Deformímetros

I am looking for the stain from the puddle of blood [on the floor of her hotel room], and then I see the faint outline. The way Lexi described it, when her water broke she was gushing blood all over the floor, right next to the bed. We are back from the hospital, and Lexi can barely walk. She wants to change the bloody pads in her underwear but dis- covers that the blood has already soaked through her jeans. “Shit!” she exclaims. Drawing on my limited gynecological knowledge, I ask what color the blood is to try and determine if it is newer bleeding (bright red) or clots (darker). She indicates that it is clots. Because she

left the hospital against medical advice (AMA), she also left without the antibiotics she was supposed to be taking postsurgery.

“I have to get to work to pay for this room,” she tells me.

“Lexi, I don’t think you can,” I respond. I can’t imagine her pulling dates [doing sex work] in her condition.

She doesn’t argue and goes to change her pad in the bathroom down the hall. Even if she does spike a fever, she won’t return to the hospital. Because she came in on a 5150 psychiatric admit and left AMA, Lexi fears the hospital staff will commit her, to finish off her man- datory seventy- two- hour lockdown. Then no one would be at the bus station to meet her six- year- old son, Lionel, who is arriving, alone, in several hours. Lexi plans to bring Lionel back here to stay with her. When she returns from the bathroom she starts cleaning up syringes, empty cigarette packs, condoms, and old food wrappers from around the room. She arranges her and Pano’s (her boyfriend’s) shoes on the floor, near the door, and collects even more garbage mixed in with her welfare and child custody paperwork. When I leave about fifteen minutes later I loan her $20 for her rent. “I will pay you back,” she says, “day after tomorrow.”

The African proverb “When vultures surround you, try not to die” aptly characterizes the tensions between survival and vulnerability for addicted, pregnant women in the daily- rent hotels. Despite all of the good intentions of those who try to help, there is a culture of vulturism in urban sites of poverty that creates complex relations of power and interdependence for all social actors — pregnant women, their drug dealers, hotel managers, and social sci- entists and policy- makers alike. Urban poor people, in my case addicted, pregnant women, become targets for social scientific investigation and are ethnographically consumed because they are wounded and bleeding, meta- phorically and sometimes literally. Social suffering is the necessary condition under which they become objects of study (not just for medical anthropolo- gists but also for public health researchers, policy- makers, and journalists). The ethical stance of the ethnographer seeking to witness and then produce narratives about the social suffering in these sites of urban poverty is pred- icated on the extreme availability of suffering here: the addiction, sex work, violence, and poverty creating a perfect storm from which it is difficult to tear one’s eyes away. The forms of suffering are also emplaced. They lie in waiting.

The anthropologist need only visit them at her convenience. Like the vulture she can circle around until the bleeding starts, and then she can engage.

It might be tempting to justify this consumption on grounds that there is an intention to “do good” or to “improve” the situation. Yet seeing the role of anthropologist as like that of a vulture offers a counter narrative — an up- close interpretation of ethnographic relations of give-and-take in which uneven power relations mask the extractive process of research as scientific altruism.34

Social scientific vulturism also conjures older ghosts, from a time when many anthropologists were handmaiden to, even complicit in, colonial projects throughout the world. But on the ground, the complexity of the relationship between social scientist and research subject demands more nuance. It would be false to describe the relationship of urban anthropology and the urban poor as one of only exploitation. The witness here can play an important role of revealing the social and structural underpinnings of social suffering. Beyond that, my relationships with the women in the daily- rent hotels were more complex and ambivalent than a simplified political economic analysis i.6. Room 43, Raman Hotel, May 2008. Photo by the author.

of poverty would capture or, indeed, support. I was a vulture, an anthropolo- gist seeking information, stories, and photographs to document the everyday suffering in the daily- rent hotels. But I was also an outreach worker, confidant, friend, chauffeur, and sometime “doctor.” I did not have the clinical power to aid or cure or the social power to grant better housing or case management. This paradoxical subject position rendered me neutral, involved, and ineffec- tive, by turns. I was present and distant. And I always went home at the end of the day, which in my case was to a house I owned fifteen blocks and a world away from the daily- rent hotels.

In a related form of complex vulturism, social relations between daily- rent hotel owners and managers and addicted, pregnant women are characterized by exploitation, care, conflict, and abuse. Occupying the housing status in be- tween government- funded supportive housing and street homelessness, the daily- rent hotels were breeding grounds for poor health, physical suffering, and extreme mental stress for the women who lived in them. Yet the micro practices that occurred in the daily- rent hotels also demonstrated care and concern for the women tenants at times. Examples include allowing the out- reach program to work in the hotels, allowing specific women to accrue debt, allowing women to leave their belongings stored at the hotel between tempo- rary evictions. Taking a broader lens, the changing neighborhood also preyed on the women of the daily- rent hotels, as was reflected in increasing policing activity and decreasing social tolerance. Gentrification occurs in urban poor neighborhoods, like the one I studied, because the poverty of the ghetto is both edgy and, at least initially, cheap.35 _{Wealthy citizens “eat up” the housing}

and businesses in the neighborhood because they are “dying”; they become “easy pickings.” Ethnographic work in this setting demands a recognition that both the people and the place itself are available for knowledge production, exploitation, and rehabilitation because they are so poor. Can it also enable certain forms of care?

On that September morning, I was searching for the blood because Lexi had asked me to. She wanted me to bear witness to that terrible night: the traumatic series of events that included drug use, violence, and the loss of her baby. I was also searching for the blood because it was material evidence of the specific form of suffering that was happening in this place. Vaginal bleeding here stands in both for what is exceptional to life in the daily- rent hotels — an addicted pregnancy that could lead to a child growing up here — and for what is typical to it: having to continue to prostitute oneself for rent even under conditions of extreme bodily disintegration. Taking and giving are muddled in

this scene. Lexi also knows she is helping my research by sacrificing her story to it, I know I am helping her with the $20 loan; we are both made needy and insecure. Yet one of us (me) is so clearly less at risk for terrible consequences as a result. The material conditions of consumption and insecurity at this sight demand an ethical evaluation of this complexity, one in which the vulturistic nature of the science is not eschewed yet the nuances of care, intimacy, love, and friendship are also not ignored. What interests me is the problem pre- sented by holding all these truths, not the naming of only one of them.

Commitment, Writing, and Addicted Pregnancy

There is no question that my multiple attributions (as a public health re- searcher in the past, as an anthropologist in the present, and as an activist/ volunteer throughout) potentially created multiple social positions for me. These multiple roles, whether chosen by me or compelled upon me in the field, may have played a role in how women reacted to me and the informa- tion they shared. What isn’t clear to me is how and in what way my multiple social positions changed the information given, and this problem came to inform my writing. I offer one early example, to explore the ways in which a perceived role might simultaneously appear to matter and to not matter. Alexandra, a woman I came to know well during my four years of ethnog- raphy, said something ironic to me the day after I had been introduced by the drop- in center staff as “a researcher,” with the statement that “we value evaluation, it improves our programs.” At the time I stated unequivocally that my project was not an evaluation, but it didn’t matter. In some sense all re- search conducted in service settings, especially critical medical anthropology, one might argue, is evaluative. The following conversation indicates Alexan- dria’s astute observation about my multiple roles, and also how her housing concerns — and my inability to really address her needs (housing) — rendered my “anthro- vulturing,” in whatever form, largely irrelevant.