An investigation into a large Argentinian group, into the intimacy of families who are managing to survive, shows how the “D system” gives rise to new forms of law.
If the pockets are empty, what is the point of searching them? Very few researchers have considered poverty from a legal perspective. Emilia Schijman’s legal-economic ethnography is a break. It sheds light on a proliferation of uses of money, and forms of accommodation when one has little. In doing so, she immerses us in the resources of twenty families struggling with exchanges and debts, obligatory sociabilities, tricks and arrangements backed by law. From the inside, we see differently this materiality of days made up of combative practices, permanent conflicts and pre-legal pacts to alleviate them.
Life, a user guide
The setting: a large complex of 3,200 housing units in Buenos Aires. One in two homes is out of status, in other words occupied without rights or title. Between the chronic indebtedness of the inhabitants and institutional failures, occupation titles are absent. The Housing Institute, a state body, is the owner and main manager of this space. However, in 2012, unpaid collective charges prevented maintenance work from being carried out. The value of the property collapsed and this devalued capital produced a formidable legal instability from which a lot of violence resulted.
The actors: they are mainly women. In the formation of exchanges, they play a major role, and especially grandmothers. With knowledge of social rights, a small pension and housing, they are active on all social scenes: the health center, the church, the Housing Institute, the canteen, the post office; and in doing so, they distribute information, benefits, resources, protections. Similarly, there are women who drive taxis, sellers of household items, managers of kiosks and telephone premises.
The mode of protection: it is ensured by the cohabitation of three generations around the grandmothers who accommodate their unemployed children and grandchildren, from which arises the obligation of a common fund where each will pay in their own way. With housing, a small pension, a detailed knowledge of aid, social rights and ways of making oneself eligible, the grandmothers circulate money, debts and the accommodated. They negotiate rules of life, which is, in short, a matter of law.
Resources: these are the grandmothers’ pensions and the children’s odd jobs. To keep the budget in check, the grandmothers are postmen, administrators, nurses, cleaners, cooks in the canteen, lenders and borrowers; they manage the collection during funeral ceremonies, sometimes act as public writers.
The exits on employment: women work “by the piece” at home, they insert five hundred chips in mobile phones for 150 pesos, fix four hundred and eighty nails on belts for a cent each, make rubber shopping bags, or cut rolls of fabric to make jeans. It is an old practice of subcontracting in cascade. These additions will join the family budgets which also mix the resources coming from social assistance, undeclared work, resale, small-scale savings and various financial practices.
It is in this theatre that housing becomes central: it is hosted, lent, sold conditionally, with signed or unsigned papers, fragile pacts that dictate the exchange and open the way to new debts. Many families seek to sublet rooms or adopt guests. The apartment is the pivot of the circulation of goods, from which exchanges are made, needs arise, and where the most necessary objects take on a particular life while remaining connected to the world of women, mothers and grandmothers – whether it be that of work, of giving or of protecting loved ones. In beautiful pages, Emilia Schijman traces the paths and pitfalls to succeed in winning a few objects, the appearance of new forms of appropriation, the need for bartering and “give and take”.
We learn how to get by, who can help whom, how to repay when we have no money. With clinical care, the researcher highlights the double movement that results from rental kinship. On the one hand, a “pact” fixing the use of a room with a counterpart, shopping to do for example. Conversely, sharing daily life creates kinship, unexpected attention, care in return. “I give to you, you give to me”: through accommodation everything fits together. That a mother shelters her two adult sons with their partners and children, an aunt and a niece passing through, an old man who was a former neighbor of the grandmother? And each will pay for “his place” in his own way.
The successive stories resemble the game of seven families, with the aim of bringing together as many complete families as possible (6 members per family) in order to obtain the maximum support to live. Who will help whom and by what balance? Who is whose ally, around what threat or what counterpart? In this game of family association, when one is weakened, the common expression used by women is “I live on borrowed money”, a way of saying that I live “at the mercy of the other”. “Being at the mercy” is this deep feeling that defines situations of poverty, others would euphemistically say “vulnerability”. However, being at the mercy means being in a position where one can be attacked – being under the thumb of, being delivered to – in short, a dominated position containing a violent threat. From then on, the author asks, how do the different positions of strength and fragility combine? How do economic interest, physical strength, feelings, friendships and moral obligations come together? How can we compensate for the short circuits between unemployment, marital breakdown and successive accommodations?
To unfold these questions, the author shows how registers overlap (in particular the gift and the market), as evidenced by Clara, who distributes bread in her stairwell, which is a way of forcing food counter-gifts. We see the importance of these sharings when Julia is suspicious of her neighbor and great friend because she never invites her to eat if she knocks at her house at noon or in the evening. Isn’t getting into debt with your neighbors a way of transforming debt into savings? And doesn’t the tontine allow you to borrow without interest with its temporary role as a “currency keeper”?
Working on forms of legality
In this broad panorama, Emilia Schijman accomplishes a tour de force. She shows that the poor make law, that is, “a whole work on legality exercised from below”. Moreover, could it be otherwise in these worlds of incessant hostilities and conflicts? By striving to shed light on a proliferation of uses, customs, forms of accommodation and pacts, the author reveals an effective legality in action. She had to work in a way other than in great legal syntheses, choose tiny episodes of exchange, follow the possible outcomes in the face of uncertainties and chronic instability. In spaces where formal law is receding or becoming inapplicable, she had to identify how living law is arranged and invents a model of dual legality, as Jacques Commaille says.
In total, and by excess, we can say that the regulatory power of women “makes law” in family and neighborhood networks, schools and health centers, meetings of building sectors, social counters. To respond to blackmail, to cushion the coercion that is exercised from above and below, women draw red lines, reduce uncertainties, indicate good practices, sanction if necessary. The law is a “being without a body”, underlines Simona Cerutti, it slips into all the negotiation relations described by Emilia Schijman, so as to release an alternative legality, active standards in short.
We finally understand that the greater the gap between legal standards and practices, the more “work on legality” is required. From then on, the latter is situated between an internal legitimacy, legal or not, which refers to the obligations and uses that are in accordance with the principles that the neighborhood accepts as its own, and an external legitimacy, rather legal. The work thus takes up the traces of this regulation affirmed by Georges Gurvitch, a right born from the effervescence of society itself, of its social frameworks according to his expression, or a “living right” in the sense of Eugen Ehrlich.
Emila Schijman’s true feat lies in this demonstration of a socially manufactured legality, a legality inscribed in the practices of individuals, acted upon and carried by them. “Having the right to”, “having the right to do”: with each description, this expression shows us the constant search for legitimacy to establish action. The result of the investigation is impressive. The game of the seven families is transformed into a “game of pacts”. Choosing, ordering, prioritizing, removing doubts, extinguishing a dispute: the work on legality is very concrete.
In fact, this history of banal law seeks to break with the indifference of lawyers for the concrete world of exchanges that are not written into the Civil Code. It is invisible law if we do not investigate. It is intangible law if we neglect ordinary practices. One only has to spend a day in a social welfare office, for example, to know what it means. Emilia Schijman delivers this remarkable investigation for those who want to understand social worlds where “every action must yield something”; in other words, she invites us to hear the law that resounds like a cry in these places of poverty, a cry that disarms the morose, disqualifies resignations. Because law is more than formal law, we must welcome this stride towards these modest fronts where actions offer rules. A matter of law before law, we could say. Because within all these pacts are lodged sociabilities that already include principles of law.