A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human - Home

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A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human
Vulnerability and Resilience
It wasn’t ruthlessness that enabled an individual
to survive — it was an intangible quality, not
particular to educated or sophisticated individuals.
Anyone might have it. It is perhaps best described as
an overriding thirst – perhaps, too, a talent for life.
terrence des pres 1976
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
University of California, Berkeley, USA
abstract This article explores the limitations of the dominant psychological trauma
model. Drawing on the experiences and the aftermaths of chronic ‘states of emergency’ among shantytown families in rural Northeast Brazil, among hunted street
kids in urban Brazil, and among revolutionaries and warriors of different political
stripes following the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, I identify several features of human resilience, the sources of strength, toughness, hardiness, and relative
immunity from personal and psychological collapse that we have come to associate
with exposure to a variety of human calamities. We need to rethink our notions of
trauma, violence and its sequalae.
keywords Survival, trauma, transcendence, vulnerability, resilience
T
here are many to whom I could dedicate this article — Biu, Lourdes,
Michael Lapsley, Albie Sachs, Linda and Peter Biehl, Dolly Mphahele,
among them — bits of whose stories will crop up in the following pages
– but I will dedicate it instead to ‘Tex’, a buddy in Peace Corps training at
Brattleboro Vermont’s Experiment in International Living. In 1964 the Peace
Corps was new, tough, and highly competitive and volunteers were put
through a rigorous selection process based on our minimal competence in
conversational Portuguese, on passing a number of physical hurdles — from
push-ups and rope climbing to drawing bloods and giving injections — and on
psychological assessments based on secret surveillance designed to ferret out
and ‘de-select’ the unsuitable, the unstable, and the unpredictable. Age was a
consideration. ‘Tex’, one of the oldest trainees, was a ‘tough old bird’ from Fort
Worth, Texas, an army officer who decided, as the Vietnam War revved up, that
she’d rather be wielding a shovel in Brazil than handing out M-16 rifles (with
an alarming tendency to jam) to American teenagers in Vietnam. I was the
eth nos, vol. 73:1, marc h 2008 (pp. 25–56)
© Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis, on behalf of the Museum of Ethnography
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/00141840801927525
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nancy sc h e pe r-h ug h e s
youngest trainee, just 19. If my handicap was not having experienced enough
of the world, Tex’s was that she had perhaps experienced too much.
The final selection in November 1964 was crisp and cruel. The eighty or
so trainees still remaining were assembled in the main dining hall. As our
names were called, each was handed an envelope. Those assigned to Group
‘A’ were told to remain put; Group ‘b’ was sent to another room. When I saw
a few oddballs in my group, my heart sank. As soon as the door was closed,
the director of training came to the microphone and announced: ‘Welcome!
You are now in the Peace Corps!’ We jumped, hooted, and gave each other
the high sign. Then we looked around and counted the missing, at least 20
were not among the chosen, including Tex, the woman who had befriended
female trainees who were having a rough time. She had given us tips, and
helped us master the demanding physical exercises. Now she, of all people,
had been de-selected. Her protégés went out looking for her and we found
Tex dressed down in her camp shorts and white T-shirt, kicking stones by
the creek. We railed at how unfair it was and offered to send a petition to
Peace Corps Headquarters. Tex silenced us. ‘What’s wrong with you gals?
Haven’t I taught you a thing? I’m OK’, she said. ‘I’ve got other plans. Besides,
I’m durable; I bounce! And I want you to be same. When you run into a brick
wall in Brazil think of me and bounce!’ She let us give her a quick Brazilian
abraço and like the lone ranger, Tex picked up her gear and was gone within
the hour. We never heard from her again.
Tex was resilient, or led us to believe that she was. She was certainly right
about one thing; we ran into plenty of brick walls in our two years working
as visitadoras and sanitary engineers, door-to-door and backyard health-care
workers, latrine diggers, emergency midwives, and barefoot doctors in an
entrenched pocket of the third world inside Brazil, a vibrant nation then
being crushed by the imposition of a brutal military dictatorship meant to
quell peasant-worker unrest in the state of Pernambuco in the ‘Northeast’, the
site of our Peace Corps assignment. No doubt, Peace Corps Volunteers were
intended to be the soft glove of anti-Marxist diplomacy, aides-de-camp of the
Brazilian military. But, as it did in most cases, the Peace Corps experience
had its primary impact on the American volunteers themselves.
Living side by side with people who cut and stacked sugar cane for less than
a dollar a day, whose bodies were wasted by chronic hunger, whose infants
were carried away on oceans of infantile diarrheas, and who themselves died
in ‘ invisible epidemics’ of typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, Chagas, and bubonic
plague, diseases that had been officially ‘eradicated’ from the country, and
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who in addition lived in mortal fear of military police raids on the homes
of suspected ‘subversives’ — hunger itself was subversive — the volunteers
developed an oppositional political consciousness. If we learned little about
political resistance — virtually impossible during that repressive period – we
learned a great deal about human resilience among a people known, and not
without reason, for their vitality and animação, their insistence upon their
right to live, to take up space, to take pleasure in the sentient world.
Eighteen years elapsed before I returned to Brazil as a medical anthropologist and to the huge, teeming shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro in the
sugar plantation zone and the market town of Timbaúba that I called with a
certain irony Bom Jesus da Mata in my book, Death without Weeping (1993).
My earlier political engagements with a shantytown association resulted in
several months of military surveillance in 1965 followed by an invitation by
the 5th army of Brazil to leave the country. So, while waiting for the democratic transition in Brazil, I conducted my first anthropological research in
rural Ireland on vulnerability to madness among bachelor farmers in County
Kerry caught in a double-binding situation of forced farm inheritance and
a veritable war on subsistence based farming by the eec which Ireland had
just joined (see Scheper-Hughes 2000).
Invisible Genocide
Finally, in 1982, at the beginning of the abertura, the ‘democratic opening’,
I slipped back into Northeast Brazil and began the first of four field trips
in the decade of the 1980s to study love and death on the Alto do Cruzeiro,
specifically mother love and child death under conditions of extreme scarcity and adversity that made life in the shantytown resemble a permanent
refugee camp or the emergency room of an inner-city hospital. Eduardo
Galeano (1998) once referred to Northeast Brazil as a concentration camp
for more than 40 million people. His metaphor was not a gross exaggeration
as decades of careful nutritional studies among the sugar cane cutters and
their families in the zona da mata of Pernambuco showed strong evidence of
slow starvation and stunting. Josué de Castro, the great human geographer
of Northeast Brazil and the author of the Geopolitics of Hunger (1978) referred
to Nordestinho nanicos, nutritional dwarfs, living on a daily caloric intake
— camp rations you might say — equal to that of the inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp during the war. By the 1980s things had gone
from bad to worse as the sugar industry was beset with the diet crazes of
the first world and the introduction of sugar substitutes like Sweet-n-Low,
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Equal, and Splenda. The grand old sugar-refinery factories on the waterfront
of Brooklyn began to close and with them the giant sugar mills, the usinas,
of Pernambuco also shut down, leaving already impoverished cane workers
completely stranded.
The concentration camp analogy was perhaps a not too well-hidden subtext in my account of mother love and child death on the Alto do Cruzeiro.
