New Books: Unruly Domestication
Join us for our conversation with Dr. Kristin Skrabut, author of Unruly Domestication: Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru, published in 2024 by the University of Texas Press. Unruly Domestication explores how Peru's "war on poverty" took shape in the city of Lima through extensive ethnographic research to better understand how the politics of poverty, statecraft, and family structure become entangled.
Guest
Kristin Skrabut, Assistant Professor, Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning, Tufts University
Get the book!
Unruly Domestication: Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru by Kristin Skrabut, University of Texas Press, 2024
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Kristin Skrabut
Formalization is anti-poverty policy. I think that's one of the more controversial things I say in the book. Because the idea of inclusion as being the thing that you have to do in order to fight poverty, that's really pervasive. I kind of agree with that impulse, but there's a line with this idea that nothing is happening at tabula rasa space. These formalization policies aren't just about kind of inclusion in some kind of abstract state. But can really be interpreted as exceptional, as partisan and political and you have to be attentive to when you're trying to include people, you have to really attentive to how you're including them and what are the categories in terms of that inclusion, because that matters for how people are going to experience marginality.
Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. You just heard from Dr. Kristin Skrabut, the author of Unruly Domestication: Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru from University of Texas Press.
Kristin Skrabut
My name is Kristin Skrabut. I am a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University. My research focuses on statecraft, kinship, and urban space in Latin America, primarily in Lima, where I've spent the last 15 years of my life conducting research specifically in the community at the northwestern area known as Pachacutec.
Emily
Great, and Kristin, thanks so much for joining us today. Maybe to get started, if you could tell us a bit about how you came to this project – why Peru?
Kristin Skrabut
I actually started as an archaeologist, not at an anthropologist, an aspiring archaeologist and that's how I first found my way to Peru because that's where all the ruins are. It's got amazing preservation conditions.
And then when I decided I wanted to move into anthropology and study Los Vivos, no los Muertos, the living and not the dead, which Peruvians always find hilarious when I say because you guys have vivos, means like wild and sneaky and like trying to take advantage of the government too. So, what I decided to do is to move into that space. I wanted to go back to Peru.
Emily
Oh, interesting! You know, so early on you frame your book’s opening with Peru’s national census to launch into your discussions around not just poverty as a social issue or condition, but how it’s produced through numbers, statistics, statecraft. Can you talk about that a bit?
Kristin Skrabut
I first started this in 2007 and at the time I was really interested in identity politics and statecraft. And at that moment, the Peruvian state was just going to be doing its second national census in two years.
And it was redoing the census entirely because it the recently decided president had said that the former census didn't adequately count the population and working to a new one that freezes everybody in place. So everyone had to stay in their houses. There was an immobility order. Everyone had to stay in their houses from 8:00 to 6:00 PM one day so that people could go around and just count everybody, which is a very old school way to do a census. It feels very politically visible. It feels very draconian. So there was definitely the visibility politics that was going on when Peru was doing the census. But my interest in it was that, so in addition to this being the second census in two years was that they were going to try and capture an ethnic identity category, and so I was really interested in how people ostensibly with indigenous roots are going to respond to this identity category. So I identify a place where I think they're going to be migrants and these sites called inversiones very often, or pueblos jovenes, invasions or young towns.
And because an archaeologist friend said that's where the migrants are go there and I found I found a place where people were willing to speak with me and interested in having an anthropologist work with them. So I started trying to get into understand indigenous identity. And I fairly quickly realized that no one gives a damn about indigenous identity, that's not the thing that anyone cares about, what they care about, in terms of identity, the way identity plays out in the everyday, which if you're trying to do this methodologically, you pay attention to us and them.
Where does us and them emerge in everyday conversation? And in this space, it was the people who are really living in this area and the people who are just kind of living or pretending to live, or the tourists. Identity politics was really residential politics and the politics of inhabitants. So that was the first project I did, was on informal modalities for urbanization and how and what constitutes kind of real residency and real inhabitants, and how this relates to state practices of accounting. So as I was trying to develop a broader dissertation project, as I was doing that first research on informal urbanization, I started to notice that every policy that I encountered, that I heard about was everything the government did, was always justified in terms of the war on poverty.
