Cornell University Press Sociology Sampler 2020

SOCIOLOGY

SAMPLER Cornell University Press 2020

This sampler includes a small excerpt from the following new and forthcoming books published by Cornell University Press, and its imprints, in the field of Sociology.

For more details about these books, as well as all others in this field, please visit our website.

Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances, by Cynthia J. Cranford (ILR Press) Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society, by Gracia Liu-Farrer When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland, by Sarah G. Phillips Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development, by Ilan Kapoor Taking Care of Our Own: When Family Caregivers Do Medical Work, by Sherry N. Mong (ILR Press) Teen Spirit: How Adolescence Transformed the Adult World, by Paul Howe

HOME CARE FAULT LINES Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances Cynthia J. Cranford

ILR PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cranford, Cynthia, author.

Title: Home care fault lines : understanding tensions and creating alliances / Cynthia J. Cranford.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Series: The culture and politics of health care work | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046918 (print) | LCCN 2019046919 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501749254 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501749261 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501749278 (epub) | ISBN 9781501749285 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Home care services—California—Los Angeles. | Home health aides—California—Los Angeles. | Older people—Home care—California— Los Angeles. | People with disabilities—Home care—California—Los Angeles.| Home care services—Ontario—Toronto. | Home health aides—Ontario— Toronto. | Older people—Home care—Ontario—Toronto. | People with disabilities—Home care—Ontario—Toronto.

Classification: LCC RA645.36.C2 C73 2020 (print) | LCC RA645.36.C2 (ebook) | DDC 362.1409794/94—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046918 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046919

Contents

Acknowledgments A Note on Sources

ix xiii

Introduction: Tensions between Flexibility and Security

1

1.

Gender, Migration, and the Pursuit of Security

20

2.

Disability and the Quest for Flexibility

40

3. Managing Flexibility without Security in Toronto’s

Direct Funding

59

4. Negotiating Flexibility with Security in Los Angeles’s

In-Home Supportive Services

83

5. Agency-Led Flexibility and Insecurity in Toronto’s

Home Care

107

6. Bargaining for Security with Flexibility in Toronto’s 7.

Attendant Services

132

Toward Flexible Care and Secure Work in Intimate Labor

151

Appendix: Interviews and Methods Notes References Index

175 179 201 213

vii

Introduction

TENSIONS BETWEEN FLEXIBILITY AND SECURITY

Alex is part of the rapidly growing population of people in the United States, Canada, and other countries who need help with intimate daily activities like getting up and dressed, bathing, eating, going to the bathroom, moving around, keeping one’s spirits up, and maintaining a clean house. Most elderly and disabled people prefer to remain in their own home, yet unpaid family care is insufficient.1 After Alex was injured at fifteen, his mother provided the daily support necessary for him to finish school and attend community college. Later his wife facilitated his career as an accountant. For the fifteen years before our interview, Alex had been receiving paid help from mostly immigrant workers. These government-funded services became essential after Alex and his wife each broke a hip. Alex, a white man in his late sixties, described both tension and intimacy with the personal support workers.

The best part of being confined and my world being turned upside down has, in a funny way, been the people I have met. I mean, I’ve got attendants from Sweden, Chile, China, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and, of course, the Caribbean and even a lot of Canadians. I love all of them. . . . I am able to talk with them. They do seem to understand me. Some of them, they even seem to like me. . . . Some of them don’t, and I’m not sure they like anybody. . . . The attendants have to have more empathy and understanding.

I am not pleased with what happened to my hip and sometimes that frustration, or frustration of living here with my wife, or her frustration boils over, and it comes out sideways. Under the [service-providing agency’s] 1

2 INTRODUCTION

rules, you could start getting threatening letters about withdrawing services. Or, if you’ve got an intelligent attendant, they shrug it off and come back. You can’t abuse them in any way. . . . The rule of thumb, you know, in the real world is “keep it simple, and straighten it out.”

Alex’s experience living long-term with paraplegia and more recently with osteoporosis points to the growing requirements for old age and disability support due to population aging, health care developments that prolong disabled people’s lives, and widespread rejection of nursing homes. Alex’s case also illustrates a second pressing issue that intersects with old age and disability support: immigration.

Kay, a Black woman in her late forties, is among a growing workforce providing intimate support in elderly and disabled people’s homes, a workforce mostly comprising immigrant women.2 Kay migrated to Toronto in the early 1990s to join her father and brother, then married another immigrant personal support worker and had a son. Kay was born and raised in Guyana, where she finished high school. Upon arrival in Toronto, she did assembly work for several years and then enrolled in a course for home health aides at a community college. She then did a series of precarious jobs, often simultaneously, including privately paid home care and temporary placements in nursing homes and hospitals. At the time of our interview, she had been working seventeen years for a unionized and relatively well-paying, government-funded, nonprofit agency focused on services to people with physical disabilities, like Alex. Similar to Alex, Kay described tensions within this intimate paid relationship.

My relationship with consumers is very professional, but I sometimes break it, you know, just to be lively, because sometimes the consumers will put the radio on. . . . I have a very good relationship with them so far. . . . I know sometimes they take out their frustration on us. So it’s, like, a nice sort of word you say, “I would appreciate if you speak to me properly.” . . . I find the consumers are, like, we don’t know about anything because we come from another country. It happens all the time. . . . That’s why I try to be as professional as I can. . . . Sometimes, I just ignore them and do what I got to do and get out. And at times, “Oh, you think because I come from Guyana I don’t know about anything? You think I don’t know what you eating there? My son, the same thing I do for my son.”

Importantly, Kay also described her efforts to mediate tensions by drawing emotional boundaries and sometimes through direct confrontation.

The relationship between Alex and Kay, and people like them, deserves attention because in this growing sector of in-home elderly and disability support

HOME CARE FAULT LINES 3

the worlds of employment and social services come together in complex ways and sometimes collide. Most studies, however, cannot capture these dynamics because they examine just the workers or only the recipients, remain solely at the policy level, or focus on the private sector.3 Recipients and workers develop close and meaningful work relationships, yet they experience different “faces of oppression,” which can bubble up in the relationship and generate tension.4 Looking closely at the experiences of people like Kay and Alex, in relation to each other and in the social context within which they relate to one another, reveals a tension between flexibility for recipients and security for workers.

Recipients face marginalization vis-à-vis a state and society that values independence.5 Many of the people interviewed had been in care institutions that cast them wholly as dependents; others experienced lack of adequately funded support at home, requiring reliance on insufficient unpaid family help, as was the case for Alex. This marginalization fuels recipients’ quest for flexibility in their current services.6 Workers experience different axes of oppression, namely devaluation and lack of recognition within class and gender inequalities, which shapes their pursuit of security. Like Kay, the majority of personal support workers in the urban areas of industrialized nations are immigrant women from less industrialized countries, and their economic insecurity is infused with racialization through nation of origin, language, accent, religion, culture, or skin color.7 Crucially, paying close attention to the relationship between workers and recipients not only allows us to understand tensions but also to chart the potential for flexibility with security. Alex’s and Kay’s quotes include traces of hope for working through tensions—in Alex’s claim that he “loves” the workers who hail from all over the world and in Kay’s feeling that she has crafted a “very good relationship” with the “consumers” by keeping it “professional.” Yet such assertions can be problematic if recipients and workers do not have collective backing and instead negotiate tensions as atomized individuals.

What exacerbates tensions or encourages solidarity between recipients and workers? In this book, I answer this question with a multilevel comparative study of in-home, old age, and disability support programs in Los Angeles and Toronto.

I call this sector “domestic personal support.” The United States and Canada are both white settler nations of immigrants, and both face expanding domestic personal support needs, thus providing ideal locales for this study. Yet understanding tensions, and the possibilities to mitigate them, requires not comparative analysis of large entities like nations but rather multiple levels of comparative analysis.

Flexibility-security tensions between people like Alex and Kay are shaped not only by clashes between distinct locations in a matrix of oppression but also by the government policies and service agency rules that structure domestic personal support. In recent years, scholars have analyzed how care, migration,

4 INTRODUCTION

and employment policies work together to shape inequality within domestic personal support, yet within this integrative framework the analysis of employment policy is least developed.8 Recent policy initiatives in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and within Europe, beginning with disability support and more recently extending to the elderly, aim to give recipients the labor market flexibility of employers, by allowing them to hire and fire their own workers.9 However, employment scholars document that this labor market flexibility generally results in precarity for workers through temporary contracts and insecure income.10 Here we see the relationship between the state and the labor market, through social policies defining the employer. This raises a question: is it possible to achieve security for workers even when recipients have labor market flexibility? Policies that seek to combine labor market flexibility and labor market security have operated in Europe under the umbrella of “flexicurity.”11 A labordisability-senior alliance won a version of labor market security with flexibility in California.12 Yet the level at which social movements engage with their members to bring security with flexibility requires much further analysis, the complexity of which I delineate in figure 1. Indeed, flexibility with security will require more than policy reform at the state and labor market levels.

State funding and labor market policies, while important, are only partial solutions because they do not address tensions at the more intimate level of the labor process. The workers and recipients interviewed for this book emphasized everyday concerns at length. Workers complained of not only insufficient employment and of income inequality in the labor market but also of deeper state

labor market social movements

social movements

labor process management workers

recipients

FIGURE 1. Levels of analysis in the study of domestic personal support

HOME CARE FAULT LINES 5

sources of insecurity—like the racialized indignities linked to assumptions that connect place of birth in a less industrialized country to inferior knowledge, as mentioned by Kay. Nonetheless, the importance of flexibility at this intimate level is clear in the views of Alex, who feels workers should adapt to his and to his wife’s moods because they come not from a place of privilege but from the marginalizing experiences of disability and age. Flexicurity and policies like it cast recipients like Alex as “employers” of workers like Kay, presumably so they can change what, when, where, and how their support is provided. However, there might be other ways to give recipients the sought-after flexibility at this labor process level that do not result in workers’ insecurity. In some domestic personal support programs but not all, there are agencies whose managers mediate the relationship between workers and recipients. Here we see the relationship between the labor market policy (that defines who is the employer in a program) and the labor process.

An agency’s rules regarding how workers and recipients should engage one another is another aspect that can shape flexibility and security at the intimate level. Agency rules can support workers’ efforts toward, in Kay’s words, “keeping it professional” or not. They can also require recipients to control their frustration, as alluded to by Alex. How do workers and recipients negotiate tensions within agency rules or lack thereof? Domestic personal support programs vary in terms of whom legislation deems the official employer but also in the level and type of rules that managers set and enforce, rules that shape worker and recipient relationships in the labor process. As such, comparative analysis at the program level is essential to understanding the flexibility-security trade-off and untangling the potential for flexibility with security in domestic personal support.

Looking closely at the experiences of people like Alex and Kay across domestic personal support programs that have different labor market policies and different labor process rules, I am able to ask original questions. In settings where the recipient is the employer, how do workers negotiate their relationship with recipients in order to keep their jobs and to garner respect? What kinds of relational work do recipients do in various settings to keep good workers and their dignity?13 In settings where an agency is the employer, do agency rules encourage recipients and workers to compromise, or do they pit them against one another? How much do workers and recipients negotiate their relationship under the agency’s radar? Finally, how do workers and recipients’ collective backing, through labor, disability, or other social movements, shape their ability to negotiate flexibility with security?

In this book I compare Toronto and Los Angeles domestic personal support programs that provide assistance to adults with physical disabilities and to elderly people across and within class and racial lines, inside and outside of families,

6 INTRODUCTION

and provided to and by both women and men. Given dynamic politics that have ushered in distinct programs over time and place, as well as diverse theoretical frameworks, different actors use different terms to refer to recipients and workers in this sector. Disability advocates and some scholars reject the terms “client” and especially “patient” and embrace the terms “consumer” (in the United States and sometimes Canada) or “service user” (in the UK) to emphasize recipients’ efforts to gain more influence over these nonmedical social services. Some reject the term “care” as denoting medicalized professional expertise or paternalistic charity and pity and instead use “support” or “help.”14 Yet the use of the term “consumer” suggests choice in a market that is not evident, despite creeping marketization.15 The frontline, in-home personal support workers in this study are referred to in the literature and in various programs as “personal support workers,” “personal attendants,” “home health aides,” “home care aides,” “home care workers,” “caregivers,” and sometimes “domestic workers.” Following work and employment scholars and labor organizers, I use “worker” rather than “caregiver” to emphasize this care as labor. I analyze, rather than assume, the meaning of the relationship between those directly receiving and providing domestic personal support. I thus use the most generic, if somewhat objectifying terms “worker” and “recipient” to refer to their structural location as paid frontline workers and as beneficiaries of state-funded services. However, when I cite study participants or discuss the particular programs under analysis, I use the terms used by the actors in question to recognize how program language and identities embed a politics situated in time and place.

By comparing flexibility and security across domestic personal support programs I address the biggest question of this book: how do workers’ and recipients’ distinct locations in multiple systems of inequality, social policies defining the program and its labor market, rules about the labor process, and social movement strategies combine to shape tension between flexibility and security (or, alternatively, cooperation)? In order to answer this question, we need not only a multilevel analysis, as shown in figure 1. We also need conceptual tools that better bridge the scholarly silos of gender, labor, and migration on the one hand and disability and aging studies on the other.

Flexibility and Security at the Labor Market Level Gender and labor scholars link the growth of precarious labor markets, representing insecure employment, to employers’ advancing labor market flexibility to hire and fire, pay lower wages, and provide fewer benefits.16 Women, migrants,

HOME CARE FAULT LINES 7

and indigenous and racialized peoples have long experienced labor market insecurity in sectors like farm labor and domestic work, but since the 1970s precarious conditions have spread to more occupations, including public or governmentfunded ones.17 Employers gain labor market flexibility in large part through their use of part-time and temporary employment contracts. In personal support, governments contract out employer responsibilities to nonprofit or for-profit agencies and increasingly to individuals, even though they still control the funding. There is growing evidence that this contracting out is meant not only, or even primarily, to respond to recipients’ desire for flexibility but also to generate flexibility for the government to cut welfare costs.18 In the United States and Canada, labor policy based on the post-–World War II factory links labor market flexibility for governments and employers on the one hand to workers’ labor market insecurity on the other. This policy assumes a standard employment relationship—that is, a direct and continuous relationship between an employee and a firm. It imagines that a single employer pays, hires, fires, and supervises the worker, as in a factory, but this does not protect workers with multiple, flexible employment contracts. As a result, such workers are highly precarious in that they have insecure employment and earnings and limited social security coverage. Key to the analysis of insecurity in labor markets, then, is answering this question: who are the actors in the employment relationship?19 Making its study complex but also opening up space to analyze the potentials for flexibility with security, the state rarely provides services directly and arranges support in multiple ways. Sometimes an agency is the legal employer, but the recipient gives direction and acts as a de facto employer. This agency model is common in in the UK, Canada, and parts of the United States, including two of the cases profiled in this book.20 Sometimes the person using the services receives funding directly from the government to hire a worker, and legislation thus defines them as the sole employer; this is becoming increasingly common in English-speaking countries and Europe and is included in a third case profiled in this book.21 Legislation defines workers in this situation as either domestic servants or self-employed.22 In both agency and direct models, the government acts as a de facto employer through its influence on funding, but it accepts little to no employer responsibility. Given this complexity, examining the degree of influence of both the legal and de facto employers is a major pillar of my analysis.