In Death without Weeping (1993) I described life on the Alto as guided by a
moral code that resembled wartime triage and prison camp culture. Mother
love was a fragile emotion, postponed until the newborn itself displayed a
fierce will to life, a taste (gusto) and a knack (jeito) or a talent for life. A high
expectancy of death prepared Alto mothers to ‘let go’ of and even to help
some of their de-selected babies to die, by reducing already insufficient food,
water and care. Mothers said their infants died because the babies themselves
wanted to die, so it was best to ‘help them go’ quickly. Thus, were the shantytown poor turned into collaborators, tricked into playing the role of their
own children’s executioners. The ethos and moral thinking characteristic
of the prison camp flourished with Alto mothers forced into behaving like
Sondercommando – the special inmate work groups at Auschwitz who were
assigned responsibility for implementing the executions of their own people,
making the ovens run on schedule.
There were other Holocaust analogies that I did not make explicit in
my earlier writings. The angel-babies of the Alto were ‘transitional objects’
neither of this earth nor yet fully spirits. In appearance they were ghost-like:
pale, wispy haired, their arms and legs stripped of flesh, their bellies grossly
extended, their eyes blank and staring, their faces wizened, a cross between
startled primate and wise old sorcerer. Consequently, these stigmatized babies
were kept at arm’s length. Primo Levi (1988) would have identified them as
miniature Musselman, the cadaverous population of ‘living dead’ known in
Auschwitz camp argot as ‘Muslems’, those victims whose state of exhaustion
was so great, whose despair so palpable, whose social and psychological
collapse so complete, that they looked and behaved like walking mummies.
Sometimes unable to stand of two feet, these ‘given up’ inmates resembled
Muslims at prayer. Their lethal passivity and indifference seemed to announce
their ‘availability for execution’. Thus, they were isolated and reviled by those
in the camps who still clung, however absurdly, to hope, and to life itself.
Similarly, the given-up and given-up-on babies of the Alto were described
as ‘ready’ for death. ‘Death or life,’ one Alto mother said. ‘It’s all the same to
them.’ Thus, they were transformed into sacrificial ‘objects’.1 Luiza Gomes
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explained: ‘The first nine of mine had to die to open the way so that the last
five could live.’ ‘I think’, said her neighbor Edite Cosmos, ‘that these deaths
are sent to punish us for the sins of the world. But the babies don’t deserve
this since we are the sinners, but the punishment falls on them.’ ‘Be quiet,’ said
Beatrice. ‘They die, like Jesus died, to save us from suffering’. And so the
paradox of death equals life or death serves life continued.
Given-Up Angel-Baby-Musselman, Timbaúba Brazil. Photo: Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
The experience of too much loss, too much death where new life should
be led to a kind of patient resignation (clinical psychologists would label it
‘accommodation syndrome’)2 that obliterated outrage as well as sorrow. No
tears were wasted at an infant burial, often left in the hands of older children.
Children buried children on the Alto do Cruzeiro. This practice killed two
birds with one stone: it allowed mothers to absent themselves from the burial
rites, and it forced children to face and accept the death of their siblings as
a commonplace and unremarkable fact of life.
When Alto mothers cried they cried for themselves, for those left behind
to continue the luta, the struggle that was life. Sometimes they cried for those
of their children who had almost slipped away, but who surprised everyone
by surviving despite everything that was against them. Wiping a stray tear
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from her eye, a mother would speak with deep emotion of the child who,
given up for dead — ‘the candles already burning around his little hammock’
— suddenly beat death back and displayed a fierce desire, and, indeed as
Terrence Des Pres would say, a ‘taste’ for life. These stubborn children were
loved above all others.
Lourdes’ son, Zezinho, was one of these tough survivors. I became reacquainted with them when Ze-Ze was a 17-year-old and Lourdes had long
since traded Ze’s father for a series of temporary husbands, none of whom
panned out, and all of whom collectively left her with a bunch of sick and
hungry kids. Finally, Lourdes took up with an old man, Seu Djalmer, a widower, not for love (she said) but for access to his pension. ‘But she still has
some affection for me, anyway’, Djalmer would insist. And she did. Both
he and Zezinho would laugh as Lourdes would delight in telling the story
of how she had given Ze up for dead as a baby and how Dona Nanci (as I
was called in those days) had swooped down on her lean-to and snatched
the skeleton baby off the urine-soaked piece of cardboard where he was left
fading under her hammock, and how I had force-fed him like a fiesta turkey
and then to Lourdes’ surprise how Ze decided to live after all. At that point in
the telling, the tears would fall, and Ze would walk over and squeeze his little
Lourdes with her son Zezinho. Don’t cry, I’m still here, mae. Photo: Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
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mama’s shoulders saying: ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry; I’m still here, mae.’ As adults
these ‘resilient’ survivors of childhood traumas held no grudges against their
neglectful caretakers, they displayed few of the classic symptoms of trauma
victims, and they viewed themselves as victors not as victims, as having met
death face-to-face and won!
Indeed, most residents of the Alto do Cruzeiro saw themselves in this way,
as tough and resilient survivors. When a visiting American pediatrician suggested that the severely malnourished and neglected babies cared for in the
crèche on the top of the Alto would grow up into psychologically damaged
and disabled adults, Dona Bea, a co-founder of the crèche countered angrily:
‘Oh, xente, (shucks!) if that were the case we would all be crazy here. Who
among us was raised without want, without abuse, without having at least
once just barely escaped death?’ Another woman added: ‘Look, mister, here
it’s easy enough for anyone to die.’ The implication was, but to live, that
takes something.
Dangerous and Endangered Kids
Soon after completing my work on maternal thinking and child death, the
next decade ushered into the Alto do Cruzeiro (as in most parts of rural Brazil)
what population experts call the demographic or epidemiologic transition.3
Both births and infant deaths declined in the late 1980s and 1990s, radically
transforming the way newborns were perceived and received by Alto mothers.
‘Watchful waiting’ accompanied by maternal de-selections were replaced by
an ethos of ‘holding on, holding dear’ (see Ruddick 1989) most infants. But
the demographic transition was accompanied by a democratic transition that
occurred in the presence of chaotic urbanization, an aids epidemic, and the
entry into Brazil of the Columbian drug cartels. By this time the geographical
limits of most large cities, particularly São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, were
reached and those populations generally confined to the peripheries and to
apartheid-like favelas and shantytowns began to spill over into city streets
where they were viewed with hostility and frequently targeted by vigilante
groups representing a rough sort of popular justice. Street youth were among
the first group to suffer at the hands of vigilante death squads. According
to a Brazilian Federal Police report, more than 5,000 children and youths
were murdered in Brazil between 1988 and 1990. Very few deaths were ever
investigated, in part because of their social invisibility and also because of
the involvement of off-duty police officers in the murders. Most victims were
Afro-Brazilian males between the ages of 15 and 19. In 1991 the Medicaleth nos, vol. 73:1, marc h 2008 (pp. 25–56)
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Legal Institute (the police mortuary) in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco,
was receiving an average of 15 bodies of dead children a month.
The proportion of Black and mixed race children was 12:1. Boys outnumbered girls 7 to 1. Eighty percent of the bodies had been mutilated.
In Bom Jesus, ‘street kids’ were the primary targets of a hyperactive death
squad supported not only by local police but, during a brief period in the
late 1990s, by the prefeito (mayor) himself who appointed the head of the
death squad, Abidoral Gomes Queiroz, to a public office in which capacity
he lead a limpeza (street cleaning) campaign, designed to clear the town of
its ‘human garbage’, its lixo. The campaign was praised by many shopkeepers,
merchants and middle-class residents of Bom Jesus, who saw it as a sound
public policy in response to the social anarchy, as they viewed it, produced by
democratization (see Caldeira 2001). I was drafted by human rights activists to
join them in an effort to identify and protect this dangerous and endangered
population while simultaneously helping local prosecutors in identifying and
prosecuting members of the death squad (Scheper-Hughes 2006).