Everything was about the lucha Contra la Pobreza. Whether it was the war on drugs, citizen security, distributing ID cards, food. This is what we have. We have to fight the war on drugs because we have to fix poverty so I started to become really curious about, well what are people talking about poverty? What does this mean to people? At the same time, so as every policy is being explained in terms of the war on poverty, Peru is also trumpeting these statistics about how their poverty rate is plummeting. It's gone from approximately 50% in the year 2000. So half of the population is designated as poor, over half, to about 20% in 10 years.
Which is extraordinary. And yet, every time this poverty statistic came out, there was always this sort of flurry of contestation. Newspapers, pundits, and people I worked with in Pachacutec who would tell me, you can't believe that, those stats are being rigged. That's just statistical smoke. Like how do we make sense of this disjuncture between these official statistics and the political salience of poverty and the ways in which it seems to be understood and experienced in practice?
Emily
Yeah, the production of statistics is such a fascinating perspective not just on the creation of these social categories – class, ethnicity, gender – but also a window into the state.
Kristin Skrabut
So, the term statistics, my understanding is that comes statistics are the science of the state. And in the 20th century, the legitimacy of the state is really dependent on its ability to produce statistics, to count the population. Statistics only matter in the context of trying of trying to manage a population and the only entity that tries to manage our population is a state, or some or some kind of statelike entity.
I guess beginning back in the 1930s, Peruvian politicians, with the rise of modernity in Peru, Peruvian politicians really start to stake their reputation on understanding the science of population and being able to produce sound statistics.
So in that context, where the legitimacy of the state is grounded in statistics, to challenge the state’s numbers is to challenge the legitimacy of the state, and you saw this very explicitly with that case of Toledo and the 2005 versus 2007 census. The 2005 census was under Alejandro Toledo and he tried to do the census in terms of the most internationally accepted ways of doing of doing a census, which is not with a de facto census where you freeze everybody, but rather it's done over the course of a number of weeks, there's some survey estimates so you don't have to disrupt everyday life and he really did try and do it in accordance with best practices in the United States and in in France.
It's an invisible political technique. No one really sees. It doesn't disrupt anything. And when those statistics came out, it seemed like that census had undercounted the population in comparison to what you would have projected. So Garcia took this as a way of saying, hey, this government didn't know what they were doing. We are going to take a new census that really counts everybody, and we're going to make sure we do it by freezing everybody and walking around and counting everybody.
And so this space where you see someone taking the administrative responsibilities of the state and embracing it in this really populist way and this really, really performative way. But then after he does that he critiques to later and says, OK, I'm challenging your statistics and your government by saying you weren't able to do these statistics right. So then Garcia goes ahead and does this and then people who want to contest Garcia start saying OK well, that's not the most modern way to do it, and now, because you're counting things in a different way in accordance with how your administration wants to govern, we're not able to these comparative statistics, and people started to suggest that by getting by doing a new census and doing a new kind of baseline, Garcia would be able to rig all statistics going forward. So that's a basic baseline for how challenging statistics is challenge is a kind of political tactic.
Emily
So maybe to segue from this analytic into the book itself – where you’re looking at this relationship between state power, this “war on poverty,” to the actual experiences of residents who are technically categorized as impoverished, how those state actions change or don’t change people’s lives in meaningful ways – I mean, you’re an anthropologist, you’re conducting ethnographic work on the ground in Lima, in these communities, so how do these connect? Or not connect – in other words, what’s the gap between institutional or state policies to combat poverty and people’s actual lived experiences of both poverty and those efforts to diminish it?
Kristin Skrabut
So, the way I divide up the book and thinking about what the war on poverty consists of in Peru, so you begin with trying to understand what poverty is. We've got how poverty is conceptualized. How poverty, anti-poverty policies are implemented, and then how poverty comes to be experienced. So that's the third section of the book. So in this first section where I talk about concepts in situ. So thinking about what is poverty? And to all of these different places and anywhere you go you're never going to get it right. If you go to policy design organizations in Lima, they've got the numbers. They're manipulating statistics, but they seem so distant from it. So, on some level they have this statistical expertise, they have some kind of claim to truth, but that claim to truth can be challenged because you're not on the ground. Plus, any information that they're getting, it's always filtered through categories. It's always filtered through one dimensional, whatever it is the state is interested in at that time.