Workers’ immigrant status, nationality, and race also contribute to labor market insecurity, but it is unclear how recipients fit into this dynamic. The governmentfunded services of focus in this book are neither the most flexible nor the most insecure forms of domestic personal support. Many migration and labor scholars focus on private-sector systems that recruit temporary migrants whose stay in the country is contingent on living with their employer, or undocumented

8 INTRODUCTION

migrants working in a highly unregulated economy.23 Some of the workers in my studies started out in these extremely insecure systems with highly precarious citizenship status but had achieved legal immigration status by the time they entered the government-funded sector of focus here. Yet their quest for security continued well beyond gaining formal, permanent status, as found in other studies.24 Furthermore, immigrants who arrived with permanent status face labor market disadvantages through the racialization of their national origin.25 When recipients are white and governments deem them the employer, as is true in one of the cases profiled in this book, any deeply held prejudices can take the form of direct hiring bias against workers of color, but anti-discrimination policy does not extend to individual household employers or to de facto employers. When recipients are white and an agency contracted by the government is the employer, as is common in another case I studied, these employers may appease recipients’ racialized preferences yet still get around anti–employment discrimination legislation by classifying the worker as casual or self-employed.26 Yet, while preferences for white workers could mean exclusion from employment or fewer hours for workers of color, studies of sectors rejected by native-born workers document employer preferences for immigrant workers of color because their limited labor market choice gives them little power to demand fair conditions.27 Immigrant recipients, who are the subject of a third case in this book, also use “ethnic logics” in order to recruit workers like themselves, but how this might shape workers’ security is unclear because few studies examine co-ethnic personal support.28 Comparing cases where workers and recipients have varying social locations allows me to consider how labor market flexibility gets tangled up with racialized preferences in multiple ways, and the implications for worker security.

The other side of potential labor market flexibility for recipients, employers, and governments, on the one hand, and insecurity for workers, on the other, is the possibility of labor market security for workers at the expense of flexibility for recipients. Labor market security for workers is most easily and commonly achieved in North America by limiting labor market flexibility, since labor protections are based on the rigid, factory workplace. In personal support, the closest we come to this type of workplace is the nursing home or long-term residential care. Studies find that recipients have little, if any, ability to influence who enters one’s living area to provide intimate support in these institutional settings.29 Some direct a similar critique at the agency model, even though it provides support to people in their own homes, because, like care institutions, agencies rarely allow recipients to hire and fire.30 Insights into precarious employment from gender, work, and migration scholarship can help unravel the implications of recipient flexibility for worker insecurity and vice versa, but there are some unique features of domestic personal

HOME CARE FAULT LINES 9

support that require modified questions. Similar to broad trends in precarious employment, actors beyond the one defined as the employer in labor policy shape the security of personal support workers. In personal support, however, there are usually more actors with influence over worker security, and their influence as legal or de facto employers is more varied than in other cases of precarious employment. This reality requires moving beyond the common analysis of precarious employment at the policy level by asking instead which actor or actors— the government, the agency, the recipient, or all of the above—influence workers’ employment and income security and in what ways. Marking an even greater distinction of the domestic personal support sector: even when policy deems the recipient the employer, they are not really a traditional employer because their requests for flexibility are based not on cost-cutting but rather on intermittent, bodily needs. This fact requires a second question inspired by (but moving beyond) matters addressed by most precarious employment scholars and integrating concerns raised by aging and disability studies: does workers’ labor market security hinge on limiting recipient flexibility? Tackling this question requires also analyzing the possibilities of imaginative social movement organizing.

Returning to Alex and Kay: Alex is an advocate for better funding, while Kay is an active union member, suggesting that the collective backing of social movements boosts both of their calls, one for flexibility and the other for security.

Kay tries to speak nicely even when recipients “take out their frustration” out on her, but when faced with racializing assumptions about her country of birth she directly confronts them. Kay at times feels empowered to challenge recipients’ racialization because her union seeks to address workplace tensions, but not all unions are attuned to the intimate labor process of domestic personal support, and many of these workers have no collective voice at all. Recipients also have varying levels of collective backing from social movements. Some programs are closely linked to an independent living movement—a section of the disability rights movement that pushes for flexibility and quality in disability support services. However, what kinds of worker protections are compatible with recipient flexibility? Policy studies too often stop short of examining whether social movement strategies address flexibility with security. Drawing on a vibrant field of labor studies, I ask: how do social movements, including unions, communitybased labor organizations, and labor-disability or labor-senior alliances, organize for flexibility with security? Historically, unions have had more power in Canada than in the United States, given better legislation, less employer and state opposition, and a larger public sector. Yet both labor movements have suffered and are rethinking their strategies in light of growing labor market precarity and neoliberal policies.31 There are also connections between labor and disability movements’ strategies across Canada and the United States.

10 INTRODUCTION

Flexibility and Security at the Intimate, Labor Process Level Uncovering how social movements might push for flexibility with security in domestic personal support requires attention to the intimate relationships so central in this sector. Recipients and workers, like Alex and Kay, seek flexibility and security not only in the labor market but also in the daily labor process of giving and receiving personal support. A long tradition of studies in the sociology of work analyzes the labor process, meaning how employers organize work in an effort to control which tasks workers perform, when, where, and how, and workers’ strategies of resistance.32 In domestic personal support, employer control is often indirect. Recipients’ pursuit of control could objectify workers as extensions of themselves.33 Yet workers’ resistance could result in power over other people’s bodies and homes.34 Although the labor process tradition directs us to important social relations between employers, consumers, and workers, the majority of recipients and workers interviewed describe a desire not for control but rather for a respectful relationship where workers show empathy and recipients speak nicely, to paraphrase Alex and Kay. Workers and recipients want respectful negotiations over what is done and when, where and how it is done, and this is what I mean by “flexibility and security at the intimate level.” Intimate labor—labor that requires particular knowledge about and attention to another—is a useful concept for my study of flexibility and security in personal support.35 Scholars have examined the daily practice of intimacy in sectors ranging from domestic work to sex work.36 What does the daily practice of intimacy look like in domestic personal support, which is high on intimacy due to the centrality of direct contact with other people’s bodies in their home? The most common ideas used to understand the intimate labor process come from scholarship on “emotional labor,” from theories of “relational care,” or from studies of domestic work. These bodies of scholarship alone provide only partial understanding of flexibility and security in domestic personal support, but each contributes important insights.

Emotions are the oil that greases the wheels in this intimate body labor—for example, through efforts like Kay’s to stay “professional,” but the dominant concept of emotional labor is insufficient for understanding flexibility and security within domestic personal support. In her pathbreaking book The Managed Heart, Arlie Hochschild argues that women always did difficult, skilled emotion work to manage their feelings while caring for their families but that when employers tried to control workers’ emotions in order to please customers and turn a profit, like in the airline industry, they transformed skilled emotion work into alienating “emotional labor.” Since its first publication in 1983, this book has spurred many studies of emotions in different types of service work.37 Yet scholars argue that the

IMMIGRANT JAPAN Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-­nationalist Society Gracia Liu-­Farrer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ​ ​​I THACA AND LONDON

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from Waseda University, which aided in the production of this book.

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​ .­cornell​.­edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Liu-Farrer, Gracia, author.

Title: Immigrant Japan : mobility and belonging in an ethno-nationalist society / Gracia Liu-Farrer.

Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019031541 (print) | LCCN 2019031542 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501748622 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501748646 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501748639 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Immigrants—Japan. | Group identity—Japan. | Social integration—Japan. | Citizenship—Japan. | Japan—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | Japan—Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC JV8722 .L58 2020 (print) | LCC JV8722 (ebook) | DDC 305.9/069120952—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031541 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031542

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowl­edgments

ix xi

Introduction: Japan as an Ethno-­nationalist Immigrant Society

1

1.

Immigrating to Japan

23

2.

Migration Channels and the Shaping of Immigrant Ethno-­scapes

40

3.

Working in Japan

62

4.

Weaving the Web of a Life in Japan

84

5.

To Leave, to Return

105

6.

Home and Belonging in an Ethno-­nationalist Society

126

7. ­Children of Immigrants: Educational Mobilities

154

8.

Growing Up in Japan: Identity Journeys

176

onclusion: Realities, Challenges, and Promises C of Immigrant Japan

200

Appendix A: Methodological Notes Appendix B: Profiles of In­for­mants Whose Names Appear in the Book Notes References Index

215 221 227 233 255

vii

Introduction

JAPAN AS AN ETHNO-­N ATIONALIST IMMIGRANT SOCIETY 9:50 a.m., September 24, 2014. Tokyo ­Legal Affairs Bureau.

I found a chair at an unoccupied desk in the ­middle of the room and sat down with the A4-­sized manila envelope handed to me by two ­women staff sitting at the entrance. The room resembled a typical classroom. A podium was placed in the front. Beside it stood a whiteboard with the day’s agenda handwritten in blue marker. Three rows of two-­seat desks and chairs ­were mostly filled. I looked around me. ­There ­were over twenty ­people in the spartanly furnished space. A few more ­were signing in. Most looked East Asian, and the one white man and one black man stood out. A ­couple of ­others might have been South or Southeast Asians. ­There ­were as many w ­ omen as t­here ­were men. It was quiet inside the room, and the atmosphere was a ­little tense. ­People sat and checked the stack of forms and sample applications inside the envelope or stared at their phones. A few who came with their families ­were whispering to each other.

At 10 a.m., a man in a white shirt and tie came in, a nametag hanging against his chest. He introduced himself as an officer in the Citizenship Department, greeted the crowd, and proceeded to explain the agenda written on the whiteboard. A moment l­ater, a man in a suit walked into the room and stood b ­ ehind the podium. He was introduced as the head of the Citizenship Department.

“Good morning,” he said. “I ­will call out your names. Please come to the front to receive your citizenship notification.” He then took out a stack of papers and started to read out the names—­most w ­ ere ­either Japa­nese sounding or the Japa­ nese pronunciations of Chinese and Korean names. “Fua-­ra-­Gurashia sama.”

He called out my katakana name with an honorific suffix. I walked up to the front. He held out the paper with both hands, lowered his head a l­ittle, and said 1

2 Introduction

“Arigatogozaimasu” (thank you). I gave him a slight bow, took it with both hands, and reciprocated with my own “Thank you” in Japa­nese. On the paper was a statement indicating that my application for Japa­nese citizenship had been approved by the minister of justice on September 11, 2014. ­After the department head bowed and walked out of the room, the man in the white shirt approached the whiteboard. “Now you have all become Japa­nese nationals [Nihon kokumin]. What this means is that you w ­ ill have the rights and obligations of Japa­nese citizens.” He pointed at the whiteboard and explained that we would now be able to vote in elections, hold a Japa­nese passport when traveling abroad, and be protected by the Japa­nese state inside and outside Japan.

He went on to explain the detailed administrative steps we needed to take ­after receiving this citizenship document, including registering with our own local city office and sending back our foreign resident cards within three weeks. It was then that I realized that the piece of paper I received was not a certificate to be held onto but an official notice to be delivered to the city office where I resided.

Without much fanfare and with no ceremonial speech or emotional pledge of allegiance, on September 24, 2014, along with the thirty-­some p ­ eople in that room and the hundreds of ­others in other rooms across Japan, I became a Japa­ nese citizen.

I am one of the millions of immigrants in Japan. This book tells our stories. It explains why and how we have come to this country, how we have made our home and raised ­children ­here, the complex relationships we have built within and with it, and the dif­fer­ent forms of attachment and belonging we have cultivated in this place. The stories of immigration in Japan are par­tic­u­lar ­because they have taken place in a social and po­liti­cal context rife with contradictions, and in a country that for many ­people is still an unlikely destination of immigration. At a global level, however, ­these stories are also common ­because the normal destinations for immigration are increasingly t­hose that consider themselves ethno-­national socie­ties.

Immigrant lives in Japan, therefore, illustrate the forms and features of an immigrant society borne out of an ethno-­national one, and the patterns of mobilities and belongings that can take place in such a previously nonimmigrant context.

Japan as an Immigrant Country Most ­people do not associate Japan with an “immigrant country,” for understandable reasons. Postwar Japan was considered an anomaly among advanced economies due to its reluctance to import foreign workers despite a significant

JAPAN AS AN ETHNO-­NATIONALIST IMMIGRANT COUNTRY

3

l­abor shortage. David Bartram (2000) argues that Japan in the 1960s and 1970s started to demonstrate l­abor force profiles similar to ­those in Western Eu­ro­pean countries a de­cade e­ arlier. While countries such as Germany and France signed ­labor agreements to import foreign workers as early as the 1950s, Japan remained largely closed to l­abor immigration even at the cost of slowing down productivity and damaging small and medium-­sized firms. This re­sis­tance to foreign l­abor marked Japan as a “negative case” of immigration for many years (Bartram 2000).

The country has gradually let in more and more immigrants since the 1980s, but the 2.6 million foreign nationals1 still stood at a l­ittle over 2 ­percent of the total population of 128 million in the country in 2018, a relatively low presence compared with most other industrial nations.

The Japa­nese government also studiously avoided defining an “immigration” policy. Although some researchers have started calling Japan an “emerging migration state,” b ­ ecause it has taken “halting steps” t­oward a national immigration policy (Hollifield and Sharpe 2017, 386), it is not an official discourse. Instead, Japan’s immigration policy is called by “any other name” but the “i”-­word (Roberts 2018). On January 28, 2016, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in a National Diet session, responded to inquiries about the necessity to increase the import of foreign l­ abor to appease depopulation and l­ abor shortages by affirming yet again that “we are not adopting the so-­called ‘immigration policies.’ ” Moreover, the image of Japan does not seem to match that of an immigrant country. Japan, to both its p ­ eople and outsiders, is a racially homogeneous and culturally unique island country. Part of the lure of Japan lies in its distinctiveness, sometimes with a fantastic inflection.

However, Japan has become an immigrant country de facto. Starting in the 1980s, to stave off economic decline caused by l­ abor shortage and in the name of internationalization, Japan has tried dif­fer­ent programs to bring in foreign workers. For example, the 1989 Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (ICRRA) drastically changed mi­grant admissions procedures and added ten new categories of persons who might be considered eligible for resident status.

In 2012, Japan became one of the most liberal states in its policies for granting permanent residency to highly skilled mi­grants.2 On December 8, 2018, the Diet passed yet another Immigration Reform Act and for the first time in the postwar history allows individuals to enter Japan as uncredentialled manual workers. In other words, over the past three de­cades, Japan has opened its door wider and wider. ­People are not only allowed but also encouraged, recruited, and even coaxed to come to this country as workers or students or both (Liu-­Farrer and Tran 2019). As a result, the population of foreigners has been rising for the past three de­cades and is likely to increase significantly in the near f­ uture. Japa­nese law provides p ­ eople in most of t­ hese entry categories a path to permanent residency

4 Introduction

and naturalization. In 2018, out of the 2.6 million foreign nationals, over 1.18 million ­were ­either permanent residents or special permanent residents.3 On top of that, over four hundred thousand individuals have become Japa­nese citizens since 1980 (Du 2015).

Why, then, do both the Japa­nese government and ­people inside and outside Japan hesitate to accept the discourse of immigration and the real­ity of its transformation into an immigrant society? I believe this hesitation has to do with Japan’s ethno-­nationalist self-­identity and the widespread myth surrounding its monoethnic nationhood, on the one hand, and the conventional, albeit anachronistic, definition of “immigrant country” and the difficulty for p ­ eople to associate an immigrant country with an ethno-­nationalist one, on the other.

An Ethno-­nationalist Japan This re­sis­tance ­toward immigration, before the 1980s in the real practice and since then merely the discourse of it, reflects Japan’s strug­gle with its ethno-­nationalist self-­identity. Ethno-­nationalism is essentially a superimposition of nationalism (a po­liti­cal program) onto ethnicity—­a “readily definable way of expressing a real sense of group identity” (Hobsbawm and Kertzer 1992, 4). Japan identifies itself as a nation whose nationhood is founded on the ideology of a common descent (Befu 2001). Japan did not have such a unified ethno-­based self-­understanding before the modernizing movement known as the Meiji Restoration (1868). Rather, the Tokugawa regime’s “rule by status”—­a practice that segregates the ruled by groups—­created segmented cultural traditions and practices. The Meiji Restoration in­ven­ted interrelated f­ amily, state, and emperor traditions and related material symbols and memorial sites in order to create a unified nation-­state and a new relation between the ruler and the ruled (Fujitani 1993).

