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Clara Han PDF
Clara Han PDF
CLARA HAN
[H]ow does one not simply articulate loss through a dramatic gesture
of defiance but learn to inhabit the world, or inhabit it again, in the
gesture of mourning?
—Veena Das (2000), “The Act of Witnessing: Violence,
Poisonous Knowledge, and Subjectivity”
INTRODUCTION
“El que nace una chicharra, muere cantando”—“He who is born a cicada, dies
singing”—says Leticia.1 A popular saying in Chile, it expresses a person’s essential
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28: 169–187, 2004.
C 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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continuity, that which resists the sculpting of history, and Leticia uses this saying
to describe herself in relation to a social world made alienating. A communist
militant during the socialist years of Salvador Allende (1970–73) and throughout
Pinochet’s military regime (1973–90), Leticia tells me she was labeled a “terrorist”
by the military regime and was exiled to Buenos Aires in 1987. She returned to
Santiago in 1995 and now lives with four of her six children and three grandchildren
in a two-room provisional house in the historically leftist población (poor urban
sector) of La Pincoya.
Four years ago, I met Leticia when beginning my fieldwork in La Pincoya, a
poor working-class community that experienced severe military repression dur-
ing the Pinochet era. Many of the inhabitants in La Pincoya know of, or have
experienced themselves, disappearances of family members, torture, and exile.
Such experiences of political violence continually inform the present, not only
through traumatic memories, but also in the way in which this violence—and the
neoliberal economic policies that it instantiated—has transformed subjectivity and
intersubjective relations. I came to La Pincoya attempting to understand how such
violence has woven itself into the intimacies of family life in the postauthoritarian
and neoliberal context.
Such a focus on the intersections of political violence and neoliberalism with
subjectivity and intimate relations is in dialogue with critical anthropological work
on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma. This heterogeneous body of
work has explored the social and conceptual history of traumatic memory and
PTSD in psychiatric discourse (Young 1995), the politics of suffering and the
stakes of diagnosis in conferring humanitarian aid (James 2004; Salis Gross 2004),
and the cross-cultural comparison of concepts of trauma (Lambek 1996). But here
I would like to pay attention to the etiological nature of the traumatic event and its
relation to historical time and language. In discourses of PTSD, a discrete traumatic
event is linked to a subject’s linear historical narrative, such that the event can be
interpreted as productive of PTSD symptoms. This framing of traumatic memory as
a reexperiencing of a discrete event, however, disallows other framings of trauma.
These framings are dependent on the interrelationships of language and history.
Consider PTSD from a psychiatric perspective: traumatic memory (and from
this, PTSD) is predicated on a prior “etiological event” that is causally related to
symptoms (Young 1995). The traumatic event, both inscribed as an unassimilable
memory and transformative of the material biology of the individual, suggests that
traumatic memory is a disease of time as well as an individual possession. That is,
as an owned entity, trauma is that which disrupts the narrative flow of biographical
time (Young 1996). Thus, the historical narrative can be read chronologically in two
directions: the etiological event can be understood to produce present symptoms,
and it can be understood as a narrative that accounts for present symptoms. The
biological consequences of the etiological event, on the other hand, can only be
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172 C. HAN
the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil), Avelar views untimeliness
as that which allows for a critical thinking through of the “epochal transition from
State to Market” and the historical defeat that this transition entailed for Southern
Cone writers (Avelar 1999: 20). That is, the untimely discourse of a socialist
politics in the Southern Cone—a defeated discourse—allows for both a critical
engagement with and mourning over the present hegemony of neoliberal political
economic discourse.4
But here, I am concerned with how subjects like Leticia inhabit this untimely
discursive locus, a locus that arguably has lost its present social referents. I examine
how, in the throes of the market themselves, these subjects are pulled between an
embodied discourse of socialism and the vicissitudes of the market. In inhabiting
this contradictory space the subject him- or herself is at stake (Povinelli 2000: 510).
What are the subjective and intersubjective tensions experienced by subjects who
face competing obligations from family members and their untimely discursive
practices, and from the logic of capital and ideological commitments? What kind
of recuperation of the everyday is possible in such contexts?
RETURNING EXILE
Thus, we return to Leticia, who continues to speak and narrate from the site of
a ruined and untimely discourse. In distinction to her family, Leticia yearns for
the arrested socialist project of Salvador Allende and laments a present milieu of
consumerist apathy. She speaks of herself as a militant communist who fought
against Pinochet and who paid for her idealism through her past political exile.
