ANTHONY LEEDS PRIZE 2006

Ex-Human Reflections on Vita:

Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

JOÃO BIEHL
Princeton University

I
am greatly honored to receive the 2006 Anthony Leeds Prize for my
book Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (with photographs
by Torben Eskerod—University of California Press 2005), and I
heartedly thank the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/
Global Anthropology. This honor is very special to me as it affirms
the force of a single person to reveal what is truly happening to fam-
ily, medicine, and the state in the global economy.
Largely incapacitated and at the margins of other people’s
experiences, Catarina spent her time assembling words in Vita, an The force of
asylum in the city of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. Although
Catarina’s external functions were almost dead, she retained a puz- a single person
zling life within her body. “The letters in this notebook turn and
to reveal
un-turn. This is my world after all.” Her seemingly disaggregated
words were in many ways an extension of the abject figure she had what is truly
become in family life, in medicine, in Brazil. Writing helped her to
draw out the best of herself and to make it all endurable: “from the happening
letters I form words, and from the words I form sentences, and from
the sentences I form a story.” to family,
I studied all the twenty-one volumes of the dictionary Catarina
was composing and discussed the words and associations with her. medicine,
In her recollections and writing, I found clues to the people, sites,
and the state
and interactions that constituted her life. There was also a free
pulsing of verse that first eluded and then slowly began to shape in the global
the terms of my own inquiry and cognition. As I juxtaposed her
words with medical records, family versions and worries, I was able economy
to identify those non-institutionalized operations that ensured
Catarina’s exclusion and that are, in my view, the missing contexts
and verbs to her scattered words. The verb to kill was being conju-
gated and she knew it.

City & Society, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 81–85, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X.
© 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/city.2007.19.1.81.
 City & Society

I found great joy in listening and talking to Catarina, and con-

sidered it a stimulating challenge to reconstruct the world of her
words. With her consent, I retrieved her records from psychiatric
hospitals and local branches of the universal health-care system.
I was also able to locate her family members in the nearby city
of Novo Hamburgo. On a detective-like journey I discovered the
threads of her life. Everything she had told me about the familial
and medical pathways that led her into Vita matched with the
information I found in the archives and in the field.
Catarina was born in 1966, and grew up in a very poor place,
in the western region of the province of Rio Grande do Sul. After
finishing fourth grade, she was taken out of school and became the
housekeeper as her youngest siblings aided their mother in agricul-
tural work. The father had abandoned the family. In the mid-1980s,
two of her brothers migrated and found 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
inherited to take care of Catarina’s ailing mother, and in the mid-
1980s, the young couple decided to migrate and join her brothers.
In the coming years, she had two more children. As her illness
progressed and her marriage disintegrated, her eldest two children
went to her husband’s family, and her youngest daughter was given
up for adoption.
Catarina had become too much of a burden for her family, a
history tangled by the complications of disease, poverty and fear,
and was frequently hospitalized and overmedicated with powerful
anti-psychotics. Yet, exploring her medical records, I uncovered
an unknown truth. Catarina actually suffered from a rare neuro-
degenerative disorder—Machado-Joseph disease—that caused her
to lose her ability to walk and, over time, shut her down. It was
the disease that had afflicted Catarina’s mother, and, as in her
case, also presented itself after childbirth. Reaching this diagnosis
took me through a maze of medical hoops and as the picture of her
condition became clearer, I took her to a geneticist and neurolo-
gist who finally made the correct diagnosis and provided the best
possible care.
Throughout my work with Catarina, I did some theorizing that
helped me to understand, to a point, the intertwining of family
complexes and social reality with her genetic heritage and present
existence. The idea of social psychosis, for example, was a way to
bracket the madness ascribed to Catarina and to bring into view
the relations that existed between her subjectivity and social and
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on Vita

