[Philippine corruption] Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines #12/204
In his 2014 book Cultural Intimacy, Michael Herzfeld expands the intimate beyond the domestic by suggesting that in any given polity (in his case, the nation), there are intimate ways of knowing each other; of realizing implicit embarrassments as shared, as expressed through little ironies and winking eyes. “Cultural intimacy,” he states, “is the space of all such self-recognition” (8). Based on our material, we may say that the way people have coped with each other and with authority has been based on shared cultural intimacy; on knowing when and how to bribe a police officer and on seeing—and not seeing—the violence or drug abuse next door, for instance. However due to the “change of change” (Højer et al. 2018, 36) instituted by the war on drugs, communal intimacy has been radically reconfigured. The question we need to ask in this regard is how communal intimacy has been reconfigured and, in particular, what people in Bagong Silang can do about it.
FIGURE 5.A resident posts a stern warning to their neighbors not to throw dead mice near their house. Photo by Karl Hapal.
FIGURE 6.A path walk in Bagong Silang. FromBagong Silang, directed by Jayneca Reyes, 2016. Courtesy of Jayneca Reyes.
As for the second theoretical movement, Herzfeld’s analysis also points to how states appropriate intimacy and kin relations, for instance, in notions of the mother or father of the nation; this is prolific in the Philippines (Rafael 2000). To explore this dynamic is beyond the scope of this study, which is concerned with communal politics. More to the point, however, intimacy is also an indispensable part of biopolitics, or what Natalie Oswin (2010) calls the governing of intimacy. Goodfellow and Mulla, in their 2008 article on “compelling intimacies,” suggest, “Domestic relations are enmeshed within the formidable and subtle regulatory processes of such things as the law, institutional ethical discourses, moral economies, therapeutic practices, and such things as the sense of taboo that infuses intimacy and other forms of affiliation found in household relations” (259). In this way, to quote Ann Laura Stoler, “To study the intimate is not to turn away from structures of dominance but to relocate their conditions of possibility and relations and forces of production” (in Oswin 2010, 62). In our work in Bagong Silang, we are not concerned directly with the domestic sphere, although we do explore gendered and generational conflicts both during the drug war and before. Rather, we use this mode of thinking as a way to understand how communal intimacy is drawn into political and regulatory processes as well as how these processes are only made possible (as in the case with the watch lists) by tapping into and preying on intimate and affectionate relationality. We can look at it in reverse and suggest that state violence, for instance the war on drugs, folds itself into and reconfigures communal and family intimate relations, as Javier Auyero and Fernanda Berti argue in their 2016 study of violence in Buenos Aires.13This means that the parameters of intimacy shift along with shifts in politics. In his analysis of what he calls agonistic intimacy, Bhrigupati Singh (2011) suggests similar relations as he explores how intimate relations between neighbors in a diverse Indian community with Muslim and Hindu residents are ever shifting, agonizing terrains of conflict and cohabitation. How violent or how intimate they are, he suggests, depends on matters of politics produced beyond the local, intimate relations. We may say that the parameters of agonizing terrains shift when the parameters of politics change, as they did with the war on drugs. Suddenly neighbors are transformed from “people like us” to dangerous outsiders in need of violent disciplining (Kusaka 2017a).
One way of understanding how intimacy is infused with societal and communal power is to take seriously the relationality of intimacy. To understand this kind of politics, and with the addition of the third theoretical movement, concerning unequal, affective exchange relations, we adopt the conceptual language introduced by feminist economic anthropology, in which exchange and gift relations are inherently unequal (Weiner 1992). Many traditional analyses of gift relations took place in relatively stable and putatively equal contexts—gift relations involved reproducing structure and long-term relations that were frequently part of the patriarchy. However, as Marilyn Strathern (1992) argues, exchange relations do not have to be equal or harmonious. In fact, gift exchanges are often compelled in which the recipient is able to elicit an object from a future donor through coercion. The exchange is then based on the “successful persuasion” of the donor that he or she is, in fact, able to part with something (Strathern 1988, 178), such as money, a house, or even the donor’s life.