The banality of inequality as neoliberal condition: border experiences in a camp in northern Chile

• In Event: The Banality of Neoliberalism: Precarious Lives, Ordinary Lives in Chile

Abstract

What does precarious lives teach us about neoliberalism? What are the effects of the banalization of inequality? What it means to live on the borders of urban life? In this presentation, I explore these questions based on my fieldwork in a squatter camp inhabited by poor Chileans and foreigners in the border city of Arica. I submit to an ethnographic examination the conditions of living on the border, namely, the individual and collective human life situated not entirely inside nor completely outside, housed not in the radical exteriority but in precarious gaps of social ‘in-betweenness’. Through this analysis, I explore the ways in which internal borders produce the invisibility of precarious lives and how these zones of exclusion can become critical turning spaces where the material existence and the ‘form of life’ of its inhabitants –in ordinary life– are played out.

Author

• Angel Aedo, Universidad Católica de Chile