Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment – Review

Written by Genki Hase

Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment is an ethnography written by João Biehl (2013) that depicts the complex of politics, economics, medicine, biology, and family resulting in abandonment of people. The central location of this study is a place called Vita, a place in Brazil where the sick, the homeless, and the mentally ill are being abandoned waiting “with death” (p. 1). In this ethnography, Biehl attempts to examine the life of Catarina—a woman in Vita—and explores Catarina’s subjectivity through decrypting her collections of words stored in what she calls “dictionary.”

As for treatment of the abandoned people in modern politics, Giorgio Agamben (1998) discusses how the state power includes zoe, the bare life, in the political realm, but excludes them from the society by disabling their bios, a particular way of life. Citing Michael Foucault and taking concentration camp as an example, Agamben defines biopolitics as “the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis” (p. 4) and argues that a power is not only excluding or including bare life, but rather including and excluding at the same time—bare life being entered into “a zone of irreducible indistinction” (p. 9). In this sense, Vita can be understood as a site of inclusive exclusion; where an exclusive power excludes the unwanted people from the family, formal economy, and the society, but at the same time, these ‘unproductive members of the society’ are being integrated under the umbrella of state regime through pharmaceuticalization and the act of deliberate creation of political, medical, and social ambiguity. In this regard, the emerging question is: why did Catarina—a person who is abandoned in Vita—resulted in her abandonment? And what does her “abandonment” entail?

Frantz Fanon’s comment on blackness may be the potential answer to this question: “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon, 1967, pp. 82-83). The people in Vita are the abandoned so-called the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless. This means people in Vita ended up in Vita by going through the process of pathologization that entails alteration of one’s subjectivity in the other. For example, Catarina’s pathology is constructed in response to multiple factors such as change in familial relationship, implementation of new health care system, institutional reform, overpopulation, de-hospitalization movement of the mentally ill, deinstitutionalization, and rapid economic development. These kinds of micro-controls that scrutinize and validate a person via passwords that “mark access to information, or reject it” (Deleuze, 1182, p. 5) are the mechanics that displaced Catarina from the realm where bios is the core evaluation criteria of a life. From another point of view, abandonment and social death of Catarina portrays the absence of her “self.” Once she becomes ‘mentally ill’ or ‘invalid,’ her voice loses its legitimacy to claim her ‘self.’ In sum, borrowing the word from Fanon, Catarina is pathologized in relation to the non-pathologized, who is the productive member of the society, and became abandoned in relation to the absence from the realm of “common sense” (Biehl, 2013, p. 9; Corin, 2007, p. 274).

In her ‘dictionary,’ Catarina writes: “Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside” (p. 8). This suggests that Catarina seems to recognize the complex that she is being situated. Perhaps, by articulating her feelings into words in her ‘dictionary,’ she is attempting to institutionalize her absence, as opposed to abandonment, and using that act of articulation as “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1988) that cultivates her ‘self’ through transforming death to alive. The ‘dictionary’ is ‘her’ voice that is not using the language of politics, science, and publicity. At the end of this ethnography of Catarina, Biehl writes: “Philosophers tell stories with concepts. Filmmakers tell stories with blocks of movement and duration. Anthropologists, I would say, tell stories with instances of human becomings: people learning to live, living on, not learning to accept death, resisting death in all possible forms” (p. 394). Biehl, as an anthropologist, told a story of an abandoned which in result articulated Catarina’s absence as well as demonstrated the “heterogeneity forces” of the potential invalid (Corin, 2007).

Anthropologists, I would say, tell stories with instances of human becomings: people learning to live, living on, not learning to accept death, resisting death in all possible forms

João Biehl

References

Agamben, G. (1988). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.

Biehl, J. (2013). Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. University of California Press.

Cheung, K. (1993). Articulating silences: Hisae Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, pp. 1-26. Cornell University Press.

Corin, E. (2007). The other of culture in psychosis: The ex-centricity of the subjects. In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigation (Ed. Joao Biehl, Byron Good, Arthur Kleinman), pp. 273-309. University of California Press.

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59 3-7. MIT Press.

Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin white masks. Grove Press.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In Technologies of the Self (Ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick Hutton), pp. 16-49. University of Massachusetts Press.