Unruly Domestication
Unruly Domestication
Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru
How the international war on poverty shapes identities, relationships, politics, and urban space in Peru.
Unruly Domestication investigates how Peru’s ongoing, internationally endorsed "war on poverty" shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima. Drawing on a decade of embedded, ethnographic research in Lima’s largest and most recently founded “extreme poverty zone,” Kristin Skrabut demonstrates how Peru’s efforts to fight poverty by formalizing property, identity, and family status perpetuate environmentally unsustainable urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians’ faith in public officials and in one another. In the process, Skrabut reveals myriad entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life, exploring how families are made and unmade through political practices, how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy, and how Peruvians’ everyday pursuits of state-sanctioned domestic ideals reproduce informality and landscapes of poverty in the urban periphery.
The only full-length ethnography written about Lima’s iconic and policy-inspiring shantytowns in thirty years, Unruly Domestication provides valuable insight into the dynamics of housing and urban development in the Global South, elucidating the most intimate and profound effects of global efforts to do good.
Kristin Skrabut is a skilled ethnographer, whose fieldwork interweaves accounts from residents, community leaders, and others, showing how individuals have agency but also are caught up in processes beyond their control. She pays attention to the complex nuances of terminology and explains her own choices. Her fascinating observations will be welcomed by many scholars.
A beautifully written and richly detailed book that boldly reconceptualizes the complex dynamics of poverty and gender, governance and relatedness. Unruly Domestication offers much for anyone concerned about the impact of state power on individual lives.
Kristin Skrabut is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University.
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introducing Extreme Lives
- Part I. Concepts in Situ
- Chapter 1. Poverty Productions: Measurement, Mediation, and Mistrust
- Chapter 2. Ambivalent Developments: The Entanglements of Politics and Kinship
- Part II. Materialities of Statecraft
- Chapter 3. Papering the Margins
- Chapter 4. State Identities
- Part III. Intimate Expanses
- Chapter 5. Domestic Ideals, Single Moms, and Elastic Relations
- Chapter 6. Housing, Kinship, and Landscapes of Poverty
- Conclusion: A Different Poverty Story
- Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index