medical identifications. Archival research and the ethnography of

her kin and of the local health care system exposed the malleable
form that the family has become—a key means and material of
sociopolitical intervention and manipulation. Her presumed mad-
ness was intimately related to changing political and labor regimes
as well as pharmaceutical forms of knowledge and care that were
embedded in nets of relatedness, intimacies, and betrayals.
Psycho-pharmaceuticals mediate abandonment both through Her presumed
the scientific truth-value such medications bestow and the chemi-
cal alterations they occasion. They work as moral technologies madness was
through which families and local medical practitioners do the tri-
age work of the state. The family is thus a state within the state. intimately
This is not to say that mental disorders are basically a matter of
related to
social construction, but rather that such disorders do take form at
the most personal juncture between the subject, her biology and changing
the intersubjective and technical recoding of “normal” ways of
being in local worlds. Hence, mental disorders also implicate those political and
people claiming to represent common sense and reason, and it is
their responsibility to address their embroilment in the unfolding labor regimes
of the disorders.
While analyzing how and why people and institutions no lon- as well as
ger took it to be in their best interest to address Catarina and her
pharmaceutical
words, I also explored the ways in which social and medical prac-
tices affected her life. The discovery of Machado-Joseph Disease forms of
was key in discrediting the categorization of Catarina as mad, and
it helped to explain the development of her condition. In my work knowledge
with her extended family I found, for example, that social abandon-
ment and the early onset of the disease was quite common among and care
women. Affective, relational, and economic arrangements were
plotted and realized around the visible carriers of the disease, and
these gendered practices ultimately accelerated dying. I used the
idea of the biological complex to think about how such environment-
gene interactions shaped Catarina’s health.
The concept I worked with the most hesitantly was that of the
ex-human. I used this term neither to posit an abstract condition
nor to upset and generate a response coded in our now familiar lan-
guage of human rights. One of the main problems in human rights
discourse is the a priori assertion of an irreducible common human-
ity that ought to provide the basis of our interactions and our social
organizations. In the face of that assertion, the term ex-human
helped me to make relative the claims of a generic humanness and
to think about the contingency and pervasiveness of the forms of
human life I found in Vita. Catarina often referred to herself as
an ex, declaring “I am an ex-wife,” or stating that she was longer
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The living related to “my ex-family.” She spoke of life in Vita as being outside
the bounds of justice, and the concept of the ex-human helped me
subjects of both to analyze and illuminate the fact that this condition is gen-
erated in institutions and exchanges that are suppose to constitute
marginal and nurture humanness.
The ethnography of Vita makes it painfully clear that there
institutions
are places in the present, even in a state founded on the premise of
are constituted inviolable human rights, where these rights no longer exist, where
the living subjects of marginal institutions are constituted as some-
as something thing other, between life and death. Such places demonstrate that
notions of universal human rights are socially and materially con-
other, between ditioned by medical and economic imperatives. Vita also reveals
the extent to which a certain kind of human rights discourse—the
life and death sort that generates “model programs” in restructuring states and
economies—in practice also works by a logic of exclusions; and it
confirms that public death remains at the center of various social
structures, animating and legitimating charity, political actors, and
economic strategies.
But I have always been worried that in representing the condi-
tion of the abandonados through such a philosophic-sounding term
as ex-human, I might generate a distance and thus unintentionally
partake in discursive regimes that ultimately miss the paradoxes and
dynamism involved in letting the Other die. It is the fundamentally
ambiguous being of the people in Vita that gives the anthropologist
the opportunity to develop a real human critique of the machine of
social death in which they are caught.
A human form of life that is no longer worth living is not just
bare life—language and desire continues. And as I listened to and
excavated what had made Catarina’s voice “posthumous,” a life
force—often gaining form in the figure of the animal and related to
libido and belonging—emerged to rework thought, social relations
and family life. Ethnography became the missing nexus between
the real of Catarina’s body and the imaginary of its mental and rela-
tional schemes, between the abandoned and the family, the house
and the city, individual and populations in Vita. Ethnography
composes history.
Catarina remarked that other people might be curious about
her words, but she added that their meaning was ultimately part of
her living: “There is so much that comes with time… the words…
and the signification you will not find in the book. It is only in
my memory that I have the signification. And this is for me to
untie.” Catarina refused to be an object of understanding for others.
“Nobody will decipher the words for me. With the pen, only I can
do it… in the ink, I decipher.”
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We might face Catarina’s words in the same way we face poetry.

She introduces us to a world that is other than our own, yet close
to home; and with it, we have the chance to read social life and the
human condition, both hers and ours, differently. To engage with
her life and writing is also to work upon oneself. “I am writing for
myself to understand, but, of course, if you all understand I will be
very content.”
Catarina refused to be consigned to the impossible, and she
anticipated an exit from Vita. It was as difficult as it was impor-
tant to sustain this anticipation: to find ways to support Catarina’s
search for ties to people and the world and her demand for conti-
nuity, or at least its possibility. Out of this intricate ethnographic
tension emerged a sense of the present as embattled and unfinished,
on both sides of the conversation and of the text.

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