Yet through this disjuncture between her locus of speech and that of her family
members, and their violent negotiations over these different modes of narration,
her sense of exile continually returns.
The alienation, she says, did not begin with Pinochet’s golpe del estado (coup
d’état), but with her return to Chile after eight years of political exile. Institu-
tionalizing a radical form of technocratic governance, the military government,
from 1973 to the beginning of the so-called “democratic transition” in 1990, at-
tempted to make Chile into a state-managed laboratory for neoliberal economics.
The regime’s Chicago school-trained economists sought to bring about a “pro-
longed and profound operation to change Chilean mentality” (as cited in Silva
1996) in which the ideal of homo economicus would be economically and socially
inculcated in the populace, materializing classical economic writings on the cult
of rationality and individual liberty (Silva 1996: 119).
With the incipient democratic transition in 1990, Chile’s international fame
as a “successful” model for neoliberal economics and postauthoritarian status
continued to reconfigure the referential frame of Chilean political economic
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had nothing left but present exile. . . . In other words, they were leading lives of exile,
hounded from their land by the defilements of history. The themes of mourning, disconsolate
despite the intoxications of new aspirations, were endlessly repeated. Here again, referential
permanence is lacking. (de Certeau 1997: 86)
Such is the case with many leftists in La Pincoya; with “referential permanence
lacking,” they reluctantly and quite painfully seek to weave themselves into the
new fabric of signifiers within Chile’s late capitalism.
Others, however, are not so fortunate in rearranging accounts of past events to
endow them with a different meaning and to draw out reasons for acting differ-
ently in the future (White 1987: 150). Some, like Leticia, are called “crazy” by
both their family members and neighbors, because their disconsolate discourse of
mourning is seemingly out of joint with local and national realities, and because
the consequences of their discourse as concrete actions have devastating and tragic
effects not only on them, but on their close relations.
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A bare light bulb illuminates the concrete floor and the couch in the house where
Leticia lies, her worn boots still on. With no money for paraffin to heat the house,
she burns charcoal in a tin can in the center of the floor. In one room, Leticia lives
with her three youngest children: Lorenzo, 22, Hector, 13, and Darwin, 12. In an ad-
joining room, Leticia’s adopted daughter, Julieta, 34, lives with her husband Jorge
and their three small children. Leticia is exhausted from her work as an assistant to a
kindergarten teacher, from the continual fighting of her two youngest children, and
from her social commitments. She tells me that she is having a “crı́sis emocional”
and is experiencing “depresión neoliberal” (literally “neoliberal depression”) due
to her feelings of isolation from her family and feelings of impotence and frus-
tration at the current economic, political, and cultural climate—a climate that she
characterizes as individualistic, consumerist, with neither memory nor justice. We
remain in silence. Radio Nuevo Mundo, a community-based radio station, begins
to play the songs of Victor Jara, a renowned communist singer–songwriter. He was
tortured and executed by Pinochet’s military regime five days after the golpe del
estado, on September 16, 1973. With her arm over her head, Leticia sings with the
lyrics,
And this was thirty years ago, and we are in the same situation, and no está ni ahı́ la gente (the
people do not care). In this epoch, we were all a family, to be a compañero was like . . . like
to be I myself, we were all one and one was all. It was a climate of solidarity, commitment,
companionship that I will never see again before I die. . . . My dreams, my hopes, my
memories are all linked to an epoch [the socialist epoch of Allende] that permits you to
survive this emotional crisis. (En este época, eramos todo una familia, ser compañero era
como . . . como ser yo mismo, eramos todo uno y uno era todo, era un clima de solidaridad,
compromiso y compañerismo que creo que me voy a morir, y, a lo mejor, nunca voy a vivir
lo que vivı́. . . . Mis sueños, mis esperanzas, mis recuerdos estan todo ligado a una época
que te permitió sobrevivir en este crı́sis emocional.)
Now, she says, “not even my children understand me and all I have left are
my own memoirs.” Leticia began to privately write her memoirs two years ago,
giving them the title “From the window,” because, as she explained to me, she
feels that she is witnessing both her past and present life outside of her, as if
looking through glass. The past assumes the status of the romantic, as an epoch
charged with an excess of personal and social meaning. And of the present,
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more time involved in community organizing than with her two younger children,
Darwin and Hector. She comes home with shooting, prickling pains that radiate
down her spine and arms. The pains are so intense that she yells at Darwin and
Hector when they come to embrace her. They angrily shout back: they hate her,
they want her to die, and they want to live with their father, El Negro. They at-
tempt to hit her and she angrily yells back at them, “Callate!” (“Shut up!”), and
sometimes she hits them back.