Street kids in jail in Timbauba. Photo: Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
In following local street kids of Bom Jesus on their rounds, and, over the
decade of the 1990s, observing the developmental cycles that turned cute
little street beggars into adolescent outlaws and ‘miniature bandits’ drafted as
couriers in the local traffic in small arms and drugs, and counting the deaths
and disappearances of street youths, I was surprised by the optimism of their
personal narratives, their strong sense of self, value and worth, and their sunny
and upbeat drawings. They described street life in positive terms, as ‘good’,
as ‘beautiful’, and as ‘liberating’. A rua e boa! (the streets are beautiful), they
would say. When given paper and crayons and magic markers, the street
kids of Bom Jesus drew themselves at the center of every picture – usually
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A Talent for Life
alone, carrying a beggar’s sack, and kindly, sweetly requesting help. Those
who could write would often add a logo, ‘Thank you, Miss. God will repay
you!’ The sun shines big and bright in their drawings. The tough kids drew
many scenes of mischief and merriment. These included: dancing fields of
sugarcane; huts stealing electricity from public street lamps; hitch-hiking
on trains, trucks and buses. They liked to draw religious images as well. In
one child’s depiction of the crucifixion and soldiers whipping Jesus, his body
seemed to be slipping off the cross. When I asked what was happening to
Jesus, Giomar answered: ‘He’s escaping from the cross! ‘In other words,
behaving just like a proper street kid: ‘I’m out of here!’
‘Jesus Escaping from the Cross’ by Giomar, age 8.
For many of the loose kids I was following, the street was not the problem
but the solution. Most were ‘working kids’ who maintained contact with their
mothers and at-home siblings, often splitting their street loot with their mother.
‘50–50’, said nine-year-old Gilvan proudly, only to be corrected by one of
his street buddy who protested: ‘Liar! When did you ever give your mother
more than 30 percent?’ Street kids faced grave dangers on the streets of Bom
Jesus but they had access to money which made them valuable. When I asked
Giomar if his mother loved him, knowing full well that she had thrown the
boy out of her home, he replied. ‘Of course, she loves me. She has to!’ Then
he stopped to reconsider. ‘Well, at least she loves a part of me.’ ‘Which part?’
‘The part that brings her money and food for the table’ he said proudly.
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Observations like these led the Brazilian government to implement an
innovative social program in the 1990s known as the bolsa escolar (the student
fund), a monthly stipend paid to low-income families for every child who
remained in school. The program recognizes that children who can bring
income into the household are treated better than children who are totally
dependent on their adult caretakers.
The street kids of Bom Jesus often had a well developed sense of self and of
their competence to negotiate the world. I wonder what Erik Erikson (1950)
would have made of eleven-year-old China’s self-narrative. I met the boy the
day after he was released from the local jail, where he was being kept illegally,
and in a safe house for runaway children. His story was a blend of bravado
and brutality, of tenderness and toughness, of pride and fear. ‘China’ is what
psychologists would probably call a pseudo adult, tough and knowledgeable
beyond his years.
— I am small, Tia, but I already know a few things. My mother said I was so small
I could hardly exist at all. I suffered a lot before I ran away. My mother turned our
house into a cabaret doing all those ‘sex’ things. I hated it. That is why I am the
way I am today, you could say, a homosexual. As the oldest I was left in charge of
everything. I was the dona da casa (the woman of the house). I did everything: the
shopping, the cooking, the cleaning. The babies were always hungry and when
they were sick I wrapped them up and took them to the clinic and when they died I
went to the mayor and got a free coffin. It was me who washed them and ‘arranged’
them in their boxes . . . even the flowers I arranged. I did everything, everything!
I only didn’t die myself because I was lucky. Finally, I went to the streets. In the
streets it was much better. I robbed and I smelled glue. When the police grabbed
me and put me in jail it was bad, miserable. The older boys called me names like
‘fag’ and ‘queer’ and they raped me. I screamed but the police didn’t do anything.
They just laughed. So I went before the judge [the Children’s Judge] and I made
my case. He let me out of jail and put me in this shelter.
— So what do you think of the world now?
— I think it stinks.
— Is there anything good about it?
— Nothing. The world is nothing. It’s only fit for thieves.
Still, China said that he liked the shelter – the clean beds and plenty of food,
and he thought he’d probably stay a while, but it didn’t surprised me that he
was gone by the next morning and was last seen hanging precariously on the
back of a bus hitching a free ride into the capital city of Recife.
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Catherine Panter-Brick compared the height, weight and growth patterns
of street- and home-based children from the same social classes in Brazil
and Nepal and found that street kids are heavier and taller than their homebased peers (Panter-Brick & Smith 2000). As competent foragers in openair markets, as part-time workers in bars, pizza shops, and cafes, street kids
generally have better access to food than their malnourished siblings. But the
trade-off is risky. Street kids in Bom Jesus could rattle off the names of dozens
of their cohort who had been killed, disappeared, abused in jail, or died in
street fights or of street drugs or died of the ‘bad sickness’ (most likely aids).
There were limits to their resilience of course. Some of the rougher street
kids were groomed by Abidoral Queiroz to be hit men for the death squad
that was exterminating their social class. Thus, street kids present a central
paradox — they are both ‘at risk’ and ‘the risk’; dangerous and endangered’
(Scheper-Hughes 2004); vulnerable and resourceful, needy and bold, naïve
and street smart, miniature adults and child-like adults.
Undoing – Violence and Recovery in South Africa
In 1993 I took up a new and, as it turned out, interim post as Chair of Social
Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University
of Cape Town. I arrived at the cusp of the democratic transition there. All
political transitions (even democratic ones) are dangerous moments, and the
months leading up to the elections that swept Mr. Mandela into power were
accompanied by a final, desperate attempt of the National Party’s security
forces to disrupt the negotiations by violent attacks on so-called ‘terrorists’,
some of them township children. Meanwhile, the Pan Africanist Congress
(pac) and white militant political groups opted to continue the armed struggle.
Some local branches of the pac in the Western Cape decided to follow an
independent course that included attacks on ordinary civilians in order to
‘wake up the world’ and white South Africans in particular. Consequently,
1993–1994, the year of my first stay in South Africa, was the worst year of political violence with the highest death toll in more than a decade of undeclared
civil war. These events over-determined the focus of my ethnographic study
on violence and recovery. I focused on three violent incidents in Cape Town:
the murder of American Fulbright Student Amy Biehl during demonstrations
in Guguletu township in August 1993; 4 and two massacres in public spaces,
the July 1993 attack on an Evangelical Christian Church in Cape Town, St.
James, during Sunday Church Services, in which eleven people were killed
and more than fifty were wounded and maimed, the second occurring in a
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student pub, the Heidelberg Tavern, in December 1993, in which four people
were killed and dozens were wounded.
The day after the murder of Amy Biehl I marched with members of the
anc women’s league into Guguletu to lay flowers at the bloodied fence post
in front of the Caltex Gas station where Amy was killed. I attended most
phases of the Biehl murder trial in the Municipal Supreme Court of Cape
Town where I met Linda Biehl, Amy’s mother, and later became acquainted
with the late Peter Biehl, Amy’s father. Finally, I contacted two of the young
men convicted of Biehl’s death, after their release from prison, having been
granted Amnesty by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In July 1999 I brought Peter Biehl, Amy ‘s father, into the ramshackle
home of ‘Easy’ Nofemela, one of the ring leaders, where he also met with
Ntbeko Peni, another of Amy’s convicted murderers.
