institutional
arrangements. All of these are entwined with the figure of the promise I describe below.

The Arts of Care

In the cold, spring months of 2004, I met Bernadette Martinez, a 30-year-old woman with
long black hair and piercing, green eyes. Following a drug-related arrest, she was sentenced
to drug detoxification at the rural recovery program where I worked as an ethnographer and
clinical staff. I observed Bernadette’s month-long stay during my work on the night shift
and often attended to her basic needs. In subsequent ethnographic interviews, I learned that
her mother Eugenia was also addicted to heroin and suffered from life-long, debilitating
depression. I also learned that Bernadette had two children, an estranged teenage son who
lived with a relative and a young daughter who lived with her until her arrest.

Upon completion of detox, an electronic monitoring bracelet was attached to Bernadette’s

ankle, and she was confined to her trailer until her trial date. Her only legal time away from
 THE PROMISE 55

home was to meet with her drug counselor, probation officer, and to attend 12-step recovery
meetings. Still, she would steal a few moments between these meetings to visit her daughter,
who had been placed under the care of another relative, or her mother. Mostly, however,
Bernadette waited at home, alone.

I visited Bernadette often during this period, making the short drive from my village to
hers. I brought her groceries and cigarettes, and she told me stories about her life. Often
these stories centered on “another time,” well before she started using heroin, when she and
Eugenia lived in their ancestral village, in their ancestral home, where Eugenia was born and
where her own mother (Bernadette’s grandmother) died. Bernadette spoke nostalgically of
the home and the events that took place within it—birthday parties, Christmases, picking
fruit from the apple and apricot trees from surrounding acres. Sometimes she showed photos
that visualized her memories. But the bucolic image of the house and the positive memories
of it stood in tension with the other stories Bernadette eventually told me, including her
recollections of her mother’s addiction and emotional state, their deepening poverty, and
her own growing loneliness and worry.

When Bernadette was 12, Eugenia sold the ancestral home and the two relocated to a
rented trailer in a neighboring town. There, Eugenia’s addiction and depression worsened,
interfering with her ability to work and pay rent. At the age of 13, Bernadette began working
on the weekends in order to contribute to the running of the household. She recalled,

That’s when I really knew there was something going on with my mom with drugs.
She’d be crying all the time and sick with las malias [literally, maladies; pain associated
with heroin withdrawal]. She didn’t go to work and I started staying home from school,
you know, to watch her, make sure nothing worse happened. She’d cry for her medicina
[drugs, usually heroin]. That’s what she called it.

During this period, there were very few mental health or addiction services in the Española
Valley, despite the awareness of the growing drug problem. Moreover, there was profound
stigma attached to being a heroin-addicted woman, especially a mother. This stigma made
accessing the already limited services even more challenging for Eugenia. In response,
Bernadette crafted her own form of caring for her mother, which meant obtaining “medicina”
to relieve her pain. Bernadette described, “I wanted her to feel better. That’s all that mattered
to me. I was afraid she was going to die. I was afraid and the only thing I could do is help
her get high.”

Like many second-generation heroin users, Bernadette’s childhood included scoring drugs
for her parent. This meant seeking drugs from a relative, friend, or stranger. Such work,
though illegal and often dangerous, is conceived as an effort to provide kin with care and
protection, as well as a means to live. It must also be understood as a manifestation of
constraints (legal, therapeutic, gendered) that occluded other possible forms of care and liv-
ing. Bernadette recalled that once Eugenia got her fix “life would go back to normal,”
meaning Eugenia would stop hurting and would be released into feelings of love and
56 ETHOS

connectedness—feelings Bernadette also craved and needed. But as Eugenia’s addiction

and depression worsened, such feelings diminished.

During this period of Bernadette’s life, the first epidemiological studies of heroin addiction
in the Española Valley were conducted. This coincided with the escalation of the nation’s
“War on Drugs.” The prosecution of low-level drug offenses and mandatory minimum
sentences have had a devastating impact on women and families. In New Mexico, as in
much of the United States, the number of convictions for women with nonviolent drug
offenses skyrocketed. Around this time, the first privately run women’s prison in the United
States was established in a remote corner of northwest New Mexico, where Bernadette was
eventually incarcerated.

