Abstract
How do you write sociology when confronted with the urgent situation of those who cannot wait any longer? In Patients of the State, a short yet powerfully moving ethnographical text, Javier Auyero and his collaborators intend to answer this question by conducting in situ research with poor people in Argentina to explore the many different faces and locales under which temporality and domination go hand in hand: an office where legal residents apply for citizenship, a welfare agency of the city of Buenos Aires government, and a shantytown in Metropolitan Buenos Aires where people await legal resolution on a suit against an oil company that has contaminated their homes.
Auyero writes within the parameters of what Andrew Abbott has recently called lyrical sociology. He uses literary texts, characterizes some of the situations through the use of mythological figures (Tiresias, Sisyphus), and allows for extensive vignettes to do the work usually done by narrative. He impacts and moves the reader while at the same time providing us with an explanation of how and why this happens. Confronted with how to present material about stillness in a cyclical temporal way, this book chooses two strategies. The first one is to reconstruct the stories and characterize the events, putting human faces on them. The second one is to display the argument such that it does not progress, there is no movement from one chapter to the next, there is no career of becoming a patient; for certain people, it is a perpetual state of being, for which there can be multiple vignettes and sites but no progress or resolution. An introduction and a conclusion make sense of what we have read and the process of producing what the author calls the “patient model.”
Patients of the State reads and feels like a novella, located between the superposition of up-close-and-in-your-face accounts of domination reported in Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World, and the narrative-centered monumental works on collective suffering that sometimes read like novels (e.g., Bourgois, Schepper-Hughes, Biehl, Klinenberg, and even Auyero’s own work in Flammable). The book follows from two strains of research underdeveloped in his own previous work, (1) the delays that happen when gift exchange occurs and how that participates in reproducing political domination, and (2) the work on how people in an obviously toxic environment are made uncertain or confused by it. Those two questions and the current book make a powerful inquiry into how the poor imagine the future. How can they get to see (if) the pieces of the puzzle that make up their lives as dominated people fit together, or even if there is a puzzle to look at.
The book outlines the “patient model,” the process of explaining how temporality participates in (re) producing domination. Auyero asks, what kind of process is subjugation by waiting? To answer this he provides a catalogue and tempography of domination that shows how poor people naturalize the idea that in order to get things from state officials they have to wait, but sometimes they do not know why or how they are doing it. This is one of the many ways in which an everyday form of statehood and citizenship are constructed and performed. While the state is an enabler, how does it enable for the poor? Auyero provides us with a clearer picture of the contradictory role the state plays in the lives of those who are destitute, the hierarchy that gets reconstructed in each act of state power, and the invisible character of some of its mechanisms of domination. If we can think of the monopoly of violence as the fists of the state, and of some of its actions as operating in the gray zone as clandestine kicks, Auyero names the governing techniques he describes in depth as invisible tentacles, pervading the lives of those who wait, producing inferiority, arbitrariness, and uncertainty.
There are of course disadvantages to the book’s writing cum analytical strategy—at times the text feels rushed. Some passages needed more explicit and precise conceptual and theoretical connections between what is being shown in the vignettes and what we are to make of them. The book could have also signaled more that some of the paperwork issues were tied to the path to citizenship, something that is trying and tiresome in most contexts for people of different class origins. A second dimension that could have used more reflection is that of the micro-dynamics of power; a lot of the vignettes are familiar to everyone who, for example, ever had to confront an officer at an airport: the humbling experience of being unable to reply in situations that are absolutely arbitrary. Nevertheless, these criticisms should not detract from our valuation of a very fine and original piece of ethnographic work.
This book should be of great interest to qualitative scholars teaching graduate courses. Since parts of the book are the revisions of fieldnotes produced for previous research under different conceptual lenses, Patients of the State can be a great starting point for discussions on the role of the theoretical revisit in sociological ethnography. It is also a collaborative ethnography in which the data were produced by Auyero, his team, and Auyero in collaboration with other researchers. In this regard, it will certainly contribute to the status of collaboration in qualitative work, as the book has an unusual display of high quality field notes as if they were produced for the reader. It is, to a certain extent, a great exemplar for graduate students when they ask: what are field notes? Because they had to be communicated to a researcher who more often than not was not physically there, the notes are clear and well organized, while shedding light on the tedium of the situation. This is also a reflection of the author’s interest in the material speaking for itself in a (paradoxically) momentaneous way, aiming to awaken the interest and emotion of the reader to the plight of the patients.
Auyero’s work stands in the ethnographic world as a hinge in a conversation between what are otherwise two disciplines isolated from one another: sociology and anthropology. In this particular text he adds the immediacy of report that is usually reserved for journalists and court investigators. His work so far has functioned as a tide, picking up where it left off; I can imagine a future book in which this combination is less experimental but equally (or even more) fruitful.