I began visiting the congregation of St. James Church immediately following the massacre and, over several years I remained in contact with some of
the survivors, Dawie Ackerman in particular, even renting a room attached
to his home during fieldwork in the summer of 1999. Finally, I attended the
autopsies of the four people killed in the tavern massacre and attended sessions
held in the Trauma Center for Victims of Political Torture and Violence in
Cape Town. These three incidents were contextualized within a broader study
of the political climate in Cape Town and in the rural Western Cape where I
conducted interviews and observations with residents of a large shantytown
in the farming village of Franschhoek (see Scheper-Hughes 2007).
Trauma, Vulnerability, and Resilience
‘What does not destroy me makes me stronger.’
friedrich nietzsche Twilight of the Idols
‘The peculiar beauty of human excellence just is its vulnerability.’
martha nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness
So, here in a nutshell, and in three distinct contexts of both everyday and
extraordinary violence, I want to rethink what we know about trauma, vulnerability, and resilience. For those living in the affluent first world, crisis is
understood as a temporary abnormality linked to a particular event – the loss
of a parent, a sexual trauma, a physical assault, or a natural disaster (Vigh,
this issue p. 7). In these cases, assuming they represent isolated events, the
aftermath of the original trauma, re-lived as a ‘traumatic memory’, may be
worse than the original experience. But for those living in constant crisis and
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subject to repetitive traumas, and where ‘emergency is not the exception but
the rule’ (Walter Benjamin 1969) the conventional wisdom and understanding of human vulnerability and resilience, especially as codified within the
clinical model of post-traumatic stress, is inadequate. One question being
raised in this special issue concerns what is required to survive and even to
thrive where terror and trauma are ordinary and usual events. What are the
sources of strength, toughness, hardiness, and relative invulnerability that I
have been hinting at thus far?
‘We are living in an age of ptsd’ argues Harvard anthropologist, Kimberly
Theidon (personal communication 2001). Indeed, trauma and recovery have
emerged as master narratives of late modernity as individuals, communities,
and entire nations struggle to overcome the legacies of mass violence and
suffering ranging from incest, rape, crime, domestic and street violence to
genocides, ‘dirty wars’, and ethnic cleansings, to international terrorism.
The events of 9/11 turned the United States into a nation of trauma victims.
The language of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ became part of a national
discourse and the label was attached not only to the immediate victims and
survivors of the world trade attack, but to those said to be ‘traumatized’ by
televised images of the destruction. Similarly, in the wake of the Oklahoma
bombing, victims came to include not only those who suffered the loss of
a loved one, but those in the community and beyond who had no personal
link to the event but felt that they were ‘traumatized’ by it in some uncertain
way. An Oklahoma psychiatrist, cited by Linenthal (2001: 91) in his study of
the memorialization of the bombing, said that trauma ‘cases’ multiplied in
response to the grants funded to study ptsd among survivors. Like the folk
syndrome, ‘susto’ in Mexico or ‘nervoso’ in Brazil, ptsd became a free-floating
signifier of danger, harm, vulnerability and woundedness.
Feelings of vulnerability and woundedness are dangerous for individuals,
for nations, and for the world at large. Wars and genocides are fueled by national sentiments, narratives, and historical memories of perceived trauma and
woundedness. The dominant clinical model of trauma and recovery, ptsd,
assumes a universal response to horrific events, a hardwired bio-evolutionary
script around the experience and aftermath of trauma. The ptsd model is
based on a conception of human nature and human life as fundamentally
vulnerable, frail, and humans as endowed with few and faulty defense mechanisms. This view of human nature has a long intellectual history in the west,
going back to Hobbes, Locke, and Jeremy Bentham, up through Freud and
modern psychoanalysis.
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Philippe Pinel, the 18th-century medical reformer and proponent of the
‘moral treatment’ of mental illness recognized the role of critical and traumatic events in the biography of his patients. Thus, his opening question to
new psychiatric patients was: ‘Have you suffered vexation, grief, reverse in
fortunes?’ He described the clinical effects of ‘bad events’ on the limits of
human adaptability.
In mid 20th century, following World War 11 John Bowlby (1969, 1973,
1980) studied the effects of adversity on small children which he documented in his magisterial three volume work on attachment, separation and
loss. Bowlby concluded that the earlier the trauma the more irreversible the
damage, the greater the threat to survivability, and the more universal the
effects. Bowlby’s concept of the ‘vulnerable child’, based on observations of
war-orphaned babies raised in state institutions identified severe disturbances
in early attachments, care and nurturing.
Bowlby’s work on war-traumatized babies had its parallel in studies of
war-traumatized soldiers returned from World Wars 1 and 11 suffering from
what was variously called shell-shock, combat stress, battle fatigue, and war
neurosis. The syndrome was recognized as a bona fide medical-psychiatric
disorder in the dsm-111, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible
of the American Psychiatric Association, in 1980. Later, a much expanded
description and diagnosis of ptsd appears in the dsm-iv, influenced by the
writings of the Harvard psychiatrist and feminist scholar, Judith Herman.
ptsd now includes traumas other than wars, those resulting from natural
disasters, terrorist attacks, kidnapping, torture, sex slavery, as well as domestic
violence, incest and rape. ptsd is also linked to occupational hazards suffered
by police, firemen and aid workers. Cancer patients are another category of
frequent trauma sufferers. Thus, what began as combat stress related to trench
warfare and to war crimes was extended to peace-time traumas.
The Clinical Model of Trauma
ptsd encapsulates both the immediate bio-psychological effects of trauma
— the perceptual distortions in time and space, the out-of-body and dissociate
reactions, flashbacks and phobias and, more importantly, their long-term
effects: nightmares, flashbacks, emotional detachment, dissociation, insomnia, avoidance, obsessive and obtrusive thoughts; irritability, aggression,
restlessness, hyper-vigilance, memory loss, startle response, depression, panic
attacks and anxiety.
ptsd is linked to biochemical changes in the brain that are distinct from
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39
other disorders such as depression. Clinical studies of ptsd patients indicate
a low cortisol secretion in urine samples while not in patients with major
depression. Other studies have pointed to high levels of norepinephrine, a
chemical associated with stress. In animal research and human studies, the
amygdala, the almond-shaped neurons nested deeply inside the brain, has
been linked to fear-related memories. The brain model of ptsd has identified
the syndrome with hyper arousal of the amygdala and inadequate control
by the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
Prevalence studies indicate that 10–15 percent of the population at any
given time are suffering from ptsd. While some individuals are certainly more
vulnerable to ptsd than others, the syndrome is seen as a human response,
a bio-evolutionary script in response to extreme stress.
Anthropology is a nomadic discipline based on cross-cultural comparison
and radical juxtaposition. We tend to question assumptions of universals that are
largely untested in cross-cultural contexts. We tend to apply what Mead once
called the anthropological veto — that is the ethnographic exception. Thus, in
this regard the biological anthropologist, Panter-Brick (2001, 2002), has compared cortisol levels for homeless street children in Nepal and found them
to be the same as those of a sample of middle-class children in the same
city. In a second study she found that cortisol levels of street children in
Ethiopia were similar to a matched sample of home-based children from
the same social-economic class. Panter-Brick concluded that living on the
streets produced no greater risk of stress-related disorder than being a poor
child living at home.
Medical anthropologists, especially Arthur Kleinman (1995) and Allen
Young (1996), have criticized the ‘traumatic vision’ of adverse events by noting
that for most of human history, people have responded to traumatic events
— including floods, epidemics, and wars — as social and religious problems.
The ‘traumatic vision’ of ptsd medicalizes powerful human experiences and
assumes a helpless, passive self, ‘a mind waiting to be smitten’ (Young, cited in
Linenthal 2001: 92). In referring to ptsd as the ‘harmony of illusions’ Young
is referring to the coming together at a particular point in time of needs,
desires, sentiments, and representations of trauma and human nature.