After a particularly violent outburst, Leticia, obviously shaken, said to me, “You
know, I never was beaten as a child. Now you have seen me hit Darwin, but hitting
him also hurts me. I never was a golpeadora (a woman who beats her children)
and I was not brought up a golpeadora. At times, no sé quien soy (I do not know
who I am).” After a pause, she continued
I feel un conflicto por adentro (an internal conflict). Perhaps if I had not left the country, if
I had been a mother to the children, then maybe they would not fight with me. And maybe
they would be more committed to remembering. Of course I feel guilt, but they also mistreat
me. Just today, Julieta mistreated me, Darwin mistreated me, and Lorenzo mistreated me.
Julieta thinks only of her family [her husband Jorge and their children]. They don’t share.
And look at Lorenzo, he’s 22 years old and he acts like he is 15.
She then asked me, “Do you see a familia integrada aquı́ (an integrated, close
family)?” I responded, “Here? Here, in this house?” “Yes,” she replied. I hesitated,
hoping to forestall judgment, not knowing quite what to say. She replied impa-
tiently, “Obvio (obvious), no, look everyone here is en su lado (off on his own).
I work for lo social (the social) and here, in my own house, every one is alone.”
Her feelings of guilt were palpable, as was a certain subjective crisis in which the
compulsory obligation of motherhood and family relationships threw into doubt
her discursive practices, and even more, shook her conception and experience of
the everyday.
Perhaps in Leticia’s predicament, we can imagine inhabiting a formation of sub-
jectivity threatened by skepticism, when language repudiates its everyday func-
tioning, and when “grasping a day, accepting the everyday, the ordinary, is not
a given, but a task” (Cavell 1988: 171). For Leticia, the doubt cast on her form
of life and her historical trajectory arises when a descent into present everyday
life renders the social world more unknowable or untouchable (recall the title of
Leticia’s memoirs, “From the window”; see Das 1998). Thus, Leticia’s relation-
ship to the external world becomes problematic when the immediate social context
vanishes with the repetition of old words, forgoing a connection with the present
(Cavell 1994: 114). We could consider this shadow of skepticism as fundamen-
tally coextensive with Leticia’s work of mourning and her plunge into states of
melancholia (Freud 1989). For Leticia is mourning the loss of language itself, a
now untimely language that formed her historical subjectivity. With this loss not
only does the social world become strange and intimate relations wounded, but
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DEBT AFFECTS
178 C. HAN
quota of sweatpants. Bolts of fuzzy material in blues, greens, and yellows litter
one corner of the house.
Shortly after this, Leticia joins another microenterprise, selling liquid detergent
from her home. Plastic bottles full of green liquid fill the panes of the front windows.
She puts a can on the windowsill to keep track of the money earned from selling
detergent. But soon she loses track of the earnings, drawing money out of the can
whenever she needs to go to the corner store for bread or milk. When she has
finished selling off the last of her detergent, Leticia finds that she does not have
enough money saved to buy the supplies necessary to produce and sell her product.
And, without another source of income, she is unable to pay back the loan from
her ex-lover, leaving her indebted to him. Other creditors constantly knock on the
door, and she has either her son Lorenzo or me tell them that she is not home.
Leticia never directly mentioned the extent of her indebtedness to me, and when
I did manage to ask her about her monetary debt, she engaged my questions by
criticizing consumismo (consumerism) and the political economy of facile credit
that “esta ahogando” (is suffocating) the población. She used her children as an
example of this suffocation by credit. “Look at Julieta, spending money on cable
when she herself is out of work. And, Lorenzo who cannot pay las letras (monthly
quotas) on a new camera that he did not need.” I only gathered an account of
her debts through her son Lorenzo and through my role of warding off repeated
calls from various creditors who told me how much she owed them. Lorenzo was
also uncertain of the depth of Leticia’s indebtedness. However, he underscored
the gravity of her situation by observing that her income seems to disappear the
minute she receives a paycheck, even as monthly bills remain unpaid. He remarked,
“Where does the money go? No one really knows. But I am sure she is struggling
pagando las letras (paying monthly quotas from creditors).” I asked Lorenzo why
Leticia would not tell me about her debt. He said, “la da vergüenza (it gives her
shame). Imagine, she cannot even tell me, Lorenzo, her own son, how much debt
she has, can you imagine how it would be to tell you?” He then tells me, “It gives
me shame too, to tell you about her debt.” Yet if the debts that Leticia has accrued
remain shamefully unspoken, they are a public secret, creating effects by the fact
of their existence.