Bernadette began smoking heroin with a boyfriend at the age of 15. Soon, her mother
became her primary drug partner, a transition she once described to me as “natural” and
“safe,” especially given the more precarious and frequently violent relations she had with
male drug partners.5 At 16, Bernadette dropped out of high school and became her mother’s
primary drug partner. Their relationship as heroin addicts and kin was collectively organized
around the heroin: they hustled for it, shared it, kicked it, and took care of one another when
one was ill with drug-related sickness. The interdependencies that were produced through
heroin become a part of Bernadette and Eugenia’s relational mix—an embodied medium
of mutual understanding and commitment. Indeed, the circulation of heroin between them
became a kind of “ethical substance” through which care was performed and commitment
reaffirmed, but in the context of further fragmentation and subjection (Foucault 1990).

Bernadette often told me that the reason that she and her mother were still alive was because
they understood and cared for one another—in essence, that they were dependent upon one
another. Instead of seeing this relationship of dependency as one of weakness, as dependency
is often described, Bernadette presented it as a resource for being included, loved, and cared
for (Kittay 1998). Aware of normative notions of morality (and the ethical purchase of
personal choice and autonomy in drug recovery), Bernadette also recognized that it might
be hard for some to surmise such dependency as moral, especially given their status as
“addicts.” But to dismiss Bernadette’s insights into the life-sustaining aspects of dependency
would not only flatten our understanding of this complex domain but would also refuse to
acknowledge its vital importance in her life.

“To care is to embody an argument about what a good life is and how such a good life
comes into being,” Elizabeth Povinelli writes. “Thus, the arts of caring for others always
emerge from and are a reflection on broader historical material conditions and institutional
arrangements” (2010:19–20). For Eugenia and Bernadette, the arts of care included small
gestures meant to ease pain. Produced at the intersection of individual agency and social
constraint, these gestures were articulated through rituals of heroin use. They may have
wounded as much as they healed. Nevertheless, they were oriented toward relieving the pain
of the other and, as such, they were moral acts, embedded in the everyday context of shared
vulnerability and difficult life circumstances.
 THE PROMISE 57

I have told the story of Bernadette’s early years in a rather linear way to provide some basic
plot to her life. Most of what I have shared thus far Bernadette told me during my visits with
her while she was under house arrest. There were many other points of interaction, too,
which took place in different settings, at different times, and with other people, including her
mother, her children, and the legal and medical officials with whom Bernadette was engaged.
All of these interactions impressed upon me the varying and often conflicting understandings
of what Bernadette described as “care” and how articulations of it emerged simultaneously
from ideas of responsibility and dependency, as well as from histories and experiences of
negligence and hurt. Put differently, the ordinary gestures of care associated with drug use,
and the dependencies upon which they were staked, had complex moral value—resistant to
easy proscriptions or pronouncements. This constellation of feelings, practices, and social
pressures is exemplified in the story of Eugenia and Bernadette’s promise, which I describe
below.

A Daughter’s Word
On a winter morning in 2003, after a series of domestic disturbances and complaints of
drug dealing by neighbors, police raided Eugenia’s trailer. Significant quantities of heroin,
marijuana, and drug paraphernalia were discovered at the scene. Bernadette was present
at the time of the bust; Eugenia was not. Approximately a year after the raid, Bernadette
was convicted of the felony offense and was sentenced to five years in prison. Months later,
Eugenia was sentenced to three years of probation.

At first, Bernadette’s physical presence in her mother’s trailer, along with the drugs, seemed
to be the deciding factor in the disproportionate ruling. Moreover, Bernadette had a well-
known history of drug addiction, which involved prior misdemeanor convictions. While this
criminal history influenced her sentence, the most significant factor was later revealed to be
what she later described to me as her “promise” of silence. Over time, I came to understand
this promise of silence as an expression of her care and commitment to her mother, whom
she wished to protect.