Racial purity and cultural homogeneity are at the center of Japa­nese ethno-­ nationalist discourses. Often referred to as Nihonjinron (discourses of J­ apa­neseness), ­these discourses emphasize that Japan’s ecological features—­namely, the geographic constraints of living on a string of islands—­and Japan’s subsistence economy (wet rice cultivation) led to its peculiar social formation, cultural practices, and national mentality (Dale [1986] 1990; Yoshino 1992; Befu 1993). In dif­fer­ent historical periods, the relative positions between Japan and other countries led to subsequent changes in the discourses. An emphasis on Japa­nese inferiority in comparison with the West could be seen during the Meiji period and again during early de­cades of the postwar era. On the other hand, “when Japan defines itself in a strong position, as in the 1930s and in the 1980s, Nihonjinron positively defines Japan’s identity and becomes a tool of nationalism” (Befu 1993, 125).

JAPAN AS AN ETHNO-­NATIONALIST IMMIGRANT COUNTRY

5

Historically sponsored and promoted by the government as Japan’s state ideology (Yoshino 1992; Befu 1993), such ethno-­nationalist discourses nonetheless became deeply entrenched in the postwar Japa­nese social consciousness b ­ ecause of their propagation by a plethora of actors, including government agencies (such as Japan Foundation), business corporations, intellectuals, and public scholars. In par­tic­u­lar, a resurgent postwar economic prosperity emboldened vari­ous power holders in Japan to revive this ethno-­national myth and to claim that the strength of Japan lies in its ethnic homogeneity and cultural uniqueness (Yoshino 1992; Lie 2000; Sugimoto 2010). Such nationalistic discourses seem to have resonated with “the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings, and interests of ordinary ­people” (Hobsbawm 1992, 10). Publications on Nihonjinron w ­ ere widely disseminated and devoured by ordinary Japa­nese. Befu (1993) provided some statistics of the circulation of several typical Nihonjinron publications (by the time he did his research) to offer a glimpse of the popularity of this genre of writing. Doi Takeo’s Amae no Kōzō (1971), the Japa­nese version of The Anatomy of Dependence (1973), was reprinted in soft cover copies 147 times. Nakane Chie’s Tate Shakai no Ningen Kankei, which in En­glish is called Japa­nese Society (1970), had gone through 79 printings. ­After de­cades of such cultural dissemination, ­these discourses have become constitutive ele­ments in “Japa­nese p ­ eople’s ‘common-­sense’ or ‘everyday knowledge’, their ‘taken-­for-­granted’ image of national character. They reflect and determine social real­ity or what a ­people know about their world” (Burgess 2010, 4). Though academics inside and outside Japan have repeatedly critiqued Nihonjinron and made g­ reat effort in debunking the myth of Japan’s cultural uniqueness and racial homogeneity, ­these ethno-­nationalist discourses linger on in the national consciousness.

The expanding presence of foreigners in the country and the many (localized) efforts to integrate them do not necessarily challenge t­ hese fundamental beliefs about Japan’s national character. This is b ­ ecause programs aiming to integrate immigrants, such as t­ hose ­under the directives of multicultural coexistence (tabunka kyōsei), do not refute but instead help reinforce an essentialized Japa­nese identity and culture (Tai 2007; Burgess 2012). Opinion surveys indicate as much. Using data from the International Social Survey Program, conducted in 2003, Nagayoshi (2011) shows that the majority of Japa­nese respondents are capable of embracing an ethno-­national identity while at the same time voicing support for multicultural coexistence, at least in princi­ple.

The past three de­cades have seen increasing involvement from advocacy groups in the fight for social and po­liti­cal rights for foreigners (Pak 2000; Shipper 2008; Milly 2014). Frequently wrapping their po­liti­cal activism in discourses of h ­ uman and citizenship rights (Tsutsui 2018), such civil society involvement is

6 Introduction

pushing Japan ­toward a more open and inclusive society. However, in what way such po­liti­cal action can or ever w ­ ill shake the ethno-­nationalist identity of Japan remains uninvestigated.

To summarize, the ethno-­nationalist discourse is a major reason for Japan’s reluctance t­ oward immigration. In the minds of most p ­ eople, Japan is, and should be, a monoethnic society (Kashiwazaki 2013, 42). Nonetheless, this ethno-­national identity does not imply the urge to bolt the door. An ethno-­national society can even welcome immigrants, although this welcome is premised on the implicit understanding of fundamental group differences and on the fact that t­here ­will always be an invisible wall separating us from them, even when “they” are among “us.” The experiences of immigrants in Japan that are described in this book make it clear that this ethno-­nationalist identity is at the root of Japan’s many institutional and social dilemmas in dealing with immigration. Moreover, it is something internalized by immigrants themselves as well, and to a few, this aspect of Japan is even considered attractive.

“Immigrant Country” in an Age of Global Mobility Aside from overcoming the unease of superimposing an immigrant country onto an ethno-­nationalist society, t­ here is also a need to combat the ste­reo­typical image of the “immigrant country” in order to see Japan as one. In both official discourses and individual narratives, “immigrant countries” seem to represent a par­tic­ul­ar category of nation-­states, t­hose that ­were established by settlers who colonized the territories, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. T ­ hese countries typically issue “immigration visas,” which define one’s (supposed) purpose of permanent settlement. For example, US immigration law divides entry visas into two types: immigration and nonimmigration. The term “immigrants” refers exclusively to ­those who arrive at the US border with “immigration” visas. Consequently, applicants from around the world often are denied visas to the United States on the ground that they show an intention to immigrate (Kraly and Warren 1992). ­Because of such nation-­building histories and ­legal frameworks, settler countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia are perceived as qualitatively dif­fer­ent from a country such as Japan or ­those in Asia and Eu­rope where immigration has not been considered a significant part of the national history and nobody upon entry is automatically granted the status of a permanent settler. However, this distinction was never clear-­cut and has in the con­temporary era become increasingly blurred. First of all, ­these so-­called immigrant countries might have in the past promoted their openness and solicited immigration to recruit l­abor power. Nonetheless, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty has al-

JAPAN AS AN ETHNO-­NATIONALIST IMMIGRANT COUNTRY

7

ways been an ideal and not a real­ity. Throughout modern history, none of t­ hese immigrant countries have extended their unconditional welcome to every­body.

In fact, we are seeing increasingly stringent controls over immigration. The lengthening wall along the US-­Mexico border and the Australian refugee detention centers located in Nauru and Papua New Guinea fly in the face of both the “American Dream” and the “Australian Dream.”

Second, in the age of globalization, ­people’s mobility takes them to ­every corner of the world, and immigration increasingly takes place in nonsettler countries.

For instance, many Eu­ro­pean countries now have higher percentages of foreign-­ born populations than the United States (OECD 2018). In terms of public opinion, according to a 2015 Pew Survey, Germans expressed a much more pro-­ immigration attitude (66% in ­favor) than Americans (51% in f­avor) (Krogstad 2015). In Japan, although foreign residents are but a small percentage of the total population, the absolute number, 2.6 million, is significant. Many of them have also obtained permanent residency, and some, like me, are no longer counted in the statistics ­after obtaining Japa­nese citizenship. Their presence, transient or permanent, has infiltrated ­every arena of Japan’s economic and social life as they construct intricate social relations, from the intimate to the institutional.

Third, all migration researchers know that ­legal categories do not define individuals’ intentions, let alone outcomes. My own experience illustrates the fickleness of intentions. When I stepped off the airplane at Narita Airport with my husband and four suitcases on September 2, 1998, I thought my stay in Japan would be temporary—­two, maybe three, years. I had not foreseen that sixteen years l­ater, I would become a Japa­nese citizen. Likewise, immigration status does not mean that one necessarily becomes an immigrant in the conventional sense of settling down and starting a new life in a new land. As the wealthy Rus­sians and Chinese who hold multiple passports and permanent residencies have demonstrated, official immigration status does not, necessarily, make one a settler (Liu-­ Farrer 2016a, 2018).

In fact, the romantic notion of a definitive, onetime migration—­a notion that feeds the imaginary of an immigrant country—­has never represented the real­ity.

Even in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many mi­grants arrived, stayed, and then returned home. As Massey and Malone (2002) point out, if such a circular mobility was common among immigrants during an era of steamships and telegraphs, it must be all the more prevalent in an era of jet airplanes and telecommunications. Indeed, the concept of immigration has become increasingly irrelevant in regions such as the Eu­ro­pean Union, where national borders for ­human mobilities within the region have largely dissolved, making many forms of migration temporary. The liberated “Euro stars” (Favell 2008) could move around the continent through their life course searching for

8 Introduction

education, work, social circles, and lifestyles that speak to their par­tic­u­lar desires and meet their specific needs. E ­ very country in the EU has therefore become at the same time the country of origin and destination. ­Because of such inconsistency, indeterminacy, and changes in the pro­cesses and trajectories of migration, I believe the concept of immigrant country should be adjusted. The term “immigrant country” should simply refer to any country that provides foreign nationals multiple l­egal channels to enter and l­egal paths and institutional frameworks for permanent settlement. T ­ here could be dif­fer­ent types of immigrant countries depending on their nation-­building histories, including historically embedded ethnic relationships, and ­legal frameworks, mea­ sured by dif­fer­ent degrees of inclusiveness and dif­fer­ent emphasis on conformity. For example, extending the common categorization of nation-­states by civic versus ethnic (Kohn 1944), civic immigrant countries and ethno-­nationalist immigrant countries could be two easy types. The traditional immigrant countries such as the United States and Canada are arguably the former, and Japan, Korea, Germany, and Italy are possibly the latter. Moreover, since ethno-­ ­ nationalism operates at both discursive and institutional levels, countries in the pro­cess of accepting immigrants might adapt institutional practices to an immigrant real­ity that result in the changing discourses about the identities of the nation or the emergence of multiple and alternative discourses. Therefore, civic and ethnic nationalist components might exist in the same immigrant context.

To define a country such as Japan as an immigrant country, an ethno-­nationalist one no less, suggests that in an age of globalization, patterns of migration have fundamentally changed, and that the experiences of mi­grants in the traditional settler countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia no longer represent the majority of the larger migration phenomena taking place in the world. With its strong cultural and ethnic national identity, Japan represents the type of immigration destination that is emerging in many parts of the world. Indeed, we might say that even traditional immigrant countries such as the United States increasingly see themselves in ethno-­nationalist terms, making the perspective from Japan even more relevant.

Characteristics of an Ethno-­nationalist Immigrant Society as Observed in Japan This book details how the immigration pro­cess unfolds in Japan. The ways immigration takes place in Japan and the social, economic, and emotional lives of immigrants in this country illustrate a few characteristics that might be distinctive of an immigrant society that emerged out of an ethno-­nationalist one.

JAPAN AS AN ETHNO-­NATIONALIST IMMIGRANT COUNTRY

9

DI S C URS I V E DE N I A L O F I M M I G R ATI ON

The discursive denial of immigration describes the ethno-­nationalist state that we have all witnessed. Adherence to an ethno-­nationalist identity does not necessitate a rejection of immigration, not when the country’s economic health and societal functioning depend on it. It does, however, mean that immigration often remains a taboo in po­liti­cal discourses. It becomes a semantic game the politicians in Japan play (Roberts 2018) and underpins a naive immigration policy that (still) expects most mi­grant workers to be just temporary manpower (Ruhs and Anderson 2010).

A N AC HRON I S TI C I N S TI TU TI ON A L PR ACTI CES

­ ecause of its reluctance to admit to the real­ity of immigration long ­after it has B taken place, many institutions in Japan—­from education and the employment system to banking and the housing market—­and many administrative procedures, big and small, are often found unequipped to deal with the needs and expectations of an immigrant population. For example, despite its ostensible enthusiasm about global talents, an obstinate corporate Japan still tries to turn global talents into Japa­nese salarymen. In Japa­nese schools, “we the Japa­nese” (ware ware Nihonjin) remains a standard refrain, and in extreme cases offering En­glish classes to third-­ graders is resisted by some parents for fear of jeopardizing ­children’s ability to learn their national language.4 P R AG MAT I SM I N I M M I G R ATI ON A N D THE SETTL EM ENT ­P RO­C ES S

­ ecause immigration is largely taking place without officially being recognized B as such, as a large part of the book aims to illustrate, the pro­cess of becoming immigrants is best described as contingent and pragmatic. The notion of Japan as a “single race nation,” an “island nation,” and a nonimmigrant country with a strong cultural identity has influence on immigrants’ expectations and practices.

Immigrants tend to profess no prior intention to s­ ettle and usually hold a one-­ step-­at-­a-­time approach. The settlement is contingent on the success of each of ­these steps in a restrictive ­legal path. Moreover, ­whether immigrants leave or stay depends also on a range of immediate existential conditions, including economic opportunities, the presence or absence of emotional attachments, and social embeddedness as well as the stage in their life course.

10 Introduction

P O S S­ I ­B L E ( BU T DI FFI C U LT) N ATI ON A L BEL ONGI NG, ­I MP O S S I BL E N ATI ON A L I DE N TI TY

Japan being in many ways unequipped to accommodate immigrants does not mean immigrants are not capable of being attached to and building lasting relationships with this country. An ethno-­nationalist society with its par­tic­u­lar cultural and social practices still has its own attractions. Depending on how individuals interpret the par­tic­u­lar concept, some immigrants do articulate a sense of belonging to Japa­nese society. Nonetheless, Japan’s discourses of Japa­neseness have been internalized by immigrants and used as an explanatory framework to make sense of their migration experiences as well as their identity. This has inevitably become an emotional hurdle for immigrants to identify themselves with the Japa­nese nation. A constant strug­gle over inclusion and exclusion at identification level appears among not only the first-­generation immigrants but also their ­children. In other words, immigrants have difficulty identifying themselves as “Japa­nese,” even with a hyphenated identity. For example, the Korean immigrants who have lived in Japan for generations have gradually shifted the location of their identity, advocating a new subjectivity for the younger generations (Chapman 2007). Nonetheless, this “third way” suggests that the third-­and fourth-­generation Korean immigrants identify themselves as Zainichi, which literally means “residents in Japan,” instead of Korean Japa­nese.

­ hese characteristics of an ethno-­nationalist immigrant society are generated T from observations made from immigrant Japan. The case of Japan might be unique in its specific characteristics, but the migration patterns into this type of destination are far from unique. The rapid expansion of global mobility has turned e­ very single country in the world into a real and potential place of immigration. Like Japan, most such socie­ties lack institutional frameworks, incorporation programs, or cultural narratives to support immigrant settlement. Therefore, observing how immigrants make decisions regarding mobility and settlement in Japan and what kinds of relationships they are able to establish within and with the host society provides insights into new patterns of immigration and integration.

Immigration ­a fter the Mobility Turn Though in one sense provocative, a book titled Immigrant Japan might be seen as conceptually ­behind the times. Traditional “immigrant studies” ­were largely borne out of the American so­cio­log­i­cal tradition, with an analytical focus on

When T ­ here Was No Aid War and Peace in Somaliland

Sarah G. Phillips

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Phillips, Sarah, 1977– author.

Title: When there was no aid : war and peace in Somaliland / Sarah G. Phillips.

Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019032183 (print) | LCCN 2019032184 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501747151 (cloth) | ISBN 9781501747168 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501747175 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Humanitarian intervention—Somalia. | Peace-building—​ Somaliland (Secessionist government, 1991– ) | Violence—­Somaliland (Secessionist government, 1991– ) | Postwar reconstruction— Somaliland (Secessionist government, 1991– ) | Somaliland (Secessionist government, 1991– )—Politics and government. | Somalia—Politics and government—1991– Classification: LCC DT407.4 .P45 2020 (print) | LCC DT407.4 (ebook) | DDC 967.7305/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032183 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032184

Contents

Acknowl­edgments

ix

Brief Timeline of Events

xiii

A Note on Spellings

xix

Introduction: What if We ­Don’t Intervene?

1

1. The Imperative of Intervention

24

2. Somaliland’s Relative Isolation

48

3. Self-­Reliance and Elite Networks

76

4. Local Owner­ship and the Rules of the Game

103

5. War and Peace in the In­de­pen­dence Discourse

136

Conclusion: Why Aid ­Matters Less than We Think

165

v iii Contents

Notes 175 References 191 Index 217

Introduction What if We ­Don’t Intervene?