With water, light, and telephone bills outstanding, the debts that hang on Leticia
have got Julieta, her adopted daughter, “hanging by the neck” (“colgando del
cuello”). Starving and abandoned by her alcoholic mother, Julieta was found and
adopted by Leticia when she was two years old. Now 34, Julieta tells me that she is
the only poor fool (huevona) that will stand with her mother until the day she dies.
Nevertheless, to Leticia, Julieta is a disappointing apolitical consumer. She wears
ideology like trendy clothing bought in the market: Julieta only participated in
protests against Pinochet when they were “de moda” (in style), and she is more
interested in aparentandose (creating an image of wealth above one’s material
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180 C. HAN
to campaign for the right-wing party, Julieta meets with the mayor. As a result,
Leticia’s bill payments are postponed and basic necessities reconnected. To Julieta,
the exchange of local political support for debt relief posits neither Julieta’s nor
Leticia’s leftist political views against the mayor’s conservative politics. “No estoy
ni ahı́ ” (I could care less), she says. In distinction to her mother, Julieta evokes
another popular saying, “Hoy por mı́, mañana por tı́ ” (“Today for me, tomorrow
for you”), and argues that this is the only politics one can live by in today’s Chile.
In discussing the relationships between money and distanciated relations,
Giddens describes credit and debt as “a mode of deferral, providing the means
of connecting credit and liability in circumstances where immediate exchange
of products is impossible. . . . Money provides for the enactment of transactions
between agents widely separated in time and space” (Giddens 1990: 24). Thus,
credit and debt are a “means of bracketing time-space by coupling instantaneity
and deferral, presence and absence” (Giddens 1990: 25). Georg Simmel outlines
the psychological and sociological consequences of money in modern times by
remarking that it provides the necessary psychological distance or barrier needed
for the maintenance of modern social life: “In this way, an inner barrier develops
between people, a barrier, however, that is indispensable to the modern form of
life” (Giddens 1990: 26–27; Simmel 1990).
The debts accrued by Leticia and transferred to Julieta, however, mark a different
sort of modern subjectivity: the indebted subject. Here, indebtedness engenders an
“emotive tonality” of the subject, a subject who is pulled apart between different
levels of ethical and monetary demands (Povinelli 2000: 511). Thus, Leticia para-
doxically mourns a neoliberal present through monetary transactions that keep her
tethered to her untimely socialist ideals. And from this fractured position emanates
the shame expressed by her silence over her debts. This silence is worth noting, for
it evokes the complex interactions between the subject threatened by skepticism
and the fate of language expressed as the condition of the human voice (Cavell
1994: 139). In Leticia’s silence we see the subject made fragile by inhabiting such
profound contradictions, for her absence of voice—as an emotive tone—again
reveals the uncertainty of her existence in the contradictory present.
But the work of indebtedness moves beyond the radical doubt created for the
subject. In the case of Leticia’s family, it is a condition of intersubjective relations, a
“kind of atmosphere that cannot be expelled to an ‘outside”’ (Das 1997: 208). And
such a condition of indebtedness–as a groundwork for intersubjectivity—creates a
field of contradicting affects and effects. Consider Julieta’s obligating relationship
to Leticia. Julieta experiences Leticia’s monetary debts as a continual testing of
her own historical indebtedness to Leticia and Leticia’s socialist politics. These
historical debts make Julieta feel unbearably tied to Leticia, or trapped in Leticia’s
untimely language. Yet to maintain this relationship, Julieta must betray Leticia’s
language (her socialist politics) by creating her own debts with local right-wing
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JULIETA’S RETELLING
Such a retrieval of voice marks Julieta’s retelling of her family’s history. Until now,
I have written of Leticia’s work of mourning and her loss of voice. Her untimely
referential frame has cast her into self-doubt and fomented painful relationships.
