Abstract
Scholarship has tended to focus on the deleterious impacts of chronic exposure to violence, to the detriment of understanding how residents living in dangerous contexts care for themselves and one another. Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines two sets of practices that residents exercise in the name of protecting themselves and their loved ones. The first set (“making toast”) includes the mundane, “small acts,”—often embedded in routine—that residents draw on in an effort to form connections and create order in a fundamentally chaotic and stressful environment. The second set (“splitting apples”) involves the teaching and exercise of violence in the name of protecting daughters and sons from further harm. Using interviews and field notes, we argue that both sets of practices, when viewed in situ, reveal an “ethics of care.” Resisting the urge to either romanticize or sanitize these efforts, we engage with the difficult question of what it means when an expression of “care” involves the (re)production of violence, especially against a loved one.
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Notes
Although largely unregulated, the state makes random impromptu appearances in La Salada, demanding property taxes, investigating violations of international copyright laws, and/or demanding sewage systems that do not pollute the (adjacent) Riachuelo River (Scarfi and Di Peco 2011). For insightful accounts of the history and workings of these markets, see Hacher (2011) and Girón (2011).
The study was approved by University of Texas at Austin IRB (protocol # 2011-05-0126).
On the diverse forms of violence experienced by the Argentine poor, see Bonaldi and del Cueto (2009); on fear of crime and perceptions of “inseguridad,” see Kessler (2009). It is important to note, however, that although in the last three decades there has been a significant rise in crime, the overall crime rates in Argentina remain comparatively low (see UNODC 2011).
On the state intervention in the area and its role in the perpetuation of interpersonal violence, see Auyero and Berti 2015.
Police brutality is part of the standard operating procedure of the state police in Buenos Aires—especially when poor youth from shantytowns and squatter settlements are involved (CELS 2012; Daroqui 2009). In Ingeniero Budge, this “violent and arbitrary penalization of poverty” (Müller 2011, p. 16) took the form of an infamous “massacre” in 1987 in which three youth from the neighborhood were brutally murdered by the local police, and five cases of lethal police violence between 2005 and 2011 (CORREPI 2012). On perceptions of the police in the area, see Auyero and Berti 2015.
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Raewyn Connell, Senior Editor of Theory and Society, and three Theory and Society reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas-Austin. Thanks to the participants for their insightful suggestions. The National Science Foundation (Award SES-1153230), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin provided funding for this project.
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Auyero, J., Kilanski, K. From “making toast” to “splitting apples”: dissecting “care” in the midst of chronic violence. Theor Soc 44, 393–414 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9255-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-015-9255-6