You can maybe critique the particular things that they're taking note of. And when you're doing that kind of analysis, I maybe took this line out of the book, but I talked about constructing these national averages of poverty as kind of constructing a kind of statistical Frankenstein's monster. Because you kind of construct these aggregate facts, like a fairly accessible example is, “Oh, the average family has 2.1 kids.” No, they don't. There's no family that has 2.1 kids. That that represents no one's experience. It's a useful indicator for governance. But that's not it's not capturing experience. So that's one way of understanding poverty.
And then you've got the kind of grounded understanding of poverty. People who are making their lives in these extreme poverty zones, but they almost always talk about themselves in a way that's kind of distant from poverty. Like no one actually, very few people embrace the poverty label. It's a technique in negotiation. It's something that comes up once in a while, but it's not the poverty categories. No one thinks themselves as primarily poor. They think of themselves as in relation to a whole bunch of other different categories that matter. One of the techniques I did was I actually shadow some of the surveyors to try and understand some of these poverty surveyors or the national Survey of Household and life conditions to try and understand how conditions on the ground of Pachacutec were being captured.
There's this respondent that we have to interview, that organizations had to interview in four years in a row and by all accounts, he has no family. His original house had been flooded, so he was relocated to Pachacutec.
He works as a shop assistant in a local convenience store. He doesn't have much in the way of income to speak of. So he seems like someone you just think is poor, like someone who might embrace that label. But as we were talking, he just got so frustrated with all the questions. And he was like, why are you all talking to me? so much poverty that when he's around here, look around you, look at all this poverty. Why aren't you talking to those poor people? The problem with the government is, you don't have a way to channel resources. Stop talking to me and talk to the to the truly needy. So poverty always seemed to be kind of elsewhere. And anytime you scrutinize any particular case too carefully, people would find a reason to doubt that particular case of poverty. So poverty is this construct. Its greatest salience in some ways, or it's greatest reality is in the abstract. It never exists as a real case. Poverty is like -- you can be a poor person. But poverty only exists in the abstract in the way. So the state and NGO's and folks who are trying to assist are in some ways, they're seeking out poverty, but that that kind of abstract poverty doesn't exist in the ground. What exists are people who are poor in different ways.
Emily
So, do you think of poverty as a kind of social relation? How is it mediated by these other practices or state actions and technologies?
Kristin Skrabut
So in this case you can think of poverty as a relation and certainly I think structures of inequality in some ways shape people's experience in a more in a very real way, in a way to think that policymakers should be. I kind of think policymakers should be attacking those structures and equality more so than attacking some kind of abstract, often spatialized poverty. But the way I talk about in that section, concepts in situ, the way I talk about poverty is that, everyone's trying to understand this abstract concept, but it only ever materializes in very particular ways. I describe it as an assemblage, using this kind of global assemblage framework. So you've got these, these statistics and these kind of fiscal terms, but you also have peruse kind of very living history of inequality and indigeneity and colonization and corrupt politicians. And then you have your own experiences of engaging with state institutions. And then you have the representational resources. So I can sit here and tell you that poverty is very hard to pin down. You're constantly seeing like someone point to hey, these are the statistics that define it and these are and look at. Here's a like, here's this reality TV show Extreme Lives. But we're going to go out and showcase the poorest of the poor. Then suddenly that imaginary becomes part of this assemblage, it becomes part of how you understand what real poverty is.
And one of my big critiques of it, like so that show Extreme Lives, is that the imaginary of poverty that they produce is so extraordinary and so morally clean. So pristine, so impossible, that no one could ever possibly inhabit, no real person could possibly inhabit that category. And as a result of trumpeting this very precise image together with a whole bunch of statistical language it makes us think that image does exist somewhere. We know because 20% of the Peruvian population is that. So you've got these statistics combined with these images, so people think that there's this impossibly precise understanding of poverty that exists and that makes it very easy to deny people aid and to say that nobody is ever deserving. One of my points is that we have to be really careful with how we're representing poverty because it matters. If we could find a way to represent deservingness that was broader, that didn't focus on kind of this this point of these pornographic displays of suffering or really trying to appeal to people's sympathies, but trying to come up with portrayals that recognize that people are imperfect and multi-dimensional and they are still worthy of aid because it's it is a worthwhile pursuit to make sure that everyone can live their best life.