I first learned of Bernadette’s promise during my visits with her in the months before her
sentencing. She told me the story in a series of fragments—a few details one visit, a few
more the next—leaving me to piece together its major threads. She often began recounting
scenes or conversations with the comment that she didn’t want to talk about what it was
she was about to say or that she shouldn’t talk about it. I never pushed and often shifted
the conversation toward lighter matters. But Bernadette would soon steer the conversation
back, repeating her ambivalence about talking about the events surrounding the bust, but
also expressing relief in discussing them.

As it turned out, Eugenia’s was helping to “move” the drugs for someone else, in ex-
change for heroin to sustain her own addiction. The other person disappeared immedi-
ately after the raid, leaving Eugenia and Bernadette to sort out the consequences. Around
58 ETHOS

this time, Eugenia was in an especially bad state; her depression had become unbearable,
and she recently suffered an overdose. These factors weighed heavily on Bernadette. “I
couldn’t let her go through it,” she explained, referring to the likely consequences of a
trial.

Initially, Bernadette’s version of events seemed to me like a harrowing story of kinship roles
and obligations gone awry—of a daughter assuming the role of an overprotective and self-
effacing mother, while the mother sank into the role of a victimized child. In time, however,
it became clear to me that the texture of emotions that bound Bernadette to Eugenia, and
Bernadette to her promise, went beyond the figurations of kinship and principles of duty.
Indeed, what seemed to weigh most heavily upon Bernadette was her worry about Eugenia’s
worsening mental health and possible death—a worry that was the accumulation of previous
episodes of illness, caregiving, and associated emotions. These past events and memories
shaped Bernadette’s emotional and practical response to the troubling circumstances at
hand.

Ultimately, Bernadette took responsibility for the drugs as a means to keep Eugenia out
of prison and alive. She considered herself stronger, healthier, and more able to endure
the challenge of prison life and to negotiate the unknown. In one of our conversations,
Bernadette pointed out that her mother was “a farmer’s daughter” and had been raised
in “another time.” She, on the other hand, had always inhabited the world of drugs and
addiction. Bernadette drew this distinction to subtly convert her lifelong association with
drugs and addiction into strength. In shouldering the blame for the drugs, Bernadette was
claiming her own status as a moral agent, of being capable of claiming the “right” thing to
do in a difficult situation.

This was not an arrangement she entered into lightly. Indeed, she was well aware that she
might lose her own daughter in this ethical act and that she would likely cause friction with
others. But Bernadette responded to the compelling needs of Eugenia, and her response
held her own desire to make possible the presence of her mother within her own life, well
into the future.

In various ways, Bernadette made clear that Eugenia never explicitly articulated her need for
Bernadette to shoulder the blame for the drugs. Instead, her need was conceived over the
course of a lifetime and was rooted in everyday scenes that Bernadette shared with me over
many years of discussion. In this manner, I have come to understand that Bernadette’s act as
both a gesture of moral responsibility and an expression of a relation of mutual dependency,
care, and commitment.6

Such complex, ethical transactions are common among addicts, who must continually weigh
a sense of responsibility and commitment for others against the legal implications accom-
panying drug use. Because of this tension, the labor of caring for the other is sometimes
experienced as burden or regret. Indeed, in caring for her mother, Bernadette’s relationship
with her own children—her status as a mother—and her relationship with the larger social
 THE PROMISE 59

world was threatened. Her awareness of this threat was especially acute when she calculated
her likely prison sentence in terms of her daughter’s age and the passing of time. Anticipating
conviction, she often imagined: “if I am convicted tomorrow and I get three years I’ll be out
by time she’s seven.” Or, “If I am paroled in two, I’ll be out by time she’s in kindergarten.”
Such calculations might be understood as lamentations of a loss of life that would accompany
incarceration. But they were also expressions of Bernadette’s hope for a habitable life in the
future—for her mother, her daughter, and herself.