Anyone who has visited Hargeysa, the capital of Somaliland, knows that the country’s peace-­building pro­cess elicits proud assertions of Somalilanders’ ability to end a brutal war with almost no external assistance. Widely heard refrains include the notion that peace “works ­because Somalilanders want it to work,” and that, ­because of the lack of policing capacity, the country “runs on trust.”1 Researchers readily accumulate stories about how peace was painstakingly negotiated u ­ nder the trees at dozens of clan-­based conferences (1991–1997) while the world focused on the bloodletting in Mogadishu.

Meanwhile, delegates from the rest of Somalia negotiated in five-­star h ­ otels funded by the United Nations to no avail against a complex emergency that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and displaced many more.2 Within t­ hese stories, Somaliland’s gold merchants—­women who sit on bustling streets selling large quantities of gold without any vis­i­ble protection from theft—­hold a prominent position. ­After being repeatedly directed to visit Hargeysa’s gold market and witness the level of security and social cohesion that their enterprise revealed, the merchants responded to my presence

2 Introduction

in similar terms: “See, ­there is peace and stability ­here. Take a photo and go show p­ eople!” Not only did they want me to understand what I saw in the same terms as ­those directing me to them, but they also understood the mileage to be gained from a foreigner photographing them g­ oing about their trade without any obvious form of security. However, by inviting the comparison with Somaliland’s recent past (and, indeed, with the Somali Republic from which it claimed in­de­pen­dence in 1991), t­ hese widespread stories about peace and cohesion are infused with the specter of vio­lence. The implicit coda to the gold merchants’ story is: and yet, ­things ­were very dif­ fer­ent not so long ago. War and peace are intermingled, with each understood through its proximity to the other.

The Lingering Place of War in Peace The shadow of war pervades Somaliland’s built environment. War is physically pre­sent across its cityscapes, even though its public monuments mark it as a relic of another time. The memorial to the antiregime strug­gle on Hargeysa’s In­de­pen­dence Ave­nue, which displays a Somalia-­flagged fighter plane (shot down as it attacked Somaliland’s main cities in 1988) and large frescos of civilians draped in the national flag being massacred; the tank monument to Somaliland’s own pro­cess of demobilization that brought its internal wars to an end in 1996; the Museum of War and Peace; the preservation of mass grave sites; the statues of a dove and of a fist raised to the sky holding a map of an in­de­pen­dent Somaliland; the rusted Soviet tanks that still line the country’s largest highway as it enters the port city of Berbera; and the prominent place that photo­graphs of ­these monuments receive in official government publications and in h ­ otels and restaurants, all underline the way that traumatic memories of war are kept pre­sent in daily life. ­These artifacts are a physical reminder that peace (or at least the absence of war) is the basis upon which Somaliland was built and has since been sustained. References to peace are everywhere. The title of the national anthem is “Long Life with Peace” (samo ku waar). Peace is mentioned six times in the Constitution, which designates it as the basis of the national po­liti­cal system, while defining the protection of the peace as one of the president’s constitutional responsibilities. But a preoccupation with peace tells of an intimacy

Introduction 3

with war. Everywhere its presence is so barely concealed that one is reminded that a careless outburst could unearth it.

Somalilanders’ historically grounded fear about the velocity of war—­and the irrelevance of international actors to containing its spread—is foregrounded such that in times of crisis, mobilizing for po­liti­cal vio­lence is largely bracketed out as a v­ iable, or perhaps even logical, course of action.

This book argues that the intimacy of the relationship between war and peace has been harnessed, albeit uneasily and by no means inevitably, as a source of civil order.

All socie­ties must manage the prob­lem of vio­lence if they are to endure (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009, 13). In modern times, this responsibility is typically understood as belonging to the state, defined as the set of institutions that successfully and legitimately monopolize vio­lence and enforce its rules (Weber 1919/1946). Let us put aside u ­ ntil the next chapter the fact that many states do not exercise that mono­poly without descending into vio­lence and consider only the idealized version of the Weberian state with its unambiguous mono­poly on legitimate force. Even in that state, vio­lence is almost always imputed without being realized. No state rules through coercion alone, no ­matter how brutal it is. It is the means by which this imputation is sustained—­the coercive threat implicit to lawful governance (Barkawi 2016, 205)—­that should concern us then, rather than the a­ ctual capacity of the state’s institutions to forcefully uphold its rules. I show how the imputed vio­ lence that underpins civil order in Somaliland resides less in the threat of state-­or clan-­based coercion than in the discursive reproduction of past vio­ lence and the vio­lence that continued in other Somalia. The idea that the discursive reproduction of vio­lence limits ­actual vio­lence has implications beyond Somaliland. It suggests that to understand how vio­lence is managed we must ask how it is remembered and anticipated, rather than focusing only on the institutions that enforce sanctions against its use. ­There is a vast lit­er­a­ture about the role of war in the formation of states that manage vio­lence (reasonably) effectively, within which two broad threads are most relevant to my purpose in this book. One draws largely from the experiences of Eu­ro­pean and other northern states to explore the ostensibly productive qualities of war. This body of work investigates the ways in which military vio­lence underpins the construction of cohesive national identities, the consolidation of legitimate institutions and through t­ hese institutions, the

4 Introduction

maintenance of po­liti­cal order.3 Crudely, this is the war-­makes-­states thesis that Charles Tilly (1990, 75) so famously advanced. A crude rendering of the other thread is that “war breaks states” (Hampel 2015, 1629). Scholars writing in this vein argue that globalization (or sometimes postcolonialism) negates war’s supposedly generative properties, with po­liti­cal vio­lence creating conflict traps that structurally impede security and economic growth without providing the opportunities for renewal that northern states may have experienced.4 This second thread is typified by Paul Collier’s argument that “civil war is development in reverse” (2007, 27). Collier’s work is influential among t­ hose who see the fragility of state institutions in the Global South as a prob­lem that calls for international intervention, a point that is taken up in chapter 1.

While both positions provide rich insights into the sociology of war, I deviate by seeking to establish neither the productive nor destructive qualities of war. Instead I explore the constitutive relationship between war and peace by illustrating the way that each seeps into and structures the other. In brief my argument is this: war and peace are not cleanly alternating phases where one begins as the other ends (Barkawi 2016, 201) but that they exist in constant tension, with neither one fully subsuming the other. Somaliland’s experience reveals with unusual clarity that war’s absence is sustained by its ongoing presence in daily life, in the ways that its memory and anticipation configure how actions become ­either pos­si­ble or unthinkable.

Crucially, international interventions in conflict-­affected areas (­whether through state-­building programs, peacekeeping or stabilization operations, support for belligerent parties, arms transfers, international loans, or overseas development assistance) are inexorably bound up in the ways that war reverberates through society. Interveners pick which group/s should benefit from vio­lence and support that vision with resources that reshape economies, politics, and local networks of trust. The fact that some form of international intervention in situations of large-­scale vio­lence is all but assured in a globalized world affects how ­people anticipate po­liti­cal vio­lence and how they act as a result. This book examines how the absence of international intervention during its formational years helped to foster a prolonged period of peace in Somaliland. It does so while noting that the internationalized war in neighboring Yemen (ongoing from 2015), the escalating geostrategic competition along the Red Sea, and the increasing relevance of Somaliland to both, represents a challenge to the longevity of that peaceful period.

Introduction 5

The unrecognized breakaway Republic of Somaliland declared in­de­pen­ dence from Somalia shortly a­ fter the collapse of Somalia’s military regime in 1991. Residents of northwestern Somalia—­Somaliland—­endured extreme brutality ­under President Siyad Barre (in power 1969–1991) from the early 1980s. The vio­lence against them peaked in 1988 when the regime responded to a military offensive by the Somali National Movement (SNM) with a ground and aerial assault that killed up to 50,000 civilians and destroyed most of the physical infrastructure in the cities of Hargeysa and Burco. Mark Bradbury recalled that in 1991, “Hargeisa from the air, resembled a city of dry swimming pools, which on closer inspection ­were shells of ­houses whose roofs had been systematically looted during the war” (Bradbury 2008, 3). Approximately half of the population e­ ither fled abroad or to refugee camps, and the ground was strewn with landmines and other deadly ordinance.

Many Somalilanders remember the events of the late 1980s as an act of genocide against the majority Isaaq clan, and some refer to it as the Hargeysa holocaust (Ingiriis 2016). The vio­lence was so overwhelming that it established a widespread belief that the security of Isaaq clan members could only be guaranteed by a permanent separation from Somalia—­and a rejection of the unitary state model that had enabled such vio­lence by one group against another.

The removal of Barre’s forces from Somaliland in January 1991 transformed the conflict but did not end it and local clan-­based militias continued to cause widespread, if intermittent, vio­lence u ­ ntil late 1996. Alex de Waal (2015, 132) argues that the intensity of Somaliland’s civil war in 1992 was so high that it “threatened to bring Somaliland to disintegration even faster than (southern) Somalia.” By the time Somalilanders had negotiated an end to the destructive interclan vio­lence, the population had experienced a de­cade and a half of conflict and displacement.

The devastating vio­lence across Somaliland ended in late 1996 for reasons that are taken up throughout the rest of this book. What is impor­tant to note at the outset is the extraordinary divergence in the levels of vio­lence experienced by Somaliland and the Republic of Somalia since that time. Somaliland is not perfectly harmonious or conflict-­free, and over three hundred ­people (mostly government forces) w ­ ere killed between 1997 and 2018 in an intermittent border dispute with neighboring Puntland.5 However, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) estimates that ­there ­were 25,793 conflict deaths in the rest of Somalia over roughly the same period (1997–2017).6

6 Introduction

That is, from the time Somaliland’s internal wars ended in late 1996, it has experienced around 1 ­percent of the fatalities from conflict than w ­ ere suffered in the rest of Somalia.7

The Puzzle of Somaliland’s Institutions I selected Somaliland as a case study for three reasons: its successful transition out of civil war; the dearth of external intervention it experienced during the key phase of that transition; and the perceived inability of its state and clan-­based governance institutions to provide a reliable ongoing deterrent to vio­lence. Leveraging the conditions for a natu­ral experiment that secessionist entities can offer, the book poses a ­simple overarching question: Why did the large-­scale vio­lence end in Somaliland while continuing elsewhere in Somalia? As the title suggests, it is particularly concerned with the conditions fostered by the most obvious difference between the two cases: the virtual absence of external intervention in Somaliland during its period of internal war (1991–1996) compared to the overwhelming international attention that the war in the rest of Somalia received over the same period.

The most common conclusion about the po­liti­cal impact of the vastly dif­ fer­ent levels of external intervention across Somalia (indeed one that I also reached previously—­Phillips 2013) centers on institutional quality (Bradbury 2008; Renders 2012; Phillips 2013, 2016; Walls 2014; Richards 2015). This position is elaborated in chapter 4 but is essentially that the dearth of external interest in Somaliland’s wars gave its p­ eople the time and po­liti­cal space to establish locally responsive and contextually appropriate (though not necessarily inclusive) governance institutions. That space was not available to other Somalis, who instead had to contend with a multitude of often conflicting po­liti­cal patrons, sources of revenue, and normative expectations about what a peaceful Somali state should look like. The core contention is thus that Somaliland’s governance institutions (­whether formal, informal, or a hybrid version of the two) established legitimate rules and that the a­ ctual or imputed enforcement of t­hese rules determined the prospects for peace and civil order. This contention is squarely in line with new institutionalism scholarship, wherein institutions are the regularized patterns of be­hav­ior or “rules of the game” that make an ordered po­liti­cal, social, or economic life pos­si­ble (North 1990, 3). The stronger an institution is, the idea goes, the greater the level of

Introduction 7

predictability, and thus civil order, it creates. The weaker it is, the less it permits (Schedler 2013, 23). From this it follows, if implicitly, that institutions are ontologically prior to the order they engender.

While not diminishing the importance of Somaliland’s governance institutions to its transition from war, this book challenges the assumption that they ontologically preceded it, arguing instead that institutions have a constitutive relationship with sociopo­liti­cal order. That is, institutions may help produce order but only in so far as they are si­mul­ta­neously products of it.

This is best explained by considering the puzzle that Somaliland’s institutions pose, which is that their inability to provide a reliable security guarantee helped, counterintuitively, to stabilize a prolonged period of peace. This suggests that even in­effec­tive governance institutions—­those that do not reliably embed or enforce Douglass North’s rules of the game—­may still help to produce civil order rather than subvert it. If this is pos­si­ble then the relationship between the quality of institutions and the level of order a society experiences is not a straightforward one of cause and effect but one of coproduction.

I argue that in Somaliland this coproduction can be seen in a discourse that emphasizes the fragility of the country’s hard-­won peace. I w ­ ill refer to this as the “in­de­pen­dence discourse” throughout the rest of this book. I understand the in­de­pen­dence discourse to consist of the belief—­evident through speeches, texts, practices, material artifacts, and proclamations by a wide variety of Somalilanders in the areas that support secession from Somalia—­that Somaliland should be in­de­pen­dent b­ ecause it is peaceful, and that peace depends on the ongoing conscious effort of Somalilanders.

This discourse limits the possibilities for violent action by reiterating the catastrophic consequences that vio­lence risks unleashing—­a risk that is credibly amplified by the very weakness of other institutional constraints.

Somaliland’s in­de­pen­dence discourse consists of three core strands. One emphasizes the purportedly exceptional nature of the Somalilander identity.

It suggests that Somaliland’s achievement of postconflict peace demonstrates that Somalilanders are exceptional to other Somalis (who remain beset by vio­lence), and that this peaceful identity warrants Somaliland’s formal in­ de­pen­dence from Somalia. Unity with Somalia is therefore bracketed out as illogical ­because unity would subvert the peacefulness upon which Somaliland’s identity rests. Another strand emphasizes Somaliland’s autonomy, particularly from the international structural and normative constraints that

8 Introduction

usually apply to states emerging from conflict. In this, it serves as a counterpoint to the dominant discourse about fragile states that is the subject of chapter 1. The other, and subtlest strand, is that vio­lence is a choice which, if taken, is unlikely to be contained by the country’s governance institutions and so must not be chosen. Somaliland’s apparent propensity to war—as expressed in this discourse—is therefore a constitutive ele­ment of its ability to maintain peace.8 By excluding certain be­hav­iors (particularly po­liti­cal vio­ lence) from obvious consideration, it organizes and stabilizes peace in ways that Somaliland’s governance institutions have not.

This stands in contrast to the widely-­made suggestion that when a state’s institutional deterrents to vio­lence are weak, power­ful actors are likely to see vio­lence as a ­viable po­liti­cal strategy by perceiving that they may “[do] well out of war” (Collier 2000; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Walter 2015). Rather than only providing a structural opportunity for po­liti­cal vio­lence, poorly constraining governance institutions may also generate popu­lar ideas about vio­lence that act to limit its use. This has impor­tant implications beyond Somaliland. If institutional weakness can underwrite both the legitimization and the delegitimization of vio­lence, then we must reconsider the conventional wisdom about how governance institutions constrain vio­lence and examine instead the ways that institutions si­mul­ta­neously generate and reflect shared ideas about vio­lence. D ­ oing so destabilizes a central assumption of state-­building and other development interventions for which vio­lence is almost exclusively the product of dysfunctional domestic institutions.

Somaliland’s In­de­pen­dence from the International Somaliland’s proclaimed sovereignty is not recognized by any state (nor, indeed, all its inhabitants), and it is still legally part of the Federal Republic of Somalia. The United Nations deals with Somaliland u ­ nder its Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) and often uses the names of the “18 pre-­war regions of Somalia” in official publications, allowing it to avoid reference to Somaliland as a single po­liti­cal entity (see for example UNFPA 2014).

Treating Somaliland as in­de­pen­dent is contentious within the rest of Somalia, which stridently rejects Somaliland’s claim of in­de­pen­dence. As a result of Somaliland’s unrecognized status, and of Somalia’s loan defaults during President Siyad Barre’s thirty-­two-­year rule, Somaliland’s government

Introduction 9

has had negligible access to external capital, w ­ hether through official development assistance (ODA), loans from international lending bodies such as the IMF, foreign investment, or rents for e­ ither strategic or natu­ral resources.