Nonetheless, ptsd-like syndromes are recognized in many parts of the world
although they appear in very different forms and usually identify a different
cluster of key symptoms. The so-called culture-bound syndromes of susto, nervoso, pibloqtoq, latah, windigo psychosis and koro (see Hughes & Simons 1985)
all recognize and credit negative effects of traumatic events on individuals. But
40
the key symptoms associated with the trauma range from cannibalistic panic
to shrinking organs, soul loss, and arctic hysterias. They cannot be reduced to
cultural variants of ptsd. Nervoso — prevalent in the shantytowns of Brazil, had
many different variants (qualidades) — nervoso de fome (hunger-nervousness),
nervoso de tranbalhar muito (overwork nervousness), nervos de soffrer muito
(long suffering nerves). Nervoso was best treated with a glass of sugar water
and a firm slap in the face. Rarely did an attack last more than a week or two.
Susto — magical shock or soul loss — is of parti-cular interest because it is so
widespread in Latin American communities – in both rural and urban communities — and, like ptsd, it recognizes both the immediate victim of trauma
and those who are merely witness to a violent or shocking event — whether a
rape, a care accident, or wartime experiences. But susto usually manifests itself
as lethargy and wasting and seems more like a culturally specific expression
of depression. One can only conclude that ptsd is a particular, and culturebound, bio-cultural expression of stress associated with trauma.
The diagnosis of ptsd has been introduced into very different social, cultural and political contexts with varying results (Wilson 2001; Littlewood
2002). South African therapists and counselors struggled to adapt the ptsd
model of trauma to a very different set of human experiences, ideologies and
expectations. The anti-apartheid struggle resulted in thousands of deaths,
tortures and physically ‘traumatized’ people. Father Michael Lapsley, himself
the victim of a letter bomb sent him courtesy of the apartheid state, opened
a nonpartisan Center for Victims of Political Trauma and Torture in Cape
Town in 2003. Counselors there rejected the idea of post-traumatic stress
disorder among victims who were facing continual and constant stresses.
The post-trauma victims, they said, were the world’s lucky few.
In the highly politicized culture of South Africa, the targets of politically
orchestrated violence — both by the apartheid state and at the hands of
revolutionaries and militants — were uncomfortable with the stripped down
clinical model of trauma. During a counseling session at the Trauma Center
following the 1993 ‘Heidelberg Pub massacre’ in Observatory, a student bohemian neighborhood of Cape Town, the victims and survivors (including
whites and mixed race coloureds across the political spectrum) rejected the
counselors’ attempts to render the massacre as a senseless act of violence by
misguided pac militants. The survivors insisted on framing the attack on their
lives as politically motivated and therefore as ‘meaningful’. A former soldier
in South African Defense Forces who was present in the pub and lost a friend
in the attack, scolded the counselors: ‘Come off it! This is South Africa! We
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41
always knew something like this would happen sooner or later. Just help me
get over my phobias [fear of going outside; fear of bright light and noise] and
let’s all hope that the political negotiations will get us out of this mess.’ A
nurse whose friend died sitting next to her at the pub agreed. ‘Every day I see
the wounds of the township coming into the emergency room. And I think to
myself, “how long can things like this go on?’’’ Everyone at the session clung
to the hope that ‘some good’ would come out of the massacre in the end.
A few years later the newly elected anc government established its famous
Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an effort to heal the nation. The trc
divided the population into two camps — victims and perpetrators of state and
revolutionary violence — and applied all the modern therapeutics of trauma:
ptsd, victim narratives, forgiveness, ‘closure’ and reconciliation. But victims
who were active in the anti-apartheid struggle refused to be positioned in either
camp, saying that they were revolutionaries, not patients or victims. The trauma
model stripped them of their identities, not to mention of their glory. ‘I am a
victor, not a victim’, Albie Sachs, an anc ‘warrior’, is fond of saying. Today, a
justice on South Africa’s highest court, Albie confided on one occasion that
he wasn’t sure that he could cope with living in ordinary times. ‘There is an
addiction to the excitement of living through a revolution’, he said.
To the chagrin of the trc ‘briefers’ and ‘comforters’, trained in the EuroAmerican trauma model, the only individuals who fully embraced the model
were perpetrators rather than victims. The apartheid police sergeant, Jeffrey
Benzein, captured international attention when he demonstrated before tv
cameras at the trc his signature technique – the wet bag torture. When asked
by one of his victims, Tony Yengeni, how it felt to suffocate another human
being, Benzene started to cry. Then he took refuge (thorough the testimony
of his clinical psychologist) in a psychiatric defense, that he was suffering
from ptsd. He was confused, anxious, sleepless, and amnesiac. He could
not remember the details of what he did or did not do to his victims. Allan
Young once argued, with reference to the Mei Lai massacre, that there was
something very troubling about a medical diagnosis that could be as easily
appropriated by the perpetrators of a massacre as by its victims (personal
communication).
Young militants in the anc and pac were trained to be strong, ascetic, and
stoical. Whether appearing as victims or perpetrators of violence (or both)
they often found the emotional hand-wringing of trc hearings unseemly.
One of the St. James Church attackers said that the trc was useless: ‘Dead
is dead and nothing I can say now — whether I am sorry or full of regret
42
— can bring those bodies back.’ My own assistant, Monga Mehlwana, from
Langa township in Cape Town, refused at first to attend open hearings of
the trc. After witnessing with me a hearing dealing with the kidnapping,
torture and burning by secret police of a militant, who the police (adding
insult to injury) accused of being a useless double-agent, Monga confided,
‘You know, I was arrested when I was 12 because I was wearing my older
brother’s T-shirt with the anc colors. The police put a bag over my head so
I couldn’t breathe and they shocked me until I passed out. I couldn’t escape
the torture because I didn’t have any of the information the police wanted.’
I asked Monga if he had ever spoken to a counselor or a mental health worker about his experience. ‘No!’ he said emphatically and then he chuckled.
‘When I came home, everyone came out to cheer me and to toyi-toyi (a
militant high-stepping dance) in my honor. Now I was a real hero. It was a
fantastic experience!’
The ptsd model underestimates the human capacity not only to survive,
but to thrive, during and following states of emergency, extreme adversity,
and everyday as well as extraordinary violence. The construction of humans
as resilient and hardy or fragile, passive and easily overwhelmed by events
should not be viewed as an either/or opposition. Human nature is both
resilient and frail. There are limits to human adaptiveness as the death rates
of infants on the Alto do Cruzeiro, of street kids in Bom Jesus, and hungry,
marginalized, oppressed and exploited people everywhere. But the medical-social science-psychiatric pendulum has swung in recent years toward a
model of human vulnerability (Harris 1997) and human frailty (Buttle 2003)
to the exclusion of the awesome ability of people — adults and children — to
withstand, survive, and live with horrible events.
In what follows, drawing on my field research among mothers and infants on
the verge of die-outs in the Brazilian Northeast; on ‘hunted’ street kids in urban
Brazil; and on the survivors of political massacres and violence following the
anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, I will try to distill a few elements that
allow individuals and communities to survive traumatic conditions, with their
wits and the wit intact, and to at least hint at an alternative model of human
hardiness to counter-balance the ptsd model of human vulnerability.
Resilience
Resilience in the face of adversity is not a new topic, but earlier and seminal studies seem to be readily forgotten or overlooked. Michael Rutter’s
(1985) research showed that following the most severe traumas less than
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43
half of all children exposed will later experience any symptoms of ptsd. B. F.
Steele (1986) analyzed the lives of famous world figures who were successful
despite, or because of, miserable childhoods or terrible early life experiences.