In his book on the cultural collapse of the Crow Nation, Jonathan Lear (2006) offers the
notion “radical hope” to express the complex ethical relationship between destruction and
survival. Focusing on the testament of the tribe’s last chief Plenty Coups who led his people
through their civilization’s collapse, Lear considers the possibilities of hope for life, albeit
life in a form that cannot be anticipated. Such hope is radical, Lear says, because it is
“directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it
is” (206:103). Without the promise of a redemptive future, radical hope is the commitment
to survival and to the possibility that life may one day flourish again.

Lear’s idea of radical hope provides a framework for interpreting forms of commitment
to the presence of possibility in the context of diminishing life chances. He makes clear
that radical hope does not mean that one necessary finds solace in commitment, nor does
it mean that the possible is necessarily “positive.” Rather, radical hope refers to the stark
acknowledgment that, because of terrible circumstances, life has ceased to be as it once was
but may nevertheless one day start again. Such hopefulness presents a picture of the moral
that embraces its own vulnerability and unpredictability. In my view, the mutual shadowing
of collapse and possibility that characterizes radical hope resonates with the striving that is
exemplified by Bernadette’s promise of silence—of her effort to protect her mother, and a
future, at the price of her own freedom.

When describing this silence, Bernadette relied on the Hispano idiom compromiso, which
blends the notions of promise and commitment. Compromiso is employed in many ways,
such as when someone describes their sense of obligation or fidelity to another person
or ideal. In more recent years, the meaning of compromiso has been reworked, drawing
from the English term “compromise,” to also suggest difficulty, especially in being in an
awkward or painful position. Many addicts I talked to conjoined these meanings and drew
upon compromiso to describe a fraught sense of responsibility for, or commitment to,
addicted kin.

Early on in our conversations, Bernadette spoke of her compromiso as mutual and enduring,
and referred to it in the collective sense—ours not mine. It emerged over a shared course
of intense, intersubjective experience that, in the case of Eugenia and Bernadette, flashed
within an intensified context of threat and care. Her compromiso illuminates what Ricoeur
means by the promise as an obligation to act in response to the appeal of another and to
adhere to this obligation over time, well into the future.
60 ETHOS

But the changing conditions of Bernadette’s life made adherence to the promise existentially
difficult. I detected this increasing difficulty in shifts in Bernadette’s voice, in her expressions
of emotion, and in her body. In what follows, I explore Bernadette’s evolving relation to the
promise over time and thus her changing relationship to the world and to herself.

Waiting
Bernadette was sentenced to five years of incarceration at a women’s prison in northwestern
New Mexico. I visited her there on a few occasions and spoke to her by phone often. During
our visits, we would sit together in the brightly lit visiting room. Although these visits were
designated open contact, meaning prisoners were not separated by a screen or intercom
system, touch was prohibited.

My first visit with Bernadette took place a few months into her sentence and lasted several
hours. Given the circumstances, I found her to be in relatively good spirits. She said that
she missed her daughter but was certain her decision to assume responsibility for the drugs
was the right one. She was convinced that Eugenia simply couldn’t survive prison. When I
pushed her on this, she explained that it wasn’t just the loneliness of being locked up that
would hurt her mother; rather, it was the loneliness of all of the other women who were
locked up, too. “At night there are so many noises,” Bernadette said. “You can hear all
these ladies crying.” Bernadette believed that the emotional outpouring of the other inmates
would generate an overwhelming feeling of despair in Eugenia.

That Bernadette drew upon the sounds of women crying at night to describe her mother’s
vulnerability struck me. I recalled our earlier conversations about her mother’s depression,
especially her childhood memories of Eugenia’s long bouts of crying. Initially, Eugenia
tried to keep her crying a secret from her daughter, just as she had tried to hide her
addiction to heroin from her. But she was unable to maintain these secrets. Bernadette once
described to me how her mother’s crying inspired contradictory feelings of helplessness and
protectiveness in her. As it turned out, in her quest to protect her mother from the pain of
others, she subjected herself to the haunting chorus of nightly crying and to new battles with
sleeplessness and anxiety.