This has meant that it has no large international debts to ser­vice; no requirement that it perform structural adjustments, implement macroeconomic austerity mea­sures, impose bud­getary constraints, or apply other neoliberal conditionalities that are usually associated with Poverty Reduction Strategies by the World Bank and IMF. Private investors are also constrained, being unable to access commercial insurance or seek recourse through international commercial law b­ ecause of Somaliland’s unrecognized status (Reno 2006, 168). This has served as a considerable—­though not entirely prohibitive—­ disincentive for non-­Somalilanders to invest in the country and has further ­limited the government’s ability to generate wealth through normal external channels, particularly t­ hose that are typically espoused by international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. The country is also excluded from international banking and postal systems, which has made its residents reliant on private enterprises, like money transfer companies and courier ser­vices, to provide similar ser­vices and plug gaps caused by the lack of sovereign recognition. Thus, throughout its existence, though particularly during its first de­cade or so, the government of Somaliland has been more reliant on its ability to access internal revenue than governments in most developing countries.9 Somaliland is also subject to the United Nations arms embargo on Somalia (Security Council Resolution 733, January 1992). Although the resolution was amended in 2014 to permit the importation of weapons, ammunition, or military equipment, the permission was “intended solely for the development of the Somali National Security Forces” (UN Resolution 2142, 2014). That is, Somaliland’s police force (SLPF) and armed forces still cannot legally acquire arms ­under the conditions of the Somali embargo, which means that all members of Somaliland’s police force must supply their own private weapons as a condition of their employment.

In addition to being overlooked by international donors, lenders, development agencies, and arms exporters, Somaliland was also peripheral to the interests of the foreign militaries that w ­ ere active in Somalia in the 1990s.

Their focus was firmly on and around the capital of Mogadishu, where together the United States and United Nations spent nearly $4 billion on military operations and peace-­building pro­cesses (Prunier 1998, 227; Ahmad

10 Introduction

2012).10 International aid agencies also provided billions of dollars’ worth of food aid to help ­counter the famine that was devastating the southern parts of Somalia, with the diversion of this aid becoming the linchpin of an entrenched conflict economy (Ahmad 2012). On the other hand, no external power attempted to end (or prolong) Somaliland’s civil wars, which dramatically l­ imited access to external revenue for its belligerents. The total amount of international funding that Somaliland received for its peace pro­cess between 1991 and 1997 appears to be around $100,000, which was supplied by two organ­izations (one Swedish and one American) to the Boorama Conference in 1993. That Somaliland was not the target of international intervention is a historical fact. However, the in­de­pen­dence discourse assigns meaning to that lack of intervention, particularly the notion that it made Somalilanders more self-­reliant and that, as a result, the peace that they forged is more resilient than it might other­wise have been.

It is impor­tant to emphasize that Somaliland is at a critical juncture. Its geostrategic significance has changed dramatically since the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) began its military intervention in Yemen in 2015, and as intra-­GCC disputes have since manifested across the Horn of Africa. In 2017, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Somaliland signed a deal for the Emirates to fund a $250 million dollar highway from Berbera Port to Ethiopia (the Berbera Corridor) that ­will grant landlocked Ethiopia easier access to the Red Sea. The Emirati com­pany Dubai Ports World was also awarded a $442 million, thirty-­year concession to develop and manage Berbera Port.

The port concession includes the condition that 35 ­percent of annual revenue ­will go the Somaliland government (Indian Ocean Newsletter 2017). Although most of the money is yet to be released at the time of writing, the expectations of an impending fiscal windfall are widespread. The UAE is also negotiating a deal to build a military base in Berbera, which w ­ ill further embed Somaliland within international military, po­liti­cal, and economic structures—­ something that it was so detached from during its formational years.

The Somaliland Counterfactual For all the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international assistance in advancing peace and development,11 ­there are precious few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. As a result, we

CONFRONTING DESIRE

PSYC H OA N A LYS I S A N D I NT ER NATI O N A L D E V E LO P M E N T

Il an Kapoor

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

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Co nte nts

Acknowl­edgments

ix

Preface

xi

Part One: Introduction and Context

1. Psychoanalysis and International Development

3

2. Post-­Development’s Surrender to Global Capitalism: A Psychoanalytic Critique 32

Part Two: Keywords/Essays

3. Antagonism: The Universalist Dimensions of Antagonism

59

4. Drive: What “Drives” Cap­i­tal­ist Development?

75

5. Envy: Capitalism as Envy-­Machine

94

6. Fetishism: Fetishism in International Development: Domination, Disavowal, and Foreclosure

123

7. Gaze: The “Gaze” in Participatory Development: Panoptic or Traumatic?

147

8. Gender/Sex: When Sex = (Socially Constructed) Gender, What Is Lost, Po­liti­cally? Psychoanalytic Reflections on Gender and Development

170

9. Perversion/Hysteria: The Politics of Perversion and Hysteria in the Tunisian Revolution and its Aftermath

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194

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vi i i Cont ents

10. Queerness: The Queer Third World

214

11. Racism: The Racist Enjoyments and Fantasies of International Development 236 12. Symptom: Development and the Poor: Enjoy Your Symptom!

265

Index 299

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Ch a pte r 1

Psychoanalysis and International Development

Introduction When the indigenous leader confronts the development economist, accusing him of promoting a proj­ect that would mean the loss of livelihoods, the economist vehemently denies it, asserting: • first, that the proj­ect ­will be beneficial for the community; • second, that the proj­ect may be damaging but only ­because of community re­sis­tance to it; and • third, that the proj­ect may well be damaging for the local com­ ill be good for broader national development! munity, but it w This quip is meant to be humorous, but like all jokes it has a ring of truth to it, describing quite accurately how, for example, many recent megadevelopment proj­ects—­the Three Gorges and Narmada hydroelectric dams, the Trans-­ Anatolian Gas Pipeline, the Guinea Simandou mining proj­ ect, and so on—­have been justified in the face of local re­sis­tance (see De Wet 2006; Sovacool and Cooper 2013). The humor of the joke lies in what can be called the “­kettle defense,” the one evoked in Freud’s famous joke in The Interpretation of Dreams (1955, 143–144; see also Žižek 2004, 1): “the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed k­ ettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first,

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that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the ­kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a ­kettle from his neighbour at all.” Taken individually, the denials are a plausible justification, yet strung together, they are contradictory, confirming precisely what they are trying to deny: that the defendant returned a broken k­ ettle, or in our case that the development proj­ect w ­ ill indeed be damaging to the local indigenous community. What psychoanalysis helps reveal ­here, even (or perhaps especially) through a joke, is the disavowed desire of development, its attempts at camouflaging and justifying its institutional power.

Yet international development—by which I mean the socioeconomic and discursive/institutional practices that structure relationships between the West and the Third World1—­has tended to ignore psychoanalysis. In Development Studies, for example, ­there has been relative silence on the topic.2 Partly, such neglect is attributable to the belief by social science disciplines (and Western modernity more generally) in the rational and empirical, taking seriously only that which is logical, mea­sur­able, and quantifiable, while disparaging the emotional, qualitative, unpredictable, or indeed humorous.

But partly I would venture to say that development’s relative silence on psychoanalysis is itself psychoanalytically telling: it betrays a suspicion of human/social passions, which threaten to destabilize and alienate the subject, divide social identity, and thus endanger development’s proj­ects, intentions, aspirations. Yet, such re­sis­tance is revealing precisely of development’s unconscious, of its inability or unwillingness to confront the antagonisms of its desires. The theory and practice of development, in this sense, are replete with unconscious social passions, which, as we ­shall see below, exactly b­ ecause they remain unacknowledged can result in “irrational” be­hav­iors. Thus, the function of psychoanalysis is to better understand the role of the unconscious, to help us identify and come to terms with our attachments and disavowed passions.

Accordingly, this chapter examines the contributions of psychoanalysis to international development, illustrating ways in which thinking and practice in this field are psychoanalytically structured. Drawing mainly on the work of Lacan and Žižek, I ­will emphasize three key points: (1) psychoanalysis can help uncover the unconscious of development—­its gaps, dislocations, blind spots—­ thereby elucidating the latter’s contradictory and seemingly “irrational” practices; (2) the impor­tant psychoanalytic notion of jouissance (enjoyment) can help explain why development discourse endures, that is, why it has such sustained appeal, and why we continue to invest in it despite its many prob­lems; and (3) psychoanalysis can serve as an impor­tant tool for ideology critique, helping to expose the socioeconomic contradictions and antagonisms that de-

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velopment per­sis­tently disavows (e.g., in­equality, domination, sweatshop ­labor). But while partial to Lacan/Žižek, I w ­ ill also reflect on the limits of psychoanalysis—­the extent to which it is gendered and, given its Western origins, universalizable.

What Psychoanalysis Can Contribute to International Development Freud is often considered to have discovered a new “continent”—­ the unconscious—­that domain of repressed desires that disrupts and distorts our conscious lives yet remains inaccessible to us. His pioneering psychoanalytic insights see childhood development and f­ amily relationships as key to the formation of self hood and the unconscious. According to him, the infant’s separation from the maternal body is traumatic (resulting in painful loss and repression, which inaugurates the unconscious), as is the child’s relationship to its f­ ather (resulting in rejection and the rise of the “Oedipus complex,” crucial to the construction of sexual and gender identity). But in making t­hese claims, Freud tends t­ oward biological essentialism, famously attributing gender difference, for example, to the presence or absence of the penis, or affirming an innate h ­ uman sexual drive or libido.3 Lacan takes up Freud’s insights but reinterprets them linguistically. That is, he averts biological essentialism by constructing trauma around, not biological drives or anatomy, but symbolic pro­cesses.4 Thus, the “Phallus” is not a bodily member but a symbol of fraudulent authority; the “castration complex” traumatizes, not ­because “we” ­don’t have a penis, but b­ ecause we experience a fundamental lack (the cutting off of one’s enjoyment, rooted in our emergence from nature into culture); and sexual difference is based, not on physiological characteristics, but on the gap in structures of repre­sen­ta­tion (see chapter 8).

Lacan draws on structural linguistics to argue that our horizons of meaning are thoroughly linguistic, so that we can make sense of the world only through language. The fundamental issue for him is that language is nothing but a string of signifiers, with each signifier deriving meaning purely relative to other signifiers (Lacan 1977, 105). The color blue, for instance, makes sense only in relation to the series red, green, black, white, yellow, brown, and so on; thus, the “blue” of the sky inheres not in some intrinsic “blueness” but in the linguistic relationship of blue to the other colors in the series.

Two impor­tant implications follow. The first is that ­there are no master signifiers or ultimate reference points: since each signifier depends on o ­ thers,

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our signifying systems are incomplete and unstable, never able to express any definitive meaning or justification and never able to fully capture the t­ hing being described. Master signifiers (e.g., freedom, democracy, God, beauty), and for that m ­ atter meanings, are fixed only by such ­factors as social convention, habit, acts of authority, and/or leaps of faith.

The second implication is that, once we (as h ­ uman animals) enter language, we are thoroughly denaturalized. That is, we are unable to relate to the world directly any more, since it is always mediated by and through language. Psychoanalytically speaking, this means that we are cut off (i.e., symbolically castrated) from our “instincts.” Our biological “needs,” in the sense of pure and unmediated instincts, are accessible only through language, thus becoming what Lacan calls “desires” (2017, 203).5 The prob­lem is that, while an instinctual need such as thirst can be satisfied, desire never can be, b­ ecause it is me­ here is, diated by a signifying system that is always imprecise and lacking. T therefore, a gap between desire and need, as a result of which we often desire what we ­don’t need. So, for example, the global North ­doesn’t need to engage in overconsumption, but many of us who live t­ here desire to nonetheless; or we ­don’t need to eat fatty or sweet foods, but we often desire them (Eisenstein and McGowan 2012, 12). The related, more general, point ­here is that ­because we are linguistic beings and the symbolic order is lacking, so are we lacking, always divided and alienated (from the world, from our own biological instincts).

Lacan articulates many of the above ideas by positing three interrelated registers, which make pos­si­ble our interpsychic life: the Imaginary (the order of seductive images and meanings, which often provide the illusion of w ­ holeness and clarity); the Symbolic (the order of language, the result of historical, intersubjective, and collective practice);6 and the Real (the order of traumas, antagonisms, and contradictions that undermine real­ity but also constitute its conditions of possibility) (see Homer 2004, 10; Lacan 2016, 11–12; Žižek and Daly 2004, 65).7 For Lacan, we are positioned, and create ourselves, in all three registers, with the Symbolic and Imaginary helping to make the fabrics of our real­ity (however incompletely), and the Real tearing them apart.

One last point before we tease out the implications of all of this for development: to say that we are linguistic beings does not mean that we create the material world. Lacan is not positing an idealist ontology ­here. Rather, the view is that our signifying systems frame real­ity, laying down the structures and par­ ameters for our understanding of it (in this sense, the Lacanian standpoint is quite consistent with discourse theory). In fact, Joan Copjec (1994, 7–8) claims that Lacan is a materialist:

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[Suggesting that] something cannot be claimed to exist u ­ nless it can first be stated, articulated in language—is no mere tautology; it is a materialist argument parallel to the rule of science which states that no object can be legitimately posited u ­ nless one can also specify the technical means of locating it. The existence of a ­thing materially depends on its being articulated in language, for only in this case can it be said to have an objective—­that is to say, a verifiable—­existence, one that can be debated by o ­ thers.

In other words, materiality cannot be apprehended without immateriality (the Symbolic), and each is meaningless without the other, a claim that aligns well with modern physics (e.g., quantum mechanics, wave theory) (see Žižek 2013, 905ff.). Žižek pushes this “dialectical materialism” further to argue that ­human consciousness emerges from material real­ity itself, or more precisely as a result of the gap (the Real) or lack in real­ity. No won­der that our own subjectivity mirrors this same lack; a lack, as we ­shall see below, that we are constantly trying to avoid and disavow even as we try to apprehend real­ity. Listen to Žižek on this point: We cannot pass directly from nature to culture. Something goes terribly wrong in nature: nature produces an unnatural monstrosity and I claim that it is in order to cope with, to domesticate, this monstrosity that we symbolize. Taking Freud’s fort/da example as model: something ­ other and so on) and symis primordially broken (the absence of the m bolization functions as a way of living with that kind of trauma. (Žižek and Daly 2004, 65; see also Žižek 2014, 29; Zupančič 2017, 121) So on the one hand, materiality is meaningless in the absence of a gap or negativity; it is sustained only by its inability to complete itself. And on the other, subjectivity emerges as a consequence of the self-­alienation of materiality, be­ ere, the embodiment of real­ity’s antagonism (see chapter 8). coming, as it w

Development’s Unconscious: Uncovering Gaps, Slips, Blind Spots The unconscious is not, as is commonly held, some discrete, hidden domain of wild and unpredictable drives; rather, it is a linguistic site in which desire reveals itself. As explained above, from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis, our language is always marked by holes, gaps, erasures: ­these gaps

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are precisely the unconscious. In this regard, Lacan famously states that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1998a, 48; 1998b, 203). That is, it is integral to language but is an excess or remainder to it. It comes about ­because of a mismatch between language and real­ity (i.e., a “cut” in materiality itself, as we saw ­earlier) and the inability of meaning to be fixed, thereby obeying a logic and grammar that psychoanalysis attempts to decipher (Homer 2004, 69).

Thus, as linguistic subjects, our everyday lives are replete with unconscious acts, which, b­ ecause they are unconscious, are inaccessible to us; nonetheless, they manifest themselves in the form of slips, miscommunications, confusion, ­mistakes, blind spots.