Emily
Talking to anthropologists and sociologists who work in urban studies is always so interesting, because these disciplines really rely on ethnographic fieldwork – you're embedded in your research area, and as a result you have to adapt so much to changing circumstances – I don’t even just mean intellectually, when a comment from or an observation of a research subject totally changes your questions, although that happens too, but you’re also adapting to the material conditions of the area. What was that like, your experiences in the field for this book?
Kristin Skrabut
Yeah, the adaptation process is constant. That's one of the great things about ethnography is it's so adaptive. You deal with what's there and you adjust the questions based on based on what's there.
I was interested in state programs and interactions between Pachacutanos and the state. When you actually try and identify the state, It's a whole bunch of different people and institutions, and it's not really clear. It's sort of like poverty kind of dissipates as you try and get close to it. But at the time when I started my field work, there was a fairly clear administrative center of Pachacutec. It was the first three concrete buildings, so I started my field work every morning, I was living about 5 kilometers away from Pachacutec. Eventually I moved into Pachacutec, but either way I walk or take a combi to this administrative center of Pachacutec which housed the Civic Center, which was donated by President Alejandro Toledo. It has what's called the Agencia where the municipal government operates.
And then this vacant model home that was what the Ministry of Housing was aspiring to build in Pachacutec, but kind of never did, because no one liked the design, this kind of monument to failed state plans. But every morning I go to this area, and I hang out and try and figure out what's happening that day and you hang out long enough, you make friends.
When I first arrived in Pachacutec, the first person I met who was like, Oh yes, we really want to work with an anthropologist. He warned me -- He hung out in the Civic Center. He was administrator there and he's like, yeah, I'm happy to help you with your project. I'd love to work with you, but just so you know, I don't want you to -- there are a bunch of bad dirigentes, bad community leaders who are really just hurting Pachacutec, like you shouldn't talk to those guys, only talk to people that I introduce you to. So like oh okay, that's interesting? Like note to self, little wary. And then I kind of stumbled into the agencia and I saw there was a meeting going on like these bad dirigentes. And two of the leaders to the people who are leading that, they were essentially saying that the leadership structure, that my first contact was involved with, had overstayed their term and they didn't actually represent the community; these dirigentes really represent the community. And so then both these sides had this strange interest in kind of communicating their side to me and why they were the legitimate leadership here. Through that experience I ended up making friends with a lot of the leadership who's trying to kind of oust this original non-representative leadership structure, and then over time a lot of those leaders get absorbed into the municipal government. So because I already had these contacts and these relationships, they understood who I was and understood kind of my student project to just understand everyday life in Pachacutec. And they were OK with me shadowing a lot of the political work they're doing, a lot of the policy work they were doing. So every time some people would contact me when there's a community event say Oh, you might want to come and take pictures for us and so I would do that. And I would also work with lower level government employees as they kind of made rounds and tried to enact policy. And through that, you end up encountering even more community leaders and explain my project to them. And through that I was able to get a good sense of what the internal operations of the state were, and trying to distance myself from that organization, I was able to kind of make friends with other kinds of community leaders and then start shadowing them in their mutual aid programs and practices.
Those first few months of field work, we're trying to figure out who are the representative, who's the real representation here, who's who are the legitimate leaders are, there's an earthquake. And this is 2007, and I remember being outside of, like I was outside the Agencia, and I just remember like feeling like I was surfing all of a sudden, and not knowing what was happening. All the dogs bark, and then you see all the earth kind of undulate and then women screaming for patron saints, running home, running home very quickly. And community leaders jumping in their cars and not saying anything. And me just standing there, not really knowing what's going on. And then I finally I am able to make my way back to my house. But the next day I come back and it turns out the earthquake it was registered 7.9 on the Richter scale, which is big, and but it comes out that the epicenter is in this town called Pisco and that's where most of the damage is, and they have these very iconic churches there that completely collapsed. And Pachacutec, while things were scary because most of the houses are made of straw, there wasn't much for to get damaged.
Over this one woman, kind of embarrassingly talking about how she got home, she realized her kids were OK and the first thing she did was like, throw herself in front of the TV because that was the asset that she had that could break, and that represents so much work and so much labor, and she's probably still paying it off.