Similarly, George Valliant (1977) found that personal strength and resilience
derives largely from having had to overcome the odds. Strength becomes
most apparent, Valliant wrote (1977:13) ‘when the going gets tough’.
There was plenty of ‘tough going’ on the Alto do Cruzeiro, on the mean
streets of Bom Jesus da Mata, and in the townships and cities of South Africa
during and just after the democratic transition there. I will identify a few
‘tactics of resilience’ that I have encountered, moving back and forth among
my three case examples. Some of the tactics are heart-warming and easy to
identify with. Other of the tactics may offend ‘our’ sensibilities and tastes,
shaped by very different subjectivities, notions of value, human worth, and
the good life, meaning always, the life that is worth living.
Strength, emotional control, courage, and self-sufficiency, along with a
certain display of ‘invulnerability’ to pain and suffering are moral virtues in
the Stoical tradition passed down via Christianity to modern Kantian ethics
based on rationality, principled behavior, dignity, and duty. Our postmodern
therapeutic sensibilities (the ‘traumatic vision’) are more Aristotelian, based
on a view of the human and the good life as derived from emotional integrity,
integration, and social virtues of care, empathy, and sensitivity to human
weakness and frailty.5 Both models argue for a different version of the good
life lived in accordance to virtue. The resilient scenarios described below
might best be seen as following the Stoical tradition in which strength of
character and relative invulnerability are purchased at the price of relationship, of intimacy, care, and perhaps even love. In short, all those emotions
and dispositions that render humans vulnerable to pain, to loss, to grief, to
despair, and to hopelessness. This is exemplified by my Brazilian co-madre,
Dalina who said, following the death of an almost loved grandchild from
poverty and neglect: ‘Don’t cry for the little critter who’s dead, cry for the
living who have to continue the battle.’
Normalization
The routinization of premature death in the interior of Northeast Brazil that
I have described here and elsewhere can be seen as a ‘psychiatric symptom’
or as a feature of resilience. When the seventh-month-old infant of a neighbor
on the Alto died, her mother decided to go ahead with the celebration of her
six-year-old’s birthday party, which had been promised the child for a very
44
long time. The cake was baked and decorated, a few balloons purchased,
coca-colas were lined up and ready. The infant in its cardboard box was
prompted up on the table next to these party favors, and the birthday well
wishers came and celebrated Patricia’s birthday while barely noting the dead
baby as the counter-centerpiece to the birthday cake.
Another example of ‘normalization’ in the context of maternal accommodation comes from South Africa. Dolly Mphahlele of Tembisa township,
mother of a fifteen-year-old boy, Ernest, who made the mistake of running
with a street gang that had been terrorizing the community. When young
vigilantes came looking for Ernest, Dolly said that she knew her wayward
son was as good as dead. She accepted unquestioningly the harsh ‘codes’ that
governed township life during the later years of the anti-apartheid struggle,
and when the young comrades warned her that Ernest would be ‘disciplined’,
she accepted the death sentence with one exception: ‘The one thing I won’t
stand for’, she said, ‘is fire on my son. You can kill him but do not burn him.’
Her maternal plea was ignored, however, and the next day Dolly Mphahlele
buried the charred remains of young Ernest. Her handsome, strong, and,
above all, resigned face filled front pages of local newspapers. She went on,
however, to become an important community activist.
Narrativity: Living to Tell the Tale
Clifford Geertz once said that the only thing that humans could not seem
to live with is the idea that life might be utterly random, meaningless and
absurd. Thus, all humans are story-tellers and meaning-makers. Resilient
narratives reframe adverse events in order to make them meaningful, purposeful, and, as my Czech mother used to say, ‘for the best’. Patricia and
David Mrazek (1987) refer to ‘cognitive restructuring of painful experiences’,
the attempt to make terrible events consistent with one’s world view. Even
the most unbearable events can be described as ‘not so bad after all’ or as
something that will lead to positive change in the end.
On the Alto do Cruzeiro, Oscar and Biu’s struggled to give ‘meaning’ to
their three-year-old daughter’s death from malnutrition and pneumonia,
while bearing in mind that she died at home alone while they were out
dancing the frevo during carnival celebrations in 1989. Oscar concluded that
‘perhaps Mercea died to bring us to our senses, to make us a united family
again’. Mercea’s older sister looked for a spiritual meaning for her sister’s
death that she could live with:
45
A Talent for Life
I think that God was good, in part, because He took Mercea away from her life
of misery. He ended her constant begging for things that we didn’t have to give
her . . . from having to cry all day and all night. It was better, in a way, for us, too,
so we could end our constant hunting down of Oscar, after he had left us, begging
him for money, for medicines, for food, everything for Mercea . . . But, then God
was not so good . . . because Mercea is still hovering around us, a wandering soul,
an alma penanda. She cannot even speak, she only points to her feet, which are
cold and blistered. And now she is no longer in a place where we can try to sort
out some of her problems. And we continue to suffer.
This tortured narrative at the very least allowed for one resolution, the
purchase of a pair of warm stockings that were buried over Mercea’s fresh
grave, and after which she did stop appearing to her sister, Xoxa.
Linda Biehl, mother of the slain Fulbright student stoned during a mob
frenzy in Guguletu in August 1993, told me during the trial of the four young
men held primarily responsible, that she imagines her daughter’s last moments
as one of ecstatic liberation. Showing me a carefully preserved newspaper
clipping of Amy coming through the finish line at a South African marathon race, Linda Biehl noted that her daughter’s face is ‘full of ecstasy, pain,
exhaustion, and relief. ‘This is how I think Amy looked when she died in
Guguletu, as if she were breaking through another, her last, finish line.’ Thus
Linda Biehl substituted an image of beauty and light for the ugly police and
forensic photos attached to her daughter’s autopsy report.
Linda Biehl on steps of Municipal Supreme Court and
Ntbeko Peni, one of the convicted killers at his home in
Cape Town, 1998. Photo: Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
46
A few years later, following a meeting I arranged between Peter Biehl and
two of his daughter’s killers, in their shack community, the Biehls informally
‘adopted’ the boys, hiring them to work for the Amy Biehl Foundation in
Cape Town. Linda Biehl once told me that she never feels closer to Amy
than when she is in the presence of the young men who killed her, holding
the hands that last touched her daughter’s body, an admission that left me
speechless and abashed.
Reframing: Victors not Victims
What psychologists have called reframing an event is perhaps not strong
enough to describe, for example, the way that the survivors of apartheid’s
violence live with the scars of their experience, scars that I have sometimes
called their ‘sacred wounds’. An excerpt from my field diary may suffice:
You cannot avoid them for they are present at every political event. Father Michael
Lapsley with his startling metal hooks where his hands should be . . . There he is
mischievously lighting a young woman’s cigarette (a magician’s trick!) or, over
there, skillfully holding the stem of a wine glass raised in a defiant toast . . . Once
the shock leaves one wants to caress his gentle hook-hand, to stroke the ruptured, permanently discolored skin where his right eye once was, and to toast him,
noble wounded warrior, with wine goblets raised high, clinking glass with metal
and champagne with tears. And over there, with his back carelessly turned to the
door, stands Albie Sachs with his handsomely lined face and his resonant soothing
voice, the agnostics’ theologian, dressed in his priestly robes, his favorite bright
and bold dashiki, waving his phantom limb, to make a point. That ever-present
missing piece is Albie’s most expressive body part and he gestures forcefully with
the freely waving, sleeve, his sweet banner of liberty . . . Of thee, I sing, Albie.
(February 15, 1994).