It is impor­tant to note that the unconscious is conceived intersubjectively ­here. Lacan is deliberately depsychologizing the concept, in the sense of wresting it from any notion of a separate, individual mind. Rather, b­ ecause the unconscious is intrinsic to language, it is part and parcel of a shared (albeit unstable) horizon of meaning. It is therefore broadly sociocultural, and hence transindividual. It becomes a vital part of our subjectivity without residing “inside” us. In fact, for Lacan, the unconscious is decidedly outside. In this connection, he writes, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (1998b, 131), underlining how language always precedes us, so that we form our subjecthood and desires through the Other.8 It should be clearer now why Lacanian psychoanalysis lends itself to the task of uncovering development’s unconscious. B ­ ecause psychoanalysis is primarily a cultural and linguistic practice, it can be used to analyze development’s texts—be ­these written or institutional, social or economic, academic or policy-­ oriented—to reveal their gaps and blind spots. Or to put it another way: that development is a linguistic/discursive/ institutional/socioeconomic construction is proof that it is replete with unconscious desires that “speak.” In fact, following Lacan’s thinking, to identify the unconscious thusly helps underline that trauma is not an “inner” condition to development and its subjects, but is externalized and materialized in development institutions. Our symbolic world, ­after all, is not some theoretical entity; in the way that Lacanians conceive it, we understand, desire, act, and interact only through it. No won­der that its gaps show up in every­thing we do, and hence that it is pos­si­ble to say that the unconscious is pre­sent as much in ­family circles as our work environments, shopping malls as much as universities, and discursive politics as much as development’s institutional policies and programs. ­There are likely innumerable ways of pointing to development’s unconscious, but I want to focus on two sets of examples. The first is what might be called development’s “slips of the tongue.” As stated above, while the unconscious cannot be fully apprehended, it does reveal itself in a number of ways, one of

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which is slips of the tongue. I use that expression broadly to refer to verbal tics, and institutional stumbles and confusion. For a start, what comes to mind ­here are commonly used development concepts, each of which betrays itself: • Population control: this refers to neo-­Malthusian programs aimed at better managing rapid population growth in developing countries (e.g., India, China, Peru, especially during the period from the 1970s to the 1990s), which resulted in such widespread excesses as forced sterilization, including vasectomies for men and tubal sterilization of w ­ omen, as well as the sterilization of ­people with disabilities, and the medical abuse of transgender ­people, practices that continue to some extent even ­today (see ­Eager 2004; Fletcher, Breitling, and Puleo 2014).

“Population control” is thus precisely that—­a technology aimed at controlling the population (what Foucault calls “biopower”).

• Sustainable development: this is meant to convey the limits that our biosphere imposes on cap­i­tal­ist growth, but has come to mean exactly the opposite—­the sustenance of cap­it­ al­ist growth—­which is, in fact, the literal meaning of the term. Sustainable development (or “sustainability”) is now very much part of the mainstream lexicon, which sees business, governments, and NGOs alike conceptualize the environment not as a problem/limit, but as a business opportunity (i.e., “greenwashing” or “green capitalism”).

• Foreign aid: ostensibly referring to Western “gifts” to the Third World, much Official Development Assistance (ODA) is in fact tied (to foreign-­policy or security objectives, or the purchase of goods and ser­vices from the donor country) and conditional (on the recipient fulfilling certain ideological conditions, in the form of neoliberal structural adjustment programs, for example). From the point of view of the recipient, then, foreign aid is often about receiving foreign gifts, that is, strange or poisoned gifts, which in many ways primarily aid the foreigner—­materially and ideologically, as suggested above, but also symbolically, ­because they make the donor look and feel good (see Kapoor 2008, chap. 5).

What is in­ter­est­ing about ­these terms is that their unconscious desires reveal themselves retroactively. Each term is first conceived and uttered, often constructed to signify more than its literal meaning (and in the case of “sustainable development,” the precise opposite of its literal meaning). But then, once it is discursively deployed and institutionally practiced, its unconscious content reveals itself to be the literal meaning that had been staring at us in

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Chapt er 1

the first place. More often than not, the unconscious is plainly evident from the start, but only retroactively discovered (more on this below).

It is also worth mentioning the myriad verbal gaffes or “bloopers” in development, which so often divulge unspoken intentions or prejudices: • Ronald Reagan’s notorious slips, including, “The United States has much to offer the Third World War” (instead of just “Third World,” an error repeated nine times during the same speech) (quoted in Cornelius 2001, 176), as if confirming his government’s impending bellicose politics and close ties to the military-­industrial complex; • George W. Bush’s equally notorious gaffes, including, “I think the best way to attack—to ­handle—­the attacks of September the 11th is to fight fear with friendship,”9 presaging his regime’s “attack” on (and precisely not friendship with) Iraq and Af­ghan­is­ tan; • Bob Geldof ’s Live Aid statement, “Something must be done, anything must be done, ­whether it works or not” (quoted in Glennie 2008, 9), betraying that what ­really m ­ atters for humanitarian celebrities such as him is the publicity, that is, being seen to be d­ oing something, ­whether it works or not; • the 2013 corporate PR executive’s tweet, written as she boarded a flight from London to South Africa, “­Going to Africa. Hope I ­don’t get AIDS. Just Kidding. I’m White!” (BBC 2013), which discloses the not uncommon Western racist anxiety (cloaked as humor) about Africa and Africans; and • the 2018 tweet by the United Kingdom’s then Conservative Minister of State for International Development, Penny Mordaunt, announcing her new private investment policy to “irradiate extreme global poverty” (instead of irradicate/eradicate), which echoes frequent references to “wars” on poverty/terror, while also inadvertently expressing the not uncommon leftist equation of capitalism with (“extreme”) vio­lence.10

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One of the more significant slips of the tongue though is that of Lawrence Summers, who as chief economist and vice president of the World Bank in 1991, writes an infamous memo to Brazil’s then secretary of the environment: “Just between you and me, s­ houldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]?”

The memo goes on to argue that the “poor” have short lives, Africa is “vastly UNDER-­polluted,” and rich p­ eople value clean air and w ­ ater more than the 11 poor (quoted in Pellow 2007, 9; see also Korten 1992).

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11

The memo is remarkable in terms of both its content and form. Its content reveals a callous (if not racist) disregard for the poor/Third World, which is characterized as a (potential) toxic dumping ground for First World industries. But its form is telling as well: while it was leaked, it was clearly not meant to be (the “Just between you and me” is an impor­tant detail), which points up precisely its unconscious (or “dirty”!) underside. Thus, the form of the memo is what makes its content embarrassing, doubly so in fact: not only does its secretive intent help strip bare the pretense that the World Bank works on behalf of the Third World (as partly implied by the memo, the Bank is controlled by, and primarily serves the economic interests of, the First World), but it also casts doubt on the “scientific” and “rational” construction of development economics, which in its neoclassical guise h ­ ere is being used as nothing but an ideological rationalization of f­ree market economics. Summers goes so far as to assert that “I think the economic logic b­ ehind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-­wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that” (quoted in Pellow 2007, 9). But is it logical or ideological to assert that improving the ­human welfare of the rich justifies poisoning the poor and the Third World? And perhaps more importantly for our pre­sent purpose, how “impeccable” can this economic logic be if it can only be uttered in a secret memo?

Summers’s memo, in this sense, is revealing of not just his personal prejudices but the Bank’s unconscious. Speaking from a power­f ul leadership position as the Bank’s chief economist and vice president, his words are indicative of a shared Bank culture (belief in ­free market economics, the assumption of the Bank as global development authority, ­etc.) and its attendant desires (domination of the poor and the Third World to facilitate ­free trade and the mobility of Western capital). And while ­free market ideology can be (and is) loudly promoted within and beyond the walls of the Bank, its accompanying (unconscious) supremacist desires can be uttered only in camera. Embarrassment ensues precisely when t­ hese “private” desires become public, exposing the callousness and irrationality of the “­free market” economics the Bank continues to defend.

A second way of illustrating development’s unconscious is by focusing on its blind spots. Once again, ­there are likely multiple examples available, but to mention just a few: the per­sis­tent failure by such mainstream economic indicators as gross domestic product or the H ­ uman Development Index to count ­women’s ­house­hold work or subtract environmental destruction (they both tally deforestation, for example, as a gain), which reveals the priority given to ­ nder global capitalism, to the exwhat is considered “productive growth” u clusion of gender or environmental concerns (see chapter 6); the frequent

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Chapt er 1

treatment by development organ­izations of t­hose they serve (e.g., t­hose affected by war or climate change) as passive victims, underlining the deep and longstanding paternalism that pervades development (see Baaz 2008); and the overwhelming tendency of global (liberal) ­human rights discourse to focus on individual civil and po­liti­cal rights (e.g., ­free speech, rule of law), to the exclusion of collective rights (e.g., indigenous p­ eoples’ rights, communal biodiversity, and intellectual property rights) and socioeconomic rights (e.g., land claims, workers’ rights, living wages).

The blind spot on which I would like to dwell a l­ ittle though is the continuing neglect of colonialism in mainstream development discourse. This neglect coincides with the very “invention” of international development in the period ­after the Second World War: aid to “underdeveloped” areas became vital to containing what the United States and other Western powers saw as Soviet expansionism. No won­der that Modernization Theory—­which pioneered development as an academic field, and has anchored Western foreign policy and development institutions ever since—­bears the strong imprint of such Cold War politics. As several analysts have argued (e.g., Escobar 1995, 14–15; Frank 1967; Valenzuela and Valenzuela 1998),12 Modernization tends to take a decidedly post–­Second World War view of history, thus avoiding the history of Western colonialism. For instance, Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth—so influential in economic and foreign policy circles—­fails to deal with colonial rule in any meaningful way. It’s not that Rostow d­ oesn’t mention colonialism at all; he does, but its significance is notably downplayed. In a short section on “colonialism,” he goes so far as to state that colonies w ­ ere founded for “oblique reasons” and colonial subjects “looked kindly” on the colonizer’s efforts to or­ga­nize “suitable po­liti­cal frameworks” (1960, 110).

But such disavowal continues in vari­ous guises even ­today. It is vis­i­ble in World Bank/International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs, which make no mention of, or allowances for, the fact that the West’s colonial plunder might have something to do with the recipient’s current socioeconomic conditions. And it is evident in World Trade Organ­ization trade deals, which so often assume a global economic level playing field in their pursuit of “­free” trade, amounting to trade “freed” of any past colonial entanglements. Robert Fletcher (2012) calls such per­sis­tent sanitization of colonialism “imperialist amnesia.” He analyzes the work of several development/ globalization pundits to drive home the point: New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman, former World Bank economist Paul Collier, and economist and UN advisor Jeffrey Sachs, all of whom treat wealth accumulation in the global North or poverty in the global South by omitting consideration of the imperialist extraction of Third World resources. In The End of Poverty (2005, 208),

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Taking Care of Our Own When Family Caregivers Do Medical Work

Sherry N. Mong

ILR Press an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mong, Sherry N., 1961– author.

Title: Taking care of our own : when family caregivers do medical work / Sherry N. Mong.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Series: The culture and politics of health care work | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019056309 (print) | LCCN 2019056310 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501751448 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501751455 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501751479 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501751462 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Caregivers—Social conditions. | Home care services— Social aspects. | Unpaid labor—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC RA645.3. M655 2020 (print) | LCC RA645.3 (ebook) | DDC 362.14—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056309 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056310

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1

Part I. The Work of Skilled Family Caregiving

17

1. The Work Caregivers Do

19

2. On-the-Job Training

38

3. Who Pays?

56

Part II. Relationships, Identities, and Emotions in Skilled Family Care Work

69

4. Integrating Care Work with Life

71

5. “You Do What You Gotta Do”

92

6. Work Shifts

110

Conclusion 126

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v iii Conte nts Methodological Appendix

143

Notes 149 References 161 Index 179

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Introduction

On the day I brought my three-and-a-half-year-old son home from his first hospital stay, I sat in the big oak rocker in our family room, taking a single moment to reflect on the sights and sounds around me. I looked out the window. It was nice outside. Sun drenched the dark green meadows that surrounded the house and I imagined onlookers on their way home or to work, taking notice of the peaceful scenery. As I rocked back and forth, I considered the commotion in the room around me. In contrast to the flowing meadows, inside there was an entirely different landscape— a landscape with rocky terrain and blurred boundaries. A landscape riddled by uncertainty.

My son, who has cystic fibrosis, had just finished his first hospital admission for a lung infection. The day before, the hospital resident had explained to me that “most parents” of children with cystic fibrosis administer IV antibiotics at home. That way, their child is released from the hospital sooner and is not exposed to the bacteria that often plague hospital wards. It seemed logical, and I had desperately wanted to do the

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2 Introduc ti on right thing for my son. I was not working outside the home at the time, and my husband, a physician, had long hours at work. We had agreed that I would stay home while the kids were young, and return to pursue a master’s degree once they reached school age. In that situation I seemed the “natural” person to do the care. But I now realized that I had no real concept of what this new kind of care would mean for me.

I could barely register the actions of the home health nurses and family members around me. More vividly I remember the mess of tubing, wires, IV poles, and bags that were draped in half-opened boxes about the family room. I walked over to the couch to join the nurse. She began talking directly to me. She was kind but stern. She had long, straight hair, and I remember thinking her earthy look somehow clashed with the severity of the situation. She told me it was important to draw up the saline now so that it could be refrigerated for future use. That way, she said, I wouldn’t have to be bothered with it every time I administered the IV antibiotics.

As I was trying to focus my thoughts, she showed me how to uncap the syringe, draw air into it, plunge it into the saline bottle, push the syringe to release the air into the bottle, and pull back. If any air bubbles formed in the syringe, as they most certainly would, I was to flick the syringe with my thumb and middle finger to break them up. Next she showed me how to manipulate the syringe so I could shoot out the excess air before recapping it. It was extremely important, she said, not to touch the surface of the bottle or the tip of the needle with my fingers. Cautiously I performed the duties, more than once spewing saline into the air as I struggled to shoot the excess air out of the syringe. The first time made me gasp, but she seemed unconcerned, so I learned to watch the unpredictable fountains as they shot straight up then cascaded down and out before landing on the carpet and furniture. She then instructed me to perform the same procedures with the heparin. I complied, while she observed me.

She asked if I had any gallon-sized plastic bags. I said I did. Following her advice, I labeled the bags with a big S or H using a black permanent marker. We then placed the freshly prepared saline and heparin syringes into the respective bags. She said this would help ensure that I didn’t get the doses mixed up when I needed them in the middle of the night. We went to the refrigerator. On the shelf directly under our usual stock of milk and orange juice, we placed the saline and heparin bags beside several other prepackaged bags of antibiotics. Until that moment, I hadn’t

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I n tr o d u ctio n 3 realized that “hospital things” had any place alongside my ketchup and mayonnaise. It was an odd combination; the placement seemed unnatural and unsettling.

I slowly made my way back to the rocker—a place of seeming refuge in my quiet, private chaos. I remember sitting dumbly, still in a head fog, as the nurse spelled out the formula to administer the antibiotics.

“S . . . A . . . S . . . H,” she told me. “Saline, antibiotic, saline, heparin.”

I repeated the command, but in the rush around me, I had hundreds of unformed thoughts flying like fireflies in the meadow outside. I felt a deep sense of confusion. I was afraid, and worried in a way I could not explain.

I had been an accountant by trade. On that first day of at-home nurse’s training, two themes permeated my otherwise scattered thinking. First, I had never been to nursing school. I had no medical training and no inclination whatsoever toward the medical profession. Surely I wasn’t the best person to administer IVs to my son. What if I made a mistake? What if I hurt him? What if something went horribly wrong? How would I be able to handle a situation like that? Second, I believed the training I did have to be virtually useless. Though I was well educated, my prior work and personal experience were inadequate in preparing me for the tasks that day or the ones that would certainly lie ahead. Accounting was as polar an opposite as one could imagine from administering IV antibiotics. Mothering, while giving me skills to work through a myriad of child-rearing issues, from fixing “boo-boos” to instilling personal values, gave me no help at all on how to perform this type of medical procedure. Surely this process—whatever it was—was way beyond mothering.

And so I felt I lacked a knowledge base from which to formulate the feelings I had. My own thoughts were not even sufficiently developed enough for me to express myself. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was standing in a situation akin to what Dorothy Smith (1987, 49) has described as a “line of fault”: a “rupture” between my experiences and “the social forms of consciousness—the culture or ideology of . . . society.”1 Foremost, I wanted to be a good mother. But the skills I needed to learn required much more timing, precision, and training than the typical housework or care work I had ever done or known about. In housework, as in child rearing, I could decide what was right, and go at my own pace.

