Toward a phenomenology of politics: Vulnerability, autonomy, and the making of “hard” corporeal selves in Chile's migrant campamentos

Abstract

How do people experience vulnerability, and what can this experience tell us about how states help those living in precarious conditions? According to the Chilean state, people who live in vulnerable encampments do so strictly out of necessity, not choice, and vulnerability is best addressed by demolishing encampments, resettling their communities, and giving the poor opportunities to recover their economic and moral autonomy. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in predominantly migrant informal settlements in Chile's northern border city of Antofagasta, this article shows how the state's project to demolish vulnerable encampments is in tension with migrant women community leaders’ own personal and collective projects of autonomy. Examining one migrant woman community leader's use of the moral concept of “hardness” to express her ethics of autonomy, I attend to ordinary instances where women helping the state resettle their communities instead subtly undermined the state's resettlement plan. This case advances feminist theories of politics and vulnerability that examine how the domain of the political is reconfigured through women's “domestic” work in the everyday. Psychological anthropology, with its recent turn to critical phenomenology, has much to add to this phenomenology of the critical, of politics.