The next time I visited Bernadette in prison, I found her noticeably heavier and downcast.
She placed her swollen hands on the table and spread her fingers wide, revealing her raw,
bitten skin. “I am eating myself,” she said.

Self-mutilation provides a “voice on the skin” when the actual voice is forbidden or con-
strained (McLane 1996). A gestural modality of language, it expresses the boundary between
existence and nonexistence, self and other, pain and relief. Merleau-Ponty writes that gestu-
ral language “makes its appearance like the boiling point of a liquid, when in the density of
being, volumes of empty space are built up and move outwards” (1962:196). Drawing on this
metaphor, one might say that in maintaining her promise, Bernadette nullified the possibility
 THE PROMISE 61

of speech. But her need to speak swelled. Constrained by the bounds of her promise and
by the physical and social limits of prison, Bernadette speech was forced back into herself,
eventually breaking out through self-injury. She compulsively bit her fingers day and night,
eliciting and then tending to her own wounds.

During that visit, Bernadette recounted that when her fingers had become badly infected,
the prison infirmary treated her with antidepressants. The antidepressants helped level off
the problem temporarily, but the biting eventually returned, and with renewed urgency.
The infirmary supplied gloves that prison guards locked onto her hands at night. Bernadette
described the gloves as a kind of torture, a double imprisonment. Gloves locked on, her
sores began to blister and her sleeplessness worsened. Eventually, the infirmary’s nurse gave
up and, in Bernadette’s words, told her to eat herself to the bone.

Bernadette was anxious. She hadn’t seen Eugenia or her daughter in a several weeks, and
she worried that they’d forgotten about her. Her parole hearing was approaching. What if
her mother moved away? What if she did not regain custody of her daughter? How would
she, Bernadette, live? I tried to soothe her worries with updates from family members and
friends and by offering empty assurances that things would be okay.

Toward the end of our visit, as the prison guards loudly announced that our time was
up, I asked Bernadette about her compromiso. Did she regret taking responsibility for the
drugs? Did she think of breaking her promise in order to save herself? Bernadette looked
at me closely, conveying with her tired eyes a sense of disappointment. Quietly but firmly
she reminded me that she never assumed responsibility for the drugs. Rather, she affirmed
her commitment to Eugenia. It was a distinction that I, like so many others, had failed to
recognize or understand.

Bernadette’s promise was a mode of moral engagement—an acknowledgement of the depen-

dency and vulnerability of her relationship with her mother and her world. “I had to think
about who had the best chance of getting through this,” Bernadette said. Still, I couldn’t
help but stare at Bernadette’s raw hands as she continued to explain. “All I can do now is
wait it out.”

Horizon

Ricoeur notes that time wears painfully on the makers of promises, but that this wearing is,
in large measure, precisely what a promise is. There is no definitive end to a promise; even if
broken, it survives, unfulfilled. This temporal and ontological indeterminacy makes several
competing narratives possible: we must keep our promises; we must break our promises;
promises should never be made. More specifically to this narrative, in the context of a
therapeutic legal structure largely indifferent to the complex concerns in which Bernadette
and Eugenia were entangled, what else could a caring daughter do? In submitting to silence
and sentence, Bernadette demonstrated her commitment to her mother, and to her own
hopes for a future.
62 ETHOS

The ethical aspects of Bernadette’s promise closely resembles Ricoeur’s notion of attestation,
defined as “the assurance of being oneself acting and suffering” (1992:22 emphasis mine). This
notion maintains that the self is at once agent and victim, thus blurring the lines between
care and hurt, freedom and restraint. Ricoeur explains that one significant dimension of
attestation is the “intimate passivity” of the self through otherness. Seen in this way, the
difficult, ongoing labor of Bernadette’s promise is an attestation—an intimate suffering—
that is also the demonstration of a caring relation. From the condition of her very body,
Bernadette suffers the sorrows of her mother, and possibly other inmates as well. But her
body also carries her hope.