Now I was being judged on something totally different. I was being asked to perform a medical procedure, which was more in the scope of registered

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4 Introduc ti on nursing than mothering. And the stakes were very high. I knew that I had to do everything right, or it could have huge implications for the health of my son. I also had the responsibility of conveying to him that this was the right thing to do. I needed to let him know that this would be part of his life, and was in fact meant to help him. I did not want him to be afraid.

But nagging questions continued to haunt me. Was it appropriate that I should be doing these types of procedures for my own son? Was I competent to do them? What was my role here? Would the stress of giving my son IVs interfere with my ability to care for him by just being his mom? Would I be able to give him the emotional support he needed while dealing with my own feelings of anxiety? Further, he had left the hospital with a peripheral IV in his arm. Should it come loose, the home health nurse would have to stick him again with a large needle. Shouldn’t home be a place of comfort and hospitals the place for needles and blood draws? I longed to run to the meadows outside and escape the shaky terrain within. Surely someone else could do a better job of this than I could.

But on that day, as on all the rest, my desire to be a “good mother” won out over the fear that threatened to paralyze me. I didn’t bolt, but stayed and learned the procedures. And through the years, with bouts of required antibiotics, sometimes running two to three IV lines up to four times a day, for periods lasting up to two weeks, on top of regular cystic fibrosis treatments, such as breathing treatments and chest physical therapy, I did the job. These were, indeed, intense periods of exhaustion and little sleep. During most of it, especially the first several runs, I was racked with anxiety. I checked and rechecked my work. I pored over my notes. I constantly reorganized medicines to get a better handle on things, and through it all, I was still subtly terrified. Were it not for my family and my husband, who not only was a wonderful resource but also shared the actual work with me when he was not at his job, I’m sure things would have been much more difficult. While I know that I am very privileged in this regard,2 it is also true that many of my experiences with home health care were often alone, when my husband was unavailable or called away.

During those times, trying to run IV lines in my son’s bedroom at night, awkwardly uncapping, injecting, remembering S . . . A . . . S . . . H, while taking care not to wake him, I often wondered about the experiences of others who are in similar situations. Indeed, my curiosity led to a fundamental concern to understand more about what other caregivers go

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I n tr o d u ctio n 5 through when they learn skilled medical labor. What kind of procedures do they have to learn? What is the process like for them? Do they too have a rough time processing their new duties? Are their problems like mine, or different? My desire to find answers to these types of questions—­ questions embedded in the social processes of what philosophers such as Kittay (1999, 29) call the “human condition”—was a fundamental reason for my decision to go to graduate school and study sociology. My training as a sociologist led me to work by C. Wright Mills (1959), and in Mills’s terms, I wanted to use my “sociological imagination” to understand how my personal troubles were linked to troubles in the lives of others. According to Mills, if I could find linkages, I would have a greater understanding of the public issues related to skilled home health care—issues that affect society at large.

And so I wanted to know how family caregivers deal—both emotionally and physically—with the skilled nursing they perform. I wanted to hear their stories and understand more about what they go through. I wanted to know whether they, at least initially, were as bewildered as I had been.

I also wanted to talk to the nurses who teach the labor. I wanted to find out how they show others how to perform these procedures, and I wanted to see the home health process through their eyes. As a result, between January 2009 and February 2010, I conducted sixty-two in-depth semistructured interviews in two midwestern states. (See the appendix for a complete discussion of methods used.) I was able to learn from people who are directly involved in the process, and I believe that, taken together, these stories provide rich insight into how home health labor is enacted in the lives of women and men. Importantly, while theirs are not my stories, my experiences certainly are relevant and no doubt contribute to the work I do, as I attempt to look beyond the green meadows that surround our visions of “home life” and capture instead glimpses of the terrain inside.

The Debate over Home Health Care At first glance, at-home skilled nursing seems a natural result of medical advancement in a technological age. People are now able to access medical information about their illnesses on the internet. They can live at home on portable oxygen. They can inject themselves with IV

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6 Introduc ti on medications—something that was impossible fifty years ago. Moreover, home health advocates—including home health agency managers, lobbyists, and many medical professionals—contend that patients are happiest and heal best in their homes, away from hospital distractions, multiple caregivers, and other patients, all of which can increase infection rates and reduce quality of care. Proponents also point to the dignity and independence that care recipients enjoy at home, as well as the immense cost savings of using home health care over institutionalization (NAHC 2019).

Those critical of the push toward at-home skilled caregiving have focused on these cost-saving policies, seeing them as an attempt to unload labor onto unpaid family members who have little recourse (Glazer 1993).

Opponents contend that home health care is often touted as “cheaper,” with no real consideration of caregiver costs. Cost-saving strategies have indeed been at the forefront of changes in Medicare and other payer sources, and this has meant that nursing agencies, which used to be able to do more of the skilled work, have been pressed to find effective ways of transferring medical tasks to families (see chapter 3). In a column on our self-service society, Ellen Goodman (2008) muses that we are now “expected to interact with ‘labor-saving technology’ without realizing that it’s labor-transferring technology. . . . In an era when every operation short of brain surgery is done on an outpatient basis, nursing care has . . . been outsourced to family members whose entire medical training consists of TiVo-ing ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ ” So how are we to conceptualize skilled at-home nursing care and its effect on families in contemporary society? To analyze the “home care is best” versus “caregivers primarily are forced laborers” viewpoints, we must first realize how they differ in their approach to skilled caregiving.

The “home care is best” view casts the home as a place of rest and healing, and emphasizes the patient’s comfort and the caregiver’s love and concern.3 This view, however, downplays the costs associated with caregiving.

This is a large understatement. Scholars estimate that family caregivers provide hundreds of billions of dollars a year in unpaid labor,4 and a survey by the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC and Evercare 2007) estimates that caregivers spend an average of $5,500 per year—a figure that does not include their lost wages. My interviews with caregivers who have performed skilled care also reveal that they face many unmet needs. Sometimes nurses are able to stay only a short amount of time, and home life is

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I n tr o d u ctio n 7 often busy and filled with other obligations. There are issues with balancing work and family care, and many caregivers experienced sleeplessness and anxiety. Though most caregivers developed a “you do what you have to do” attitude and were able to figure out a way to perform the tasks, it was not a simple process.

The second viewpoint, which focuses on caregivers primarily as forced laborers, recognizes caregivers’ labor, and the enormous contributions they make, but downplays the gratification that many have found in helping their loved ones, as well as the nuances of the caregiver–care recipient relationship. Under a strict interpretation of this viewpoint, caregivers seem more like victims than anything else. Many of the caregivers I spoke with were ready to leave the hospitals or rehab facilities with their loved ones, and preferred to be in familiar and comfortable surroundings. Overall, many also expressed that they wanted to take care of their loved ones, and said they felt deep satisfaction in their caregiving labor.

Indeed, these important components of caregiving—that it involves both labor and love as well as satisfaction and costs—have been recognized and addressed by care work scholars (Abel and Nelson 1990; Abel 1991; Graham 1983). Abel and Nelson (1990, 6–7) state that socialist feminist views that focus on the material and ideological mechanisms that oblige women to provide care, as well as feminist views that emphasize the humanizing aspects and personal fulfillment of caregiving, are both inadequate. The first, they say, leave out human connectedness, while the second run the danger of contributing to women’s subordination (1990, 7). While Glazer’s (1993) work—which viewed the “work transfer” on a Marxist scale and called attention to the structural processes that place nursing care on caregivers—was incredibly important, it did not consider important microprocesses such as caregivers’ own interpretations of their labor, the identities of care workers, and the interactions and relationships between caregivers, care recipients, and nurses.

These insights tell us that the panacea-like home care rhetoric and the forced labor scenario are both oversimplifications. “Home care for all” downplays caregiver labor and does not consider unmet caregiver needs or the particular nuisances of the home health situation. Seeing caregivers mainly as forced laborers, however, denies the agency of those who genuinely want to help their loved ones when they need them most. An honest assessment of skilled home care should recognize interactional components

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8 Introduc ti on as well as structural constraints, while remembering that caregiving involves both labor and love (Abel and Nelson 1990; Graham 1983).

Indeed, scholars are increasingly recognizing the multifaceted nature of caregiving, and the fact that care work itself entails intrinsic rewards as well as costs and obligations (see, for example, Folbre and Wright 2012).

An expansive body of work on caregiving documents the associated stresses and burdens (see Bianchi, Folbre, and Wolf 2012), and shows that caregivers have less time for rest and exercise (Burton et al. 1997), give up leisure time, and report increased financial costs, including out-of-pocket expenses (Leonard, Brust, and Sapienza 1992; NAC and Evercare 2007).

A host of studies also show that caregiving is associated with depressive symptoms and psychological distress (Schulz et al. 1995; Cannuscio et al.

2004; Hirst 2005), worse physical health (Pinquart and Sorensen 2007), and perceived ill health (NAC and AARP 2009).5 Despite these costs, however, studies have also shown that caregiving can have positive benefits, such as increased closeness to loved ones, a sense of satisfaction regarding the importance of the care, and improved mental health (Elmore 2014, 18–19).6 Green (2007) found that caregivers of children with disabilities experienced a sense of strength, closer family relationships, and an ability to look beyond appearances. In a national study, Donelan and colleagues (2002) found that 71 percent of informal caregivers said their relationship with their care recipient had improved, and 89 percent said their care recipient had expressed appreciation for what they had done. Such studies paint a picture of caregiving as multifaceted and deeply rooted in social relationships (see Abel 1991).

It is clear that we need further assessment of the daily work processes enacted in homes and a better understanding of how caregivers experience these processes—both emotionally and physically. Such an assessment is critical in the midst of increasing technology and demographic changes that significantly impact home health care, including an increase in the elderly population, smaller families that are more geographically dispersed, a large growth in the adult population living alone, and the fact that only around 3.5 percent of adults over age sixty-five are in institutional care (Glenn 2010; Moeller 2013; USDHHS 2013).7 Drawing on feminist, medical sociology, and care work literature (see, for example, Daniels 1987; Corbin and Strauss 1988; Abel and Nelson 1990; James 1992; Glazer 1993; Bolton 2000; Cancian and Oliker 2000;

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I n tr o d u ctio n 9 Folbre and Wright 2012; Duffy, Albelda, and Hammonds 2013; Erickson and Stacey 2013), a central tenet of this book is that the unpaid, skilled caregiving activities that are integral to the work in home health care need to be considered as “labor processes”—processes that include both emotional and physical/instrumental labor. Early studies of labor processes were performed in manufacturing settings, and offered detailed descriptions of methods that paid workers used to learn the work, workers’ strategies and feelings about their labor, and their identity construction and consent to the labor process (Roy 1952; Braverman 1974; Burawoy 1979). In her 1993 work, Glazer refers to the “labor process” in describing the “work transfer,” which takes place when women’s unpaid labor becomes “decommodified” and structural forces create a labor force of paid and unpaid workers (215). Citing Braverman’s (1974) use of the term “labor process,”8 Folbre and Wright contend that studying the “labor process” in care work “calls attention to the lived experience of work and highlights the qualitative features of interactions among care managers, care providers, and care recipients” (2012, 5).

Using a labor process lens allows us to see caregivers’ interactions and what they go through in their performance of everyday labor. How do they learn specific skills? What types of training do they receive? How do they make sense of their labor? How are emotions and relationships important? We are also able to understand how nurses teach this labor.

How do they teach such complex skills to caregivers, and how do they feel about transferring their technical skills? Exploring and answering these and many more questions helps us understand how narrow both policy and personal choices are, and how we can analyze this new form of work in a way that recognizes both labor and love.9

Unpaid Care Work as Work Interestingly, workplace scholars have generally confined their analyses of medical labor to paid wage labor.10 Considering the abundance of labor studies that critique capitalism for its exploitative effects, the lack of attention given to unpaid labor is ironic.11 By recognizing only those who are compensated, scholars allow capitalism to define work processes and to determine who it is that we consider as workers. Feminist scholars

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1 0 Introduc ti on have convincingly shown that capitalism and labor markets themselves depend on unpaid labor (Glazer 1984, 1990; Daniels 1987; James 1989).

Glenn (2010) makes the case that coercion by the state and capitalism place undue burdens on family caregivers, especially women. Due to status obligations, caregivers feel intense pressure to take care of their family members, and these processes have both structural and ideological underpinnings.12 The ideological expectation that families should take care of their loved ones is demonstrated by a 2012 study in which the United Hospital’s Transitions in Care-Quality Improvement Collaborative (TCQuIC) analyzed care transitions for family caregivers in thirty-seven hospitals, home care agencies, rehabilitation programs, and hospices. It found that of thirty-seven agencies, none had a systematic way of finding out who the actual caregiver was—only who it was assumed to be (Reinhard, Levine, and Samis 2012, 9).

The central contribution of feminist scholars in understanding caregiving labor is to show that gender often serves as an organizing principle of such labor, and that the association with love and domesticity hides the underlying work processes (Waerness 1978; Graham 1983; Ungerson 1983, 1990a). Thus, while the labor of medical professionals is visible, the labor of family caregivers seems less so—a personal matter, just what families do when one of their members is sick or in need. Activities related to caring and nurturing are often seen as the responsibility of women (Tronto 1993; Kittay 1999; Coltrane 2000; Bittman and Wajcman 2000; Bittman et al. 2003) and as something that comes “naturally” to them (Cancian and Oliker 2000; Daniels 1987). Although these activities entail large investments of time, energy, and organizational and emotional skills, they remain, for the most part, outside public discourse and invisible to society’s recognition of productivity or labor processes (Daniels 1987; James 1989; DeVault 1991; Folbre 2001).

Scholars maintain that the invisibility of caring labor is rooted in the ideology of “separate spheres”—the private and public realms that became particularly prominent in the nineteenth century (Padavic and Reskin 2002).13 Industrialization brought with it a marked change in our view of work, and relegated our measurement of productivity to economic valuations of paid work. This began a dichotomous division of labor whereby unpaid work in the “private sphere” was seen as personal and

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TEEN SPIRIT How Adolescence Transformed the Adult World Paul Howe

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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ITHACA AND LONDON

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Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Howe, Paul, 1966- author.

Title: Teen spirit : how adolescence transformed the adult world / Paul Howe.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048953 (print) | LCCN 2019048954 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501749827 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501749841 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501749834 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Adolescence—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Adolescence—Social aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Adulthood—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Adulthood—Social aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Emotional maturity—United States.

Classification: LCC HQ796. H745 2020 (print) | LCC HQ796 (ebook) | DDC 305.2350973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048953 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048954

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Contents

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Figures and Tables Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

ix

1.

The Character of Adolescents

12

2.

The Crucible of Adolescence

33

3.

A Century of Change

52

4.

Problems of the Present

73

5.

Liberating Effects

89

6.

Governing Together: Politicians, Citizens, and Democracy

110

7.

Getting Ahead: Economic Life in the Adolescent Society

132

8.

Adolescence Alone?

144

9.

Bucking the Trend: The Millennials and Beyond

167

Conclusion

191

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

199 201 223 237

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Introduction

ADOLESCENT SOCIETY, THEN AND NOW

Age, it is often said, is just a state of mind. You’re only as old as you think you are.

Nowadays, it seems that many have taken this reassuring adage to heart. Individuals ages twenty to eighty seem little concerned about adhering to traditional adult norms, favoring instead the free and easy ways of youth. If Dick Clark was once dubbed the “world’s oldest teenager,” many of us these days appear to be vying for that title, hoping to remain forever young even as we move forward through the latter stages of life.

In some cases, this may reflect a deliberate effort to adopt a youthful frame of mind in an attempt to stave off the inescapable reality of growing older. But often an adolescent way of thinking and acting seems to come very naturally to people. Instead of consciously seeking to recapture their youth, they are simply doing and expressing what feels instinctively right, reflecting the fact that in some important sense they have never really fully grown up.

This, at least, is the way the phenomenon is often presented in popular culture.

