Invited Session - Life at the Limits: Affliction, Healing, and Urban Poverty

Session Submission Type: Featured/Invited Session

Abstract

Recent social science literature on urban poverty and social inequality in Latin America has emphasized the spectacularity and pervasiveness of violence that have arisen in concert with growing social inequalities during the region’s democratic transition. In studies of what is termed the “new violence” - affirmed by the key figure of rising homicide rates - social scientists have portrayed low-income neighborhoods as steeped in and largely defined by violence, a cluster of conditions involving urban gangs and criminal networks, forms of police violence, and urban poverty. This panel seeks a different route to the engagement of urban poverty and health in Latin America. We explore the ways in which life is made inhabitable and uninhabitable in conditions of urban poverty. We examine how destructive and affirmative impulses emerge in contradictory ways in everyday life and in relation to state interventions. By taking as our central concern “life at the limits” and asking how life is made inhabitable or bearable, this panel also attempts to reassess taken-for-granted categories of “the political” and “the criminal”, and the split between so-called “informal economies” and the “formal” that seem to secure the sites of legitimate authority and violence. Furthermore, we seek to move beyond the notion of biomedicine and “folk theories of illness” as fully formed (and oppositional) realms of knowledge and practice. Instead, we explore how the most mundane events - such as a normal childbirth - involve a bricolage of elements from social and medical models as people search for cure, care, and well-being. Participants include social scientists working in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Brasilía, and Saõ Paolo.

Sub Track

• Invited Panels

Individual Presentations

• Psychoanalysis and Urban Poverty in a Buenos Aires Neighborhood - María E Epele, CONCICET/UBA

• Childbirth and precarity: a case study in low-income Santiago - Marjorie Murray, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• The idiom of high blood pressure: Understanding old age, urbanity and affliction at Guariroba (Brasília/Brasil) - Soraya R Fleischer, University of Brasília

• On the Violence of Poverty, War and Recovery in Mexico City - Angela Garcia, Stanford University

• Shadows of the ordinary: death, healing, and social worlds - Clara Y Han, Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Susana Durao, Membership