Everyone in Pachacutec, I'm understanding as being like the poorest of the poor, the truly needy, because it is an officially designated extreme poverty zone, but all those people start taking up collections to send down to Pisco.
And all the politicians who were trying to showcase their earnest concern for Pachacutanos start going to Pisco to be seen helping there. So, at that moment as I'm starting to think about poverty, I also decide to go down to Pisco like, OK, what's going on here?
And that's when I come to realize that poverty is mobile. It doesn't stay in place. So in some sense, poverty is this thing that’s a production. You need cameras, you need images, you need laws, and that kind of produces emergency circumstance that makes people care.
So from that, my methodology, in terms of thinking about the scope of this project, it sort of evolves and I start trying to figure out, OK, well, if Pachacutec is the place where the poorest of the poor are, except in certain circumstances -- So then I try and understand, OK, well, where are these other places? And so I go to other places outside of Lima, other places more broadly in Peru that are designated as extreme poverty zones to try and understand how they're similar to or are different from. So then I go and spend a few days, a few weeks in the case of Pisco, I lived there for four months, trying to understand those dynamics. And so I had aspirations at one point for this to be like a truly comparative project, like let me hold Pisco constant and let me hold Pachacutec constant and compare them.
I sort of realized, because I've continued to return to Pachacutec over and over, I realize that really the center of my theory building is there. That's how I understand what everyday life is in Peru is, through this site and everything else is kind of a way for me to better understand what's happening here. So, in the book I talk about that as a grounded but mobile methodology.
Emily
I think there’s so much in here, in terms of methods, theory, that is or could be portable, even though your work is really grounded in place, or in situ, as you say. But what do you hope that readers will take away from this book? Do you see it crossing disciplinary lines, maybe even informing some of the more practical, policy-oriented work in Latin American cities?
Kristin Skrabut
I think the book can speak to -- certainly urban scholars and Latin Americanists, people interested in Peru. And in fact, I know that Peruvians are already picking up this book in a way that for, like urban planners in Peru are picking up my book, which I think is just amazing, boosting my confidence that I actually got something real. There can be a fear, like am I really getting this right? But the fact that Peruvians and people who work in these places are picking it up and saying, yeah, you did, and we want to work with this to produce policy and produce better urban spaces and understand urban spaces better. That’s really gratifying for me.
I would really love it if students, IR students, people interested in development, any kind of social policy, or any kind of do-gooder work. I would really love it if that population picked up the book, because I think one of things that I was so struck by in reading through policy texts, and particularly a lot of the formalization programs that that are used to combat poverty, so many of those formalization programs, like programs to formalize identity, and formalize property, a lot of that is based on this weird idea that this program is the first thing that has ever happened to this place, and they really do. They reproduce these tabula rasa imaginaries and as a result, policies misfire or are not interpreted the way that people who are enacting the policies want them to be interpreted, because they don't recognize that whatever they're doing is going to be layered into this really complex sociopolitical space. And so I think that's one big take away.
In some ways it's very simple. But that anyone who wants to do policy has to have a really good understanding of what is already there, politically and socially before you enact, because otherwise, you have no way of knowing what your policy is going to do or how it's going or how it's going to be perceived.
Emily
We haven’t really had the opportunity to get into it too much yet, but gender is also a really significant motif throughout this work – how poverty is experienced differently along gendered lines, how notions of family, kinship, domesticity get entangled not only in the experience of poverty but also in how it’s defined, or treated as a problem for the state.
Kristin Skrabut
So gender is a big theme in the book and that was one of the more unexpected themes, this construct of single mothers was so omnipresent in discourses on poverty and it's critically important nowadays because there's a lot of development programs focused on empowering women, and one of the things that I hope comes across in the book is that there's a kind of tension there. So in between empowerment and responsibilization.
So a lot of these efforts to empower women and get them to take ownership over their lives, it's putting an extraordinary burden on women and also holding them in some ways to a really impossible standard, such as they end up being sort of trapped by these representations of what is the, what is the entrepreneurial good, deserving poor woman? And so I would love it if the book encourages people to be more sensitive to that slippage and helps us pull back before that happens.
Emily
My thanks to Kristin Skrabut, author of Unruly Domestication from University of Texas Press. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.