Through Julieta’s retelling of Leticia’s exile, however, we can locate an historical
agency of the subject through language “allow[ing] not only a message but also the
subject to projected outward” (Das and Kleinman 2001: 22). Such retellings also
give us an entrée into how intersubjectivity makes possible interactions between the
loss and retrieval of voice and the limits of acknowledgment in certain contexts.5
“Leticia talks about exile, hueveando (fucking around, making nonsense), but
she never really was exiled,” Julieta told me. Leticia fell in love with El Negro
while she was married to Julieta’s father, the father of the three younger brothers.
She began to have an affair with El Negro and was pregnant with their first child,
Hector, when El Negro was arrested and tortured for his work as a communist
militant. He was forcibly exiled to Argentina in 1987. Rather than face the exile
of her embodied political ideals and lose the father of her unborn child, Leticia
decided to follow her lover and leave her family. Julieta said that she was the only
one in the house that knew about the affair and Leticia’s pregnancy. When Leticia
did not return home that day from work in 1987, Julieta knew that she had “left
us abandoned” and took it upon herself to tell her father the news of her affair.
Leticia’s abandonment and Julieta’s knowing silence so angered Leticia’s husband
that he stormed out of the house, never to return.
The children were left to manage on their own and only heard about their
mother through her compañeros. There were promises that she would send for
her children, but none were fulfilled. As the oldest, Julieta found work as a live-
in nanny to support her three brothers and herself. She recounted her work as
degrading and dehumanizing, a time in which the owner of the house attempted
to rape her and violently beat her for resisting his sexual advances. During this
time, the oldest of her younger brothers, Marco, became the leader of the militant
Communist youth group in La Pincoya, and after Leticia’s absence, their house did
in fact become a site of intense police vigilance. Under this extreme political and
economic pressure, Julieta effectively became la dueña de casa (person in charge
of the household) and was economically and morally responsible for the running
of the household. As she said, “I paid the bills, and saque la cresta (beat up) any of
my brothers who got into trouble.” She compared herself to Leticia:
When I was running the house, none of the cabros (the kids, referring to her younger
brothers) were taking drugs. If they did, I would beat them up and they knew it. But now,
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182 C. HAN
look, Lorenzo is addicted to pasta base, and Leticia just turns a blind eye. This huevon
(fucker) is medio loco (half crazy), and Leticia says nothing.
When Leticia came back to the house, she could not accept Julieta’s new role
as older sister/surrogate mother. Leticia attempted to reinstate herself as the moral
authority of the household. She also attempted to have the children accept her
new lover El Negro as their own father. When Leticia told Julieta to call El Negro
“father,” she refused and told her younger brothers to refuse as well. “Leticia kept
slapping my face, telling me to say “father,” but I refused, just stayed silent. Is this
huevon (fucker) related to me? No. He’s only her compañero. It’s her business. I
would not say it. She gave up, and my cheeks, they were red, red from the slapping
for days.”
The house was then divided into two, with Julieta and her husband Jorge taking
one side and Leticia, El Negro, and the three brothers and two half brothers born
in Buenos Aires taking the other. Even with this split in the household, however,
Julieta says that she still maintained her position of moral authority. As she said,
All of my younger brothers, they come to me when they need advice. Marco came to me
with all his worries before he was going to marry his wife Vero. Did he talk to Leticia about
his worries? No, he came to me because he trusts me. And Lorenzo, he comes to my side
of the house when he loses another job and is in trouble. Does he talk to Leticia? No. None
of them depend on Leticia. They all know that she is media loca (half crazy).
Look, I never saw Leticia as a mother. She is more an egoista than she is a mother. She
expects everyone to give to her, crying about how she has no money, how she is so depressed,
but she gives nothing to us in return. If I could, I would live apart from her, cada uno para
su lado (everyone in his place).
Since the time that Leticia came back, the house has also been filled with a
distrust of the other’s words. Julieta said that Leticia’s abandonment of the children
and her desperate commitment to “lo social” has irreparably broken a fundamental
trust between them. She said, “How could she just leave us botados (thrown out)
and come back and lie about her exile?” Now, although she said that she still feels
indebted to Leticia, she did not believe her stories of suffering. Julieta warned
me, “Don’t trust everything Leticia tells you. She’s always making up stories
about her suffering. Always llorando (crying) about her exile. You have to get
used to it and don’t let it affect you. Me acostumbré (I got used to it) and now
‘la dejo hablar y hablar’ (I let her talk and talk).” Thus, with her retelling of
history and her doubt of Leticia’s pain, Julieta projects herself as a subject outward
to the social world and to those that listen to her. In a move that negates her
mother’s pain and her role as a “proper mother,” Julieta instantiates her historical
agency in a situation in which she is irrevocably tethered to monetary and affective
debts.