My interpretation of Bernadette’s promise is, in a sense, what Lorraine Code (2002) calls
a “storied epistemology,” one which I believe has important implications for how we think
about moral experience. It is an embodied account of moral life; an account of a daughter
trying to negotiate how to live in troubled circumstances and under punishing constraints.
It would be a mistake to limit these issues to any one factor or individual, be it addiction,
crime, mental illness, or parental neglect.

Moreover, we must also cast the net of understanding well beyond the individual and the
intersubjective and also consider the myriad historical, social, and political arrangements that
contributed to Bernadette’s predicament. We must consider, for example, social policies that
expand punitive responses to addiction and mental illness while limiting behavioral, clinical,
and community health services, especially for the poor. These policies are especially onerous
in New Mexico, which has the highest national rate of residents living in poverty and the
second highest percentage of those living without health insurance. In this context, poor
women with addiction are significantly more likely to end up in criminal justice system,
which is ill equipped to respond to their health needs. The children of incarcerated women,
in turn, are profoundly affected by punitive responses to addiction and are at heightened
risk for incarceration themselves. Families are torn open by these institutional processes.
At the same time, these same processes weave kin relations together ever more tightly by
generating salient ties of commitment and care.

Families contending with addiction develop ethical sensibilities and tacit modes of moral
engagement from the exigencies of everyday life and from the broader political histories
that inform it. The point for anthropology is not to seek logics or tenets to how one should
respond but to develop a sense of the moral as “a striving—the play of uncertainty, doubt, and
the deepening of intimate relations within a whole weave of life” (Das 2010:378, emphasis
mine). This sense of a striving is exemplified by Bernadette’s promise. Acutely aware of the
circumstances and limits at hand, but also of the possibilities, her promise provided a way
forward, carrying her commitment not only to Eugenia, but also to a certain way of being in
the world—as caring, responsive, and willing to place herself at risk for the sake of another.

Bernadette is now out of prison and lives with her daughter and mother. She makes ends
meet by working as a home health aid for the elderly, a position she once held as a teenager.
 THE PROMISE 63

Like Eugenia, she still struggles with heroin addiction and remains on the margins of what
is typically considered “moral.”

We talk several times a year but have only discussed her promise twice since her parole,
the last time being when she commented on a draft of this essay. In one of her remarks,
Bernadette said that, as difficult as maintaining her promise sometimes was, it was also a
lifeline. That is, it gave her something to hold onto during a period of instability and flux.
She held onto her promise not for the sake of simply fulfilling it and not only for the sake
of protecting her mother. Rather, her silence speaks of a hope for the future in the face of
diminishing life chances. In my view, this is the very heart of moral life.

ANGELA GARCIA is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Notes
Acknowledgements. I am grateful to the participants in the session on the theme of “Moral Experience” held at
the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 2010. I thank the session’s organizers Jason
Throop and Jarrett Zigon for their encouragement in developing this paper into an article and for making this
special issue of Ethos a reality. Finally, I am most grateful to the woman I call Bernadette for showing me what it
means to live a moral life in the face of continuous struggle and uncertainty.

1. I reference Tzvetan Todorov’s (1996) notion of nonheroic, “ordinary virtues,” which include intimacy, caring,
and the life of the mind.

2. Between 1995 and 2000, there were 100 deaths attributed to overdose. I began conducting ethnographic research
in the Española Valley in 2003 and, beginning in 2004, lived and worked there continuously for three years. Since
2007, I have returned at least twice a year. Eleven of my research subjects have died from heroin overdose.

3. Both names are pseudonyms. Some aspects of this narrative have been modified to protect the identities of
subjects.

4. Levinas’ (1979) theme of the “face” as the signature of the other and call for responsibility resonates with
Ricoeur’s framing.

5. Many second-generation heroin users, especially young women, made similar comments, noting that using
heroin with a parent provided some degree of normalcy and safety given that it occurred within a familiar and
familial world.

6. Ricoeur’s formulation of the “life plan” is pertinent here. Life plans are essentially narratives of life, which enrich
discrete practices and acts, including promises. In this context, Bernadette’s promise mediates between a discrete
gesture in the present and a horizon of possibility.

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