
Unruly Domestication
Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru
Kristin Skrabut(Author)
University of Texas Press
Published on 21. May 2024
Book
Hardback
312 pages
978-1-4773-2909-2 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
One of the book's greatest contributions is its attempt to comprehensively characterize the everyday lives of the urban poor in a format reminiscent of classical ethnographic monographs in our discipline. Skrabut has an exceptional ability to conceptually elaborate on longer-term processes specific to the Global South from particular ethnographic evidence...Unruly Domestication stands out for its methodological rigour, rich ethnographic description, and the thought-provoking theoretical elaborations offered by the author. The book isa must-read for anyone interested in understanding how anti-poverty policies affect the way the urban poor of Latin America experience and make sense of their everyday lives in contexts of vulnerability and everyday interactions with the state. (Social & Cultural Geography)More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Austin, TX
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
540 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4773-2909-2 (9781477329092)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Kristin Skrabut is a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University.
Content
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
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