Life in debt

This dissertation is based on thirty-five months of fieldwork between 1999 to 2006 in Santiago, Chile. Through ethnographic and historical work, I examine how successive democratic governments sought to technically and morally acknowledge the Pinochet regime's legacy of political violence and free market reforms through a discourse of "social debt": the moral and monetary debt owed to the poor, materialized in highly selective interventions on poverty, human rights, and mental health. Paradoxically, amidst this discourse of the "social debt", local networks of economic debt among the urban poor have emerged in concert with a growing credit industry as a response to Pinochet's dismantling of the welfare state and the rise of everyday economic insecurity. Situated in La Pincoya, a poor urban sector on the periphery of Santiago, I explore how economic indebtedness among the urban poor is now experienced as a potent resource for survival and social inclusion in the democratic era, and how economic debt has recast local forms of care and acknowledgment. In this context, I ethnographically track how the governments' measures to address the "social debt" were themselves appropriated into economic debt relations. Taken up as selective resources to offset the household and bodily manifestations of economic indebtedness, these government attempts at official repair and redress were experienced as an extension of a history of social damage and suffering, rather than as an acknowledgment of that suffering. In this dissertation, I ask: How has economic indebtedness configured the stakes of acknowledgement for the state and among the urban poor? What are the economic and moral groundworks that have experientially established the "absence" of the state, even as it attempts to reassert itself?