Father Michael gestures broadly with his metal hooks, referring to them as
his ‘entree’ into the Black community. ‘These’, he once told me, very nearly
poking me in the eye, ‘are the gold standard. They are my passport into
South African township life.’ Albie Sachs is as expressive with his phantom
limb — the space where his right arm once was before it was ripped away
in a car bomb blast — as Father Lapsley is with his hooks. Sachs (2000) has
written exquisitely of his recovery from the bomb that was carefully placed
in the trunk of his car courtesy of the apartheid state while he was in exile
in Mozambique. While it (quite literally) ‘unbalanced’ him, the loss of his
arm in that bomb blast paradoxically provided him with a Wittgensteinian
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47
‘certainty’ in his body-self and in the new body politic emerging in South
Africa. As his normal right-handedness necessarily shifted to left, a softer,
more feminine side of himself emerged, a self he likes considerably better than
his older and more stoical and reserved self. With humor and grace, Albie
re-armed himself in his hospital bed in preparation for his and his country’s
victory against apartheid and terrorism which was Albie’s ‘soft vengeance’.
Like Michael’s hooks, Albie’s wounds are a visible sign of the pact he struck
as a militant and a race traitor to white privilege under apartheid.
Jeitos and Malandragem: Instrumentality and Structured Improvisation
Not all aspects of human resilience are as edifying. In the shantytowns of
Brazil people refer to their jeitos and malandragem — the trickery, cunning,
manipulations — they often use to get out of a tight space. The jeitoso is a
personality type, connoting one who is attractive, smooth, handy, sharp and
a real operator. When a jeito involves ‘getting away with murder’ or a ‘taking
advantage’ at someone else’s expense, it is related to malandragem, the art
and tactics of the scoundrel and the rascal: it refers to a ‘badness’ that is also
a kind of strength that involves charm, sexual allure, charisma, street smarts
and wit. Jeitos and malandragem are forms of ‘social navigation’ used by Brazilians of all classes to ‘beat the system’ by circumventing the law, but in the
shantytown they refer to the daily improvisations used to stay alive at all.
The people of the shantytown work their jeitos vertically through alliances with the rich and powerful, as well as laterally through friendships and
sexual relationships that are purely instrumental. Resilience in the context
of shantytown life involves a certain amount of manipulation verging on
sociopathy. When Lourdes shacked up with an old man to milk him of his
pension, or when ’Tonieta, after being jilted by a trucker who left her pregnant,
took the cheap engagement ring he left her and presented it to a slow-witted neighbor, Severino, who always had a crush on her, saying ‘Look here,
Severino, I have a nice ring left me by Geraldo, why don’t we use it and get
married?’ they are using classical tactics of the jeitoso.
Loyalties are often ‘shallow’ and they may follow a trail of gifts and favors. Love is often conflated with material favors. Lourdes described one of
her casual boyfriends, Nelson, as her ‘husband’ during the months that he
visited her on Saturday nights, bringing her a feira basket of groceries. When
the groceries ended, so did the so called ‘marriage’. Similarly, while grandmothers on the Alto frequently rear their daughters’ children for indefinite
periods of informal fosterage, many of the older women were explicit about
48
the ground rules. ‘I will keep them only as long as they are virgins’. When
Donna Goldstein’s (2003) key informant, from a large favela in the hills of
Rio de Janeiro, Gloria threw her incorrigible daughters into the streets, she
later referred to them humorously as Falecida um (deceased number one)
and Falecida dois (deceased number two).
Shantytown residents form households and families through bricolage, an
inventive ‘making up’ relations as they go along, following a kind of structured improvisation. Women fashioned husbands out of weekend visitors, just as
they might replace or substitute their own mortally neglected and dead infants
with filhos de criação, foster children rescued from younger women unable to
rear, as they once were, a living child. When lacking a mother, a street child
would invent a ‘godmother’ in a pinch. I was often recruited into this role for
as long as it might take to extract something valuable and needed to get by
for a day or a week, after which the fictive kinship would be forgotten.
Socialization for Toughness: ‘Eating Shit in a Favela’
Graça (above), the mother of a large gang of children, some her own,
others casually fostered, told Donna of the time that Oscar, a foster child
she had rescued from starvation as an infant, soiled the bed he shared with
his foster siblings. She made him eat the shit the next morning, and worse,
forced him to lick his lips and say Mmmm as if it tasted good. She did the
same when another foster child, Coco, continued to wet his bed long after
it was deemed normal and she made him suck the urine-soaked bed sheets.
Gloria was trying to teach the children how to be what Brazilians call gente
(civilized people), as well as how to survive in the mean streets of the Brazilian
favela. Children had to learn a blend of shame and toughness.
Black Humor
The people of the shantytown often swallow and deflect their anger by
means of an ironic and absurdist black humor. ‘Don’t fret, Nancy’, Sue Ejidio tried to console me after a few dozen Alto families had dug huge pits in
their ‘backyards’ on the basis of an empty promise I had extracted from the
Pernambucan Secretary of Sanitation of free cement slabs and construction
materials in support of the shantytown’s ‘self-help’ latrine project. Months
had passed and the winter rains began in earnest, filling the abandoned pits
with rainwater, posing a grave risk to Alto toddlers and young children. Still,
Ejidio tried to cheer me up. ‘It’s alright’, he said. ‘We don’t eat enough to fill
those holes, anyway’.
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49
In the favelas of Brazil where death is small and life often lived on the edge
of collapse, one is often drawn into a chorus of ‘laughing people’ (Bakhtin).
While humor is sometimes seen within the weapons of the weak school of
thought as as a fugitive form of insubordination, or a hidden transcript of
resistance, Goldstein (2003) is correct in suggesting instead that black humor
in the favela is less a site of resistance than a site where existence itself is
made possible. Humor not only allows one to live but it contains within itself
a refusal of the demand to suffer. Humor, then, is a way of bearing witness
to tragic realities without succumbing to them. Thus, Goldstein shows how
even jokes about rape, child stealing and abandonment, physical abuse, and
gang murder contain layers of bravado, anger, defiance, deep sadness as well
as strength.
The favela, after all, as captured in Coldstein‘s memorable vignettes in
Laughter Out of Place, is a social world in which people are left behind to wash
away the bloodstains on the doorstep from the previous night’s gang rape or
police homicide as they invite the wary visitor to come inside: ‘Enter! It’s clean,
totally clean, all gone, nothing to fear now’. Gloria thus invited Donna into
her living room the morning after her son-in-law had been shot in the head.
When a little eight-year-old filled Donna in on the changing composition of
the household: ‘Remember Zeca?’, she asked impishly, referring to her halfbrother. Yes, says Donna smiling, of course I do. To which Soneca replied
by drawing a line across her neck, sticking out her tongue, and saying (with
her eyes buldging): Morreu e fedeu – he’s dead and rotting. When Donna
responded with alarm, Soneca reassured her, ‘It doesn’t matter. I never liked
him anyway; he was a runt and a tattletale and, really, I don’t miss him a bit.’
(2003:18–19).
Resilient Biu – ‘No, I won’t Cry!’ Photo: Nancy Scheper-Hughes.�
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Making Merry/Animaçao
Festas connote the popular cultural tradition within which people play
carnival, dance their cirrandas, forrós, quadrillas, and light their fireworks and
bonfires — in short, in which they make merry despite the wolf at the door.
In concluding her life history, Biu refused to let it end on a sorrowful or a
desperate note. She came close up to my face, so close I could smell the faint
aftertaste of dried fish and celantro, as salty and bitter as tears. But Biu would
not have it that way: ‘No, Nancí, I won’t cry’, she said. ‘And I won’t waste
my life thinking about it from morning to night. My life is hard enough. One
husband hung himself and another walked out on me. I work hard all day in
the cane fields. What good would it do me to lie awake at night crying about
my fate? Can I argue with God for the state that I’m in? No! So I’ll dance and
I’ll jump and I’ll play carnival ! And yes, I’ll laugh and people will wonder at
a pobre like me who can have such a good time. But if I don’t enjoy myself, if
I can’t amuse myself a little bit, well then I would rather be dead.’