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As a spoken narration, Julieta’s words slip quietly into and out of the pauses of
Leticia’s laments; and Leticia herself may possibly never hear Julieta’s words.
Yet through her storied movements, Julieta marks empathic limits to her mother’s
untimely practices. In a tragic sense, Leticia’s narration of exile materializes and
mutates in the intimate fissures traversing her autobiography and her daughter’s
historical narrative, her task of mourning both amplified and renounced. Such a
state of returning exile evokes the importance of acknowledgment and the tragic
consequences of a turning away from another’s pain. For what is at stake in Julieta’s
acknowledgment is not only the future of intimate relations themselves but also
the recovery of the everyday.6
The limits of acknowledgment evoked in Leticia and Julieta’s relationship point
us to a central problem in the recovery of the everyday for subjects whose institu-
tions of meaning have been radically altered and who now inhabit a social context
where historical signifiers have lost their signifieds. It is a crumbling of language,
as it were. As we have seen, while Leticia attempts to recover her sense of the
everyday through her obligations as a post-communist militant mother, her work
of mourning—evidenced in her compulsive work for the social—is in an untimely
language, a language which neither her family nor her social world shares. Such
mourning creates a crisis of the everyday, and puts into question what recovery
from exile means or how it would take place. Through a lack of acknowledgment
based on the dissonance between languages, the moment of exile is continually
re-inscribed, and a reoccupation of the site of devastation leads to more undoing
of relations.
But the undoing of intimate relations insinuates neither affective distance nor
bonds broken. Rather, what I have attempted to evoke is how this limit to ac-
knowledgment is instantiated in the context of monetary, historical, and affective
indebtedness. Such indebtedness ties subjects together while creating painful con-
ditions for the loss of voice—as seen in Leticia’s shame—and the retrieval of
voice—as seen in Julieta’s retelling of history. Here, however, we see that such
interactions between loss and retrieval of voice are not moments of healing and
recovery, but traumatic moments of a turning away from the present world or from
the other’s pain.
It is within this nexus of dissonant languages and multiple debts that I engage
the question of trauma. I have sought an exploration of trauma as neither an in-
dividual possession nor etiological event, but rather as a referential dissonance in
the neoliberal context. For, through the stories of Leticia and Julieta, the symp-
toms of trauma emerge as the limits to acknowledgment. These symptoms arise
neither from the belatedness of a singular traumatic event nor through biological
processes, but rather through the gap between historical languages and how those
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184 C. HAN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost I thank the families of La Pincoya for inviting me into their
lives and making this work possible. I am grateful to my advisors Arthur Klein-
man, Byron Good, and Kay Warren for their ongoing advice and support. I am very
thankful to my colleagues at the Pan-American Health Organization, Regional Pro-
gram on Bioethics in Santiago, Chile who graciously provide me a warm home.
I am indebted to fellow graduate students Diana Allan, Narquis Barak, Angela
Garcia, Johan Lindquist, Jessica Mulligan, Emily Zeamer; mentors João Biehl,
Adriana Petryna, and Vincanne Adams; and my sister Alysia Han for their insight-
ful comments and conversations since the beginning of my research. Many thanks
also to Josh Breslau, Mike Fischer, Chris Dole, Lindsay French, Amy Grunder,
Marcos Amaral, Fernando Lolas, Sergio Zorrilla, Alex Bota, Viviana Riquelme,
Laura Rueda, Isabel Toledo, Patricia Delaigue, Leonardo Gonzales, and the Friday
Morning Seminar for Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry at Harvard Univer-
sity for engaging with drafts and thoughts of this work in one form and context
or another, as well as the reviewers and the editors at Culture, Medicine and Psy-
chiatry. This work was supported by an NSF Pre-Doctoral Fellowship; the David
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Weatherhead Center for
International Affairs, Harvard University; the Crichton Fund, Department of So-
cial Medicine, Harvard Medical School; and a National Institutes of Mental Health
NRSA M.D./Ph.D. Pre-Doctoral Fellowship.
NOTES
REFERENCES
Avelar, Idelbar
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MD/PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
and
Department of Social Medicine
Harvard Medical School
641 Huntington Ave., 2nd Floor
Boston, MA 02115
USA
E-mail: clara han@student.hms.harvard.edu