According to the numbers, Peru’s economy is growing rapidly with poverty rates declining apace. Yet Peruvians themselves remain skeptical of this success. They argue that help fails to reach the truly needy and that official reports to the contrary are statistical “make up” designed to obscure Peru’s corrupt and impoverished reality. Based on 14 months of comparative and multi-sited ethnographic research, I track this discord from the offices of policy designers in Lima and into the homes of Peruvians making their lives on the urban periphery. I argue that as “extreme poverty” is mediated by official reports and popular imagery, it is also domesticated; on the one hand identified, quantified and controlled, but also increasingly understood and experienced through domestic space and intimate relations. At the level of the household, however, politics and bureaucratic documents intertwine with kinship, sexual morality, and violence to produce new indeterminacies and marginalize non-normative family forms, particularly female-headed households. In analyzing this phenomenon, I explore the coproduction of knowledge and skepticism, how efforts to create governable societies feed illicit markets, the real-life flexibility and fragility of ostensibly rigid family structures, and the permeable boundaries between politics and kinship. This research makes original contributions to anthropological understandings of urban poverty in Latin America, the human dimensions of documentation and emerging constellations of citizenship and exclusion in the margins of the state.
Skrabut, Kristin J.,
"Extreme Lives: The Unruly Domestication of Peruvian Poverty"
(2014).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0N58JR6