Trauma and Transcendence
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one
special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of
screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go
through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and
at a touch they are there in all their completeness (William James 1902:305).
Finally, I want to suggest a topsy-turvy view of the phenomenology of trauma
suggesting that the subjective experience of the immediate symptoms of an
explosion, a violent assault, a rape, even torture may produce paradoxical
‘symptoms’ that can be viewed as signs of resilience and strength rather than
breakdown. The immediate experience of trauma produces altered states that
are not totally dissimilar from states of ecstasy or what William James called
‘Varieties of Religious Experience’. We can call them transcendental.
When Albie Sachs refers to his ‘addiction’ to the excitement of waging a
revolution — one that resulted in his near death and loss of limb — or when
anthropologist Meira Weiss says that in Jerusalem, following a spate of
bomb-ings in the city, people grow bored and ‘antsy’ in-between the blasts,
they speak of violent events with a blend of horror and exultation. If there
is survivor guilt, and there is, there is also ‘survivor high’ and it bears some
serious examination.
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Eric Haanstad (2006) presented a provocative paper at the 2006 American
Anthropological Association meetings in San Jose, California, that opens
up this subject. He notes, based on his research on Thai police involved
in a war on terror, that the perceived temporal and spatial alterations surrounding violent encounters — the slowing down of time, the out-of-body
dissociations, the sense of flying and so on — should not be viewed simply as
the result of bio-physiological processes but indicate the subjectivity of our
perceptions of time and space. The perceptual alterations that accompany
traumatic events include tachypsychia – the distortion of perceived and lived
time — the speeding up or, more frequently, slowing down of the original
events so that the victim seems to be suspended in a slow motion film, and
dissociation of body perception so that the victim may see herself hovering
above the attack (‘excorporation’) — the fugue state and tunnel vision that
excludes all peripheral vision.
All these para-normal states also accompany mystical experiences. They
can be found, for example, in Blake’s poetry, in Rousseau’s jungle dreamscapes, and in the spiritual writings of St. Teresa of Avila and of Juan de la
Cruz. Father Michael Lapsely, like some of the St. James Church survivors,
says that he saw the hand of God at work in the bombing that nearly took
his life. ‘I was never closer to God’, he said during an interview, ‘than in the
moment of the explosion that took away my eye and my hands. I could sense
the Holy Spirit at my side, holding me up, telling me that I would survive.’
Dawie Ackerman, who lost his wife in the St. James Church Massacre
has re-played a thousand times over the decisive moment when he walked
into the church a few minutes after his wife, and rather than disrupt her and
the woman with whom she was sitting, chatting, in a front pew, Dawie took
his place several pews behind them. Four years later Dawie still tormented
himself:
— Now, why why didn’t I take my seat next to my wife? Why didn’t I interrupt
her conversation and take her firmly by the arm to sit beside me where she might
have been safe? But I left her there right in the front line of the attack, so that she
was one of the first ones killed . . . This was so contrary to my nature which is to
act decisively. You would think I would be one of the first to try and stop it . . . But
I didn’t, I didn’t . . . I had no gun . . . and I just ducked beneath my pew . . . Two hand
grenades barely missed me . . . People all around me were hit by shrapnel, sprayed
with rifle bullets. A man sitting behind me was killed instantly . . . A man sitting
next to me lost both his arms and his legs. I had to walk over several dead bodies
52
to get to where my wife was sitting. But neither the grenades nor the bullets
caused me any harm. Not a piece of shrapnel hit me. I was completely spared . . . So
I had to accept that God had chosen our Church [for the attack] and those who
survived it for a purpose.
— Which was?
— To give testimony that would honor His name. To do so I have had to remove
all rancor, all hatred against my wife’s killers.
Here the replayed, revisited, haunting trauma has become a vehicle of forgiveness but of political transformation. Ackerman now sees the ‘oblivious
going-about-our business in apartheid South Africa’ as a form of violence, one
in which he and his happy, middle-class, suburban family of soccer players
and church picnic goers was complicit.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while theories of human vulnerability and trauma acknowledge the weight of the world on the lives of the poor, the excluded, and the
oppressed, human frailty is matched by a possibly even bio-evolutionarily
derived, certainly historically situated, and culturally elaborated capacity
for resilience. While for many years searching in the nooks and crannies of
oppressed and excluded communities for political mobilizations and organized resistance in the face of terror as usual, I found, instead, forms of everyday resilience. And in the context of these besieged lives existence itself — living
and surviving to tell the tale – is more than enough to celebrate.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the anonymous manuscript reviewers for Ethnos and especially Henrik Vigh for organizing this special issue of Ethnos and for his many helpful suggestions, interventions, and substantial editing of my paper. A shorter version of the
paper was presented as the 2006 Culture, Brain and Development Distinguished
Lecture Hampshire College, Massachusetts, November 30, 2006. I am grateful to
Barbara Yngvesson, Alan Goodman, Chaia Heller, Donald Joralmon, Debborah Battaglia, Jane Coupers, Lynn Morgan and Ventura Perez for many helpful criticisms
and suggestions that helped push my thinking in new and different directions.
Notes
1. In response to a question I posed at a community meeting on the Alto: ‘What do
you mean when you say that a baby has to die, or that it dies because it wants to
die?’, a woman named Terezina replied: ‘It means that God takes them to save their
mothers from suffering’.‘Yes,’ agreed Zephinha, ‘God knows the future better than us.
It could happen that if the baby were to live he could turn out a thief, or a murderer,
or a good for nothing. There are many reasons to rejoice at the death of an angelbaby!’
A Talent for Life
53
2. ‘Accommodation Syndrome’ is a diagnosis attached to the victims of extreme trauma of a sort that negates hope of escape because one’s life may depend on the abuser.
Thus, it is a label often affixed to child sexual abuse (see Summit 1983) as well as
to kidnap, hostage, and torture victims (see Post 1990). The sense of entrapment,
despair, hopelessness can result in paradoxical dependencies sometimes referred to
the Stockholm Syndrome.
3. Many social, economic and political factors came together and interacted in producing the demographic transition in this part of Brazil. The teachings of liberation
theologian clergy dislodged a more baroque folk Catholicism that viewed God and
the saints as authorizing infant death by ‘calling’ infants to themselves. The widespread availability of the drug Cytotec, as a counter-indicated morning-after drug, in
this part of Brazil in the early 1990s, provided a risky mechanism for birth spacing
that had not existed before. (The birth control pill itself was rejected by many poor
women who feared or who had experienced negative health consequences.) The
installation under President Cardoso of a national system of local ‘health agents’
who went door to door in an effort to rescue infants from unnecessary death was
another factor. On the Alto do Cruzeiro, however, the primary transformation was
the installation of water pipes and improvements of water purification.
4. In August 1993 during an anc-supported teacher-student strike called ‘Operation
Barcelona’ a visiting American Fullbright student from Stanford, California, Amy
Biehl, was dragged from her car in Guguletu township in Cape Town and stoned
and stabbed to death by a mob of jeering school students chanting ‘Death to the
Settler’, a term which, at that particular moment, referred to almost any white person appearing in an African township.
5. This argument is developed by George W. Harris in his book, Dignity and Vulnerability in opposition to Martha Nussbaum’s thesis in her book, The Therapy of Desire.
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A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human - Home

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