The Conflictual Social Life of an Industrial Sewing Machine
Abstract
This paper tells the story of Doña Justa and a network of friends and kin who are interconnected through a broken-down industrial sewing machine. This machine, which circulated first as a commodity and then as collateral on interpersonal loans connected to microfinance debts, has been tied to domestic violence, a possible murder, and the adjudication of both Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and kinship. In this paper, I build on Adelman’s (2004) call to examine the political economy of domestic violence or the “battering state” to consider the widespread promotion of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a mechanism to improve access to justice for Bolivia’s poor, particularly as conflicts arise around household economics and intimate disputes among kith and kin. The critical literature on ADR has pointed to the ways that third party mediation “disappears” violence as it promotes harmony and reconciliation. Yet Bolivian ADR practitioners regularly insisted to me and to their clients that “you cannot conciliate violence, you must adjudicate.” Despite this assertion, I found that Bolivian ADR practitioners regularly mediate “around” domestic violence as they draw-up agreements on issues ranging from child support to loan repayments to a husband’s alcohol consumption patterns. Yet conciliators often did so at the behest of their clients, who were anxious to obtain conciliation documents that would help them cope with vast webs of debt and other sources of economic precarity. Many women pursue conciliation accords as a form of leverage with violent domestic partners, and eschew domestic violence litigation in order to first grapple with those crushing debts. As a consequence, conciliators frequently try to compartmentalize violence and debt, to treat them as distinct problems. Through the circulation of the sewing machine, I demonstrate how those artificial divisions not only obscure violence, but also depoliticize forms of violence that are rooted in and exacerbated by an entrepreneurial model of citizenship promoted by foreign aid organizations, the Bolivian government, and NGOs targeting the urban poor. Yet even as conciliation programs treat these as isolated, private problems to be resolved by signing interpersonal conciliation documents, many clients point to the macro political-economic dimension of their household woes.
Bio
Susan Helen Ellison’s current research centers on conflict as a window onto the entanglements between foreign aid agendas, political upheaval, the justice sector, and the lived experience of violence and economic insecurity in urban Latin America. She received her Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from Brown University (May 2013) and has served as a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton for two years. She will join the Department of Anthropology at Wellesley College as an Assistant Professor this fall. Her book project, under contract with Duke University Press, examines how the unfolding (geo)politics of foreign-funded conflict resolution programs have become entangled with Andean kinship practices, regional political tactics, and postcolonial governance projects alike.
[email protected]
This paper tells the story of Doña Justa and a network of friends and kin who are interconnected through a broken-down industrial sewing machine. This machine, which circulated first as a commodity and then as collateral on interpersonal loans connected to microfinance debts, has been tied to domestic violence, a possible murder, and the adjudication of both Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and kinship. In this paper, I build on Adelman’s (2004) call to examine the political economy of domestic violence or the “battering state” to consider the widespread promotion of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a mechanism to improve access to justice for Bolivia’s poor, particularly as conflicts arise around household economics and intimate disputes among kith and kin. The critical literature on ADR has pointed to the ways that third party mediation “disappears” violence as it promotes harmony and reconciliation. Yet Bolivian ADR practitioners regularly insisted to me and to their clients that “you cannot conciliate violence, you must adjudicate.” Despite this assertion, I found that Bolivian ADR practitioners regularly mediate “around” domestic violence as they draw-up agreements on issues ranging from child support to loan repayments to a husband’s alcohol consumption patterns. Yet conciliators often did so at the behest of their clients, who were anxious to obtain conciliation documents that would help them cope with vast webs of debt and other sources of economic precarity. Many women pursue conciliation accords as a form of leverage with violent domestic partners, and eschew domestic violence litigation in order to first grapple with those crushing debts. As a consequence, conciliators frequently try to compartmentalize violence and debt, to treat them as distinct problems. Through the circulation of the sewing machine, I demonstrate how those artificial divisions not only obscure violence, but also depoliticize forms of violence that are rooted in and exacerbated by an entrepreneurial model of citizenship promoted by foreign aid organizations, the Bolivian government, and NGOs targeting the urban poor. Yet even as conciliation programs treat these as isolated, private problems to be resolved by signing interpersonal conciliation documents, many clients point to the macro political-economic dimension of their household woes.
Bio
Susan Helen Ellison’s current research centers on conflict as a window onto the entanglements between foreign aid agendas, political upheaval, the justice sector, and the lived experience of violence and economic insecurity in urban Latin America. She received her Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from Brown University (May 2013) and has served as a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton for two years. She will join the Department of Anthropology at Wellesley College as an Assistant Professor this fall. Her book project, under contract with Duke University Press, examines how the unfolding (geo)politics of foreign-funded conflict resolution programs have become entangled with Andean kinship practices, regional political tactics, and postcolonial governance projects alike.
[email protected]