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Anthropologies of health, well-being, and care; violence; poverty; moral community; subjectivity; law, specifically in relation to incarceration; kinship; and science and technology; Latin America, specifically Chile, and the United States

Poverty’s Life: Anthropologies of Health and Economy; Anthropology of Mental Illness; Bodies in Anthropology; Care and Affliction in the Everyday; On the Question of Drugs; Medical Anthropology; Inquiries between Life and Death; On Care and Well-Being; Methods

Clara Han received her PhD from the Dept. of Anthropology at Harvard University and her MD from Harvard Medical School in 2007. Her dissertation research was situated in Santiago, Chile and explored the intersections of state violence, poverty, and health. This research is now a forthcoming book by University of California Press, entitled Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. It explores emerging modalities of care amongst urban poor families in the context of the post-authoritarian state’s attempts to pay "moral and social debts" to the population. Since 1990, the Chilean state has attempted to "pay back" the moral and social debt to the population accrued during the Pinochet dictatorship. A "moral debt" was owed to the victims of human rights violations, while a "social debt" was owed to the poor. This research explores not only how these debts emerged with the lifeworlds of the urban poor in the form of poverty and mental health programs as well as in official acknowledgements of torture in the population, but also how kin and neighbors engage in subtle modalities of care as well as denial towards their intimates, and the various ways in which state violence and economic precariousness interweave in daily life. It explores how consumer indebtedness has become a pervasive feature amongst poor urban families, while at the same time exploring how notions of gift and historical forms of solidarity gain new valences in everyday life. As such, the research is deeply concerned with temporality, morality, and concepts of health and life in relation to the everyday. Funding for this research came from institutions including the Social Science Research Council, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation.

In her next project, Clara brings her long-standing interests in health, poverty, care, and state violence more closely into conversation with the anthropology of law as well as the studies of the city. Specifically, she will longitudinally explore how neighborhood-level policing, focalized densities of incarceration, as well as collective responses to violence and policing are reshaping kinship networks and moral obligations in a highly policed neighborhood of Santiago. This study also considers the wider context of drug law reforms and criminal procedure reform in Chile, and regionally in Latin America, that has been tied to projects of transitional justice and has advanced an ambitious transformation from the inquisitorial system to the adversarial court system in the past decade. As is perhaps well-known, in the past two decades, the prison population across Latin America has significantly grown. Chile’s prison population has had a 75% increase between 2000 and 2009, making Chile’s incarceration rate the highest in Latin America. Yet, few ethnographic studies have actually explored how kinship relations, ideas of family relatedness, as well as the phenomenological qualities of neighborhoods and neighborhoods as actual social forms are changing in relation to incarceration. This project seeks to contribute to our understanding of these very complex issues through long-term ethnographic research. This next project is set within a larger research framework. Through long-term work in a different poor neighborhood of Santiago, this next project contributes to scholarship on the heterogeneity and variability of urban poverty in relation to morality, law, and kinship, which could be fruitfully put alongside other studies focused primarily on structural violence and social exclusion.

Clara is also one of the core faculty of the Critical Global Health seminar series, an interdisciplinary seminar between Anthropology, History, History of Medicine at the School of Medicine; International Health and Health, Behavior and Society at the School of Public Health. She also has an appointment at the School of Public Health in the Dept. of Health, Behavior, and Society. See this link: http://criticalglobalhealth.net/

Han, Clara. Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press. (forthcoming, April 2012).

Han, Clara. (work-in-progress). "On Feelings and Finiteness in Everyday Life" in Chatterji (Ed.) Generations and Genres: Conversations with Veena Das.

Han, Clara. (work-in-progress). "The Difficulty of Kindness: Boundaries, Time, and the Ordinary" in Kleinman, Das, Singh, and Jackson, (Eds.), Anthropology and Philosophy: Affinities and Antagonisms.

Han, Clara. (work-in-progress). "Contemporaneity of Gift: Silent Kindess, Poverty, and the Social Debt in Santiago, Chile".

Han, Clara. forthcoming. "Unpredictable Work and Medication: The Absorption of Pharmacueuticals into Local Worlds" in Biehl and Petryna (Eds.) When People Come First: Evidence, Actuality, and Theory in Global Health.

Han, Clara. 2011. "Depths of the Present: State Violence and the Neoliberal State" in e-misférica 7.2 After Truth. (Read it online.)

Han, Clara. 2011. "Symptoms of Another Life: time, possibility and domestic relations in Chile’s credit economy" in Cultural Anthropology 26(1): 7-32

Han, Clara. 2010. "Earthquake in Chile: Poverty and Social Diagnoses" in LASA Forum XLI (3): 9-13.

Han, Clara. 2004. "The Work of Indebtedness: The Traumatic Present of Late Capitalist Chile" in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. 28(2): 169-187