Life in debt Han, Clara
2012., 20120506, 2012, 2012-06-05, 20120101
eBook
Chile is widely known as the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America, carried out and made possible through state violence. Since the beginning of the transition in 1990, the state has ...pursued a national project of reconciliation construed as debts owed to the population. The state owed a "social debt" to the poor accrued through inequalities generated by economic liberalization, while society owed a "moral debt" to the victims of human rights violations. Life in Debt invites us into lives and world of a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago. Tracing relations and lives between 1999 and 2010, Clara Han explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by poverty and mental health policies and reparations for human rights violations are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries. Attending to intimate scenes and neighborhood life, Han reveals the force of relations in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. Lucidly written, Life in Debt provides a unique meditation on both the past inhabiting actual life conditions but also on the difficulties of obligation and achievements of responsiveness.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and
refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their
personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these
people ...or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973
military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean
Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights
violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship
reflected a complicated moral calculus that weighed expediency over
ethical considerations and ignored individual acts of moral
courage. Maxine Lowy draws upon hundreds of first-person
testimonials and archival resources to explore Chilean Jewish
identity in the wake of Pinochet's coup, exposing the complex and
sometimes contradictory development of collective traumatic memory
and political sensibilities in an oppressive new context.
Latent Memory points to processes of community gestures of
moral reparation and signals the pathways to justice and healing
associated with Shoah and the Jewish experience. Lowy asks how
individuals and institutions may overcome fear, indifference, and
convenience to take a stand even under intense political duress,
posing questions applicable to any nation emerging from state
repression.
The Religion of Life examines the interconnections and
relationship between Catholicism and eugenics in early
twentieth-century Chile. Specifically, it demonstrates that the
popularity of eugenic ...science was not diminished by the influence
of Catholicism there. In fact, both eugenics and Catholicism worked
together to construct the concept of a unique Chilean race, la
raza chilena . A major factor that facilitated this conceptual
overlap was a generalized belief among historical actors that male
and female gender roles were biologically determined and therefore
essential to a functioning society. As the first English-language
study of eugenics in Chile, The Religion of Life surveys a
wide variety of different materials (periodicals, newspapers,
medical theses, and monographs) produced by Catholic and secular
intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century. What
emerges from this examination is not only a more complex rendering
of the relationship between religion and science but also the
development of White supremacist logics in a Latin American
context.
Becoming Mapuche Course, Magnus
2011, 20111128, 2011-11-30, 20110101
eBook, Book
Magnus Course blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this superb ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic ...fieldwork, Becoming Mapuche takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. Exploring their way of life, the book situates the Mapuche within broader anthropological debates about indigenous peoples in South America._x000B__x000B_Comprising around 10 percent of the Chilean population, the Mapuche are one of the largest indigenous groups in the Americas. Despite increasing social and political marginalization, the Mapuche remain a distinct presence within Chilean society, giving rise to the burgeoning Mapuche political movement and holding on to their traditional language of Mapundungun, their religion, and their theory of self-creation. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, Course also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life--eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun.
In Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile ,
Ángela Vergara narrates the story of how industrial and mine
workers, peasants and day laborers, as well as blue-collar and
white-collar ...employees earned a living through periods of economic,
political, and social instability in twentieth-century Chile. The
Great Depression transformed how Chileans viewed work and welfare
rights and how they related to public institutions. Influenced by
global and regional debates, the state put modern agencies in place
to count and assist the poor and expand their social and economic
rights. Weaving together bottom-up and transnational approaches,
Vergara underscores the limits of these policies and demonstrates
how the benefits and protections of wage labor became central to
people's lives and culture, and how global economic recessions,
political oppression, and abusive employers threatened their
working-class culture. Fighting Unemployment in
Twentieth-Century Chile contributes to understanding the
profound inequality that permeates Chilean history through a
detailed analysis of the relationship between welfare professionals
and the unemployed, the interpretation of labor laws, and
employers' everyday attitudes.
The 1980s and '90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the
property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as
part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting
...reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending
neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples' rights.
In Negotiating Autonomy , Kelly Bauer explores the
inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in
response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community
and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset
of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy
documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship
Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to
Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve
the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region,
effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to
extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche
territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of
Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation
reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the
recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for
communities to negotiate autonomy.
Patrick Barr-Melej here illuminates modern Chilean history with an unprecedented chronicle and reassessment of the sixties and seventies. During a period of tremendous political and social strife ...that saw the election of a Marxist president followed by the terror of a military coup in 1973, a youth-driven, transnationally connected counterculture smashed onto the scene. Contributing to a surging historiography of the era's Latin American counterculture, Barr-Melej draws on media and firsthand interviews in documenting the intertwining of youth and counterculture with discourses rooted in class and party politics. Focusing on "hippismo" and an esoteric movement called Poder Joven, Barr-Melej challenges a number of prevailing assumptions about culture, politics, and the Left under Salvador Allende's "Chilean Road to Socialism."While countercultural attitudes toward recreational drug use, gender roles and sexuality, rock music, and consumerism influenced many youths on the Left, the preponderance of leftist leaders shared a more conservative cultural sensibility. This exposed, Barr-Melej argues, a degree of intergenerational dissonance within leftist ranks. And while the allure of new and heterodox cultural values and practices among young people grew, an array of constituencies from the Left to the Right berated counterculture in national media, speeches, schools, and other settings. This public discourse of contempt ultimately contributed to the fierce repression of nonconformist youth culture following the coup.