A case in point is the Adam Sandler movie Grown Ups, about a group of men who are clearly anything but, along with countless other forgettable films in which Sandler plays the stunted man-child to perfect effect. TV shows like Arrested Development and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia follow a similar script, depicting characters who fall short of the adult mark in various ways with their erratic and self-absorbed behavior. Talk radio features outlandish hosts, such as shock jock Howard Stern, whose boorish broadcasts suggest an adolescent mentality hard at work, while reality TV includes shows like Carpool Karaoke where celebrities channel their teenage selves as they drive around town singing favorite pop songs at top volume.

1

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2 INTRODUCTION

If examples of adults acting like adolescents appear in many corners of the entertainment world, there are also signs of this same trend emerging in different avenues of real life. In our work, leisure, and personal pursuits, we sometimes act in a surprisingly impetuous manner, letting our impulses and emotions get the better of us rather than displaying adult qualities of balance and self-­ control. Some of us actively resist the trappings and responsibilities of adulthood throughout our twenties, our thirties, and even later, giving rise to widespread diagnoses of the so-called Peter Pan syndrome. For rest and relaxation, many adults these days prefer amusements—video games, superhero movies, comic books—designed first and foremost with teenagers in mind.

Clearly, these descriptions, and others like them, do not apply to everyone all of the time; but they encompass enough of us enough of the time to support the conclusion that a youthful spirit now holds considerable sway and has reshaped important elements of modern adulthood. We have entered what might be termed the age of adolescence, an era where there is an adolescent aura to much that adults think and do. It is, without doubt, an important social and cultural development that warrants closer investigation.

How Did We Get Here?

One way to gain insight into these changes is to look closely at teenagers themselves and their shared social setting—the subject matter of a classic sociological work from more than fifty years ago. In the late 1950s, James Coleman carried out a close study of ten American high schools, seeking to learn more about adolescents and their orientation toward schooling. He published the results several years later in The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education. What Coleman discovered through his research was that the social, not the educational, dimension of the high school experience was paramount.

When gathered together in the high school setting, teenagers occupied a separate and distinct social space largely immune from adult influence, and with this came a tendency to “develop standards that lead away from those goals established by the larger society.”1 This adolescent society, as Coleman named it, was an inevitable by-product of the high school education system with the potential to decisively reshape the perspective and priorities of teenagers.

More than a half century later, the book continues to be a reference point for those who believe that herding teenagers together for several years in splendid isolation wasn’t necessarily the wisest social experiment we’ve ever undertaken.

“The child of high-school age,” Coleman warned, “is ‘cut off ’ from the rest of society, forced inward toward his own age group, made to carry out his whole

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ADOLESCENT SOCIETY, THEN AND NOW 3

social life with others his own age. With his fellows, he comes to constitute a small society, one that has its most important interactions within itself and maintains only a few threads of connection with the outside adult world.”2 In this insular world of the adolescent society, teenage traits and behaviors were free to flourish largely unchecked and unchallenged.

Coleman was mainly worried about the effects of this social cocooning on teenagers themselves. His principal concern, in other words, was with the impact of the modern adolescent experience on adolescents. My work focuses on another important impact of teen segregation. Spending critical formative years in a social setting dominated by like-minded peers not only shapes who we are as adolescents; it also promotes a more permanent etching of adolescent habits and characteristics, leading to their continued influence into the adult years.

Some of our teenage ways may be cast aside as we move forward to adulthood, but an important residue remains, deeply ingrained in our personal inventory of embedded instincts, norms, and values. And so Coleman’s phrase “adolescent society” no longer applies only to the realm of teenagers; it is also a fitting description of the larger society’s gradual absorption of deep-seated adolescent qualities. Fifty years on, a new understanding of adolescent society is in order, along with a new book to explain its origins and significance.

We can glimpse the connection between these different conceptions of adolescent society in two classic television sitcoms. Happy Days was a show popular when I was young that depicted the lives of a group of typical American teens in the 1950s, offering a stylized portrayal of adolescent society around the time that Coleman was writing on the subject. Seinfeld, for the one or two of you who haven’t heard, was set in the adult world of the late twentieth century, following the daily activities and diversions of four thirty-something adults living in New York City.3 The parallels between the shows are telling. In both cases, the action revolves around four fast friends who spend a lot of time hanging out in diners— Arnold’s burger joint in the case of Richie Cunningham and his pals on Happy Days, Tom’s diner for Jerry Seinfeld and friends. There is a rough alignment of characters: each features a rebel who bucks convention (Fonzie and Kramer), a nerd who wants nothing more than to be accepted and well liked (Potsie and George), a smart aleck who delights in giving the nerd a hard time (Ralph Malph and Elaine), and an amiable lead character at the center of the action (Richie and Jerry). Their banter focuses on similar themes and preoccupations: relationships, social status, what they’re going to do that weekend. They share a vague sense of being at an unsettled stage, trying to figure out who they really are and where they’re going in life, though no one seems in any great rush to sort it all out. The overwhelming sense in both cases is of a group of people mainly preoccupied with themselves and the present. If TV shows provide a window of sorts into the spirit

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4 INTRODUCTION

of the times, the affinities between Happy Days and Seinfeld hint at the way that adolescent ways of thinking, acting, and being have seeped upward into adult life.

The implications of this idea are many and varied. The adolescent fibers now embedded in the fabric of adulthood influence virtually every aspect of our lives: our relationships with family, friends, neighbors, and strangers; our sense of connection and commitment to our communities and the larger world; the actions we undertake, or sometimes fail to undertake, as citizens in a democratic society; economic choices around work, leisure, and consumption; the social norms and values we endorse; the cultural practices we embrace.

Citing examples of adolescent thinking and behavior in the adult world from the way Jerry and his friends live their lives would be like shooting fish in a barrel. I’ll leave it to readers to conjure up their own examples—but just to get you started, recall George’s squirming efforts to escape his engagement to Susan and his barely disguised relief when she succumbs to toxic glue on the cut-price wedding invitations he selected. Or if Seinfeld seems a bit passé, picture Phil from Modern Family collaborating on a video with his son Luke that involves gamely taking dozens of basketballs to the head (hoping one will ricochet into the basket) in fulfillment of his personal parenting ideal: “I’ve always said that if my son sees me as one of his idiot friends, then I’ve succeeded as a dad.”4 In real life, the effects are equally pervasive but a bit more subtle, and have crept up on us slowly over time as adolescent habits and manners have gradually worked their way into the adult realm. Most of the time, we barely notice them—and certainly don’t recognize them as the product of an ascendant adolescent mentality.

Yet when we look at specific characteristics that are quintessentially adolescent, we can find in today’s adult population widespread manifestations of comparable qualities, suggesting a connective thread. Or if we examine norms and practices common among adults of earlier decades and compare them systematically to those prevalent among adults today, we discover ample evidence that we now think and act differently from before—not just because the world has changed in so many ways, as common wisdom would have it, but because we have changed in so many ways. Our inner adolescent has been given freer rein, not quite to the point of taking full navigational control, but certainly having substantial influence over our everyday decisions and actions along with our larger life ambitions.

If this seems like a sweeping claim, the supporting ideas from which it flows are simple and uncontroversial. The core notion is this: many of our basic dispositions take shape in the early stages of life and are profoundly influenced by those around us. Part of this socialization process occurs, as it always has, when children are still under the close care of parents and are taught a series of basic skills, norms, and values necessary to human well-being and social functioning, some universal, others peculiar to their own culture and society. For many years

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ADOLESCENT SOCIETY, THEN AND NOW 5

of human history, the next step was for children to move out from under their parents’ wing around the age of puberty and enter adult society—not as a separate cohort of “teenagers,” but as the youngest members in an adult world marked by a relatively seamless age continuum. Here the finishing touches were applied.

The prevailing norms of adulthood in a given society were firmly imprinted on each new generation through interaction between individuals of mixed ages in various work and social settings. The smooth and direct transition from childhood to the adult world allowed for the steady reproduction of existing norms and practices in each new generation.

About one hundred years ago, as part of a larger package of changes in countries experiencing economic and social modernization, the entry of youngsters into the world of adults was delayed. Now as we reached the stage where we were pulling away from parental influence and looking to others around us for guidance and direction in life, we no longer did so under the full influence of adult society. Instead, we did so primarily in the company of same-age peers, people more apt to reinforce than to challenge our youthful mind-set and temperament. There were still adults around, of course—parents at home, teachers in the schools, adult figures throughout the community—but as Coleman observed, the focal point of the teenager’s world became the adolescent society and its prevailing norms and ideals. Instead of being shaped by adults, young people now were being primarily molded by peers, a change in the socialization process with ramifications both immediate and far-reaching.

This book tells the tale of that transformation, surveying the events and developments that led to the consolidation of the adolescent stage of life, as well as the social and cultural ripple effects that followed in its wake. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed changes in the adolescent realm that produced early rumblings of social change that proved to be the precursor of greater upheavals to come. At the heart of this account is the power of peer influence not just as an interesting phenomenon in the here and now, but as a social force capable of catalyzing long-term historical change.

Why Should We Care?

The relevance of all this to our lives today becomes quite apparent when we consider how our increasingly adolescent outlook and disposition have infused contemporary adult society—a second key theme in the chapters that follow. In part, this analysis echoes that vein of current social commentary that highlights and decries wide-ranging problems of the present. The concerns are voiced in different ways, but the overarching lament is that our society has become more

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6 INTRODUCTION

discordant and dysfunctional, that we as individuals have grown more impulsive and shallow, less thoughtful and conscientious—less adult, if you will. One prominent critic, political philosopher Benjamin Barber, goes as far as to accuse us of “infantilization” in his 2007 book Consumed, employing rhetorical hyperbole that probably pushes things a bit far back in the developmental timeline.5 Rather than infantilization, the behaviors and attitudes that Barber and others decry should properly, and quite literally, be seen as the manifestation of an ascendant adolescent mentality—which still implies we need to grow up, but is not quite as scathing an indictment. Moreover, it hints at an important upside that is often overlooked in the lament literature. The emergence of our adolescent character, if harmful to certain types of mature conduct, has been a tremendously liberating change as well. We have become, in the manner of teenagers everywhere, more open, free-spirited, and adventurous. Perhaps the pendulum has moved too far in the direction of youthful abandon, but this doesn’t mean we should now seek the other extreme—to become stern, unbending adults devoid of any adolescent exuberance. Our adult and adolescent selves offer different virtues worth cultivating, and there is a balance to be struck between the two.

Alongside this shift in the general tone of modern society, there are also many specific examples of our increasingly adolescent character in contemporary ­attitudinal and behavioral trends. On the downside, the rise of an adolescent mind-set can be seen, for example, in a general decline in civility and rise in rule-breaking behavior, including cheating, lying, and other forms of self-­serving action. Episodes such as the college admissions scandal of 2019—in which affluent parents, among other schemes, bribed coaches to “recruit” their collegebound offspring for sports they had never played—are only the tip of the iceberg.

There is likewise something decidedly adolescent about many impetuous behaviors, from excessive consumption to erratic commitments in the working world and personal relationships, that are common among adults nowadays and often detrimental to both the individuals involved and those around them. A profusion of less-than-adult attitudes and actions can be seen in contemporary politics as well, among citizens and political leaders alike, in both the erosion of venerable principles of civic duty and responsibility and in the rise of brazen and boorish behavior that sometimes goes so far as to threaten basic democratic norms (yes, I mean you, Mr. Trump). Yet not to be discounted, again, is the positive side of the adolescent coin. The growing influence of youthful sensibilities helps explain our gradual evolution into a more tolerant and open society, more receptive to the interests and rights of marginalized groups—not perfect, by any means, but undeniably moving in the right direction over the long haul. A related example is our transition from a society that places a premium on conformity to one that values creativity and difference, a development that has benefited individuals

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ADOLESCENT SOCIETY, THEN AND NOW 7

and society alike through the unbottling of innovative potential in economic endeavors and other areas. The influence of adolescent qualities on adultdom is not the entire explanation for all these disparate long-term developments (which are described in greater detail in later chapters). It is, however, a substantial contributing factor and a common denominator that reveals how many features of modern life normally treated in isolation are in fact diverse manifestations of our increasingly adolescent character.

In seeking to capture something important about the tenor and direction of modern times, this work shares common ground with others that have tackled this sweeping theme while also staking some original claims. Certainly there are many who have suggested that salient problems of the present—from social fragmentation, to impulsive and rash behavior, to declining civic engagement—can be seen as the unfortunate consequence of the steady erosion of traditional adult norms and practices over the course of time. Barber says we have developed infantile responses—a preference for that which is easy, simple, and fast—across many aspects of our lives, a sentiment echoed by journalist Paul Roberts, who claims that impulsiveness has become endemic in today’s society. In a similar vein, sociologist James Côté decries the widespread problem of “arrested adulthood” in Western society and its unfortunate implications for individual growth and identity development; US Senator Ben Sasse laments what he calls perpetual adolescence and the “vanishing American adult”; while cultural historian Gary Cross contends that today’s men often think and act like overgrown boys.6 But while these kindred works all point to a stubborn immaturity that has become more prevalent in recent times, this is often little more than an evocative description of the phenomenon. The current study presses further, by developing a more fully elaborated theory connecting peer influence in adolescence to long-term trends in character development and social change, and by suggesting that adolescent qualities have, quite literally, refashioned many dimensions of contemporary adulthood.

This work also differs from studies that point to other social sites and different time periods as the wellsprings of social change. Most focus their attention on the postwar years, seeing this as the period when the ground started to shift and social changes connected to the erosion of traditional conceptions of adulthood began to unfold. Barber, for example, contends that commercial capitalism in its recent incarnation—driven forward by manipulative advertising designed to generate superfluous consumer wants (new iPhone, anyone?)—is to blame for turning us into infantile, impulsive, unreflective consumers. Robert Putnam, focusing on the steady decline in one critical benchmark of adulthood, civic engagement, famously identified the roll-out of television in the 1950s as a kind of anti-civic “X-ray” that stole our time and zapped our motivation to participate in community life.7 In contrast to these works, this study searches for root causes

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8 INTRODUCTION

further back in time, to the earlier years of the twentieth century when adolescence first became a more clearly demarcated stage of life; and it emphasizes the subtle escalation and diffusion of adolescent character traits over the course of many decades, rather than a more rapid transformation in social values occurring in the postwar period.

In short, if the common view is that external forces have been chipping away at our adult assets over the past few decades, this study suggests a transformation at once more subtle, gradual, and profound. Through an inversion of the traditional socialization process, adults no longer impose themselves on youth to ensure conformity to prevailing norms of adulthood; instead, youth have been afforded a separate and secure social space to develop by their own lights and through that vehicle have slowly but surely reshaped adulthood in their adolescent image. This isn’t something that has recently begun, but is instead a process of great depth and duration that has become fully entrenched over the past one hundred years. If we are concerned about some of the effects of ascendant ­adolescence—a concern I would share, while also underlining that there are beneficial as well as baleful consequences to be considered—we need a full understanding of the phenomenon in order to design effective remedies.

Twists and Turns While the rising tide of adolescent qualities in the adult population is the principal story line in the pages that follow, there are also some important side stories to consider. One intriguing twist lies in the fact that the creation of our adolescent society went hand in hand with another critical change of the twentieth century: a massive increase in education levels across all sections of society. The fact that the two unfolded concurrently is hardly a coincidence, since it was the introduction of universal secondary education that created adolescent society— both the high school enclaves where teens interact intensively with one another, and the adult society that has gradually absorbed a diverse range of adolescent qualities. This adolescent infusion is a factor little considered when evaluating the effects of enhanced education on our social evolution over time.

Yet consider it we should. For what is intriguing and more than a little ironic is that the positive ends education was meant to serve—to make us more thoughtful and competent adults—have in some instances been undermined by the inadvertent nourishing of adolescent qualities working against those same outcomes.

The educational effects of greater schooling for one and all have played out largely as expected—individuals with higher levels of education are, on the whole, more enlightened and adept in a host of different ways—but the broader social effects were quite unanticipated and have undermined at least some of the ambitious goals

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ADOLESCENT SOCIETY, THEN AND NOW 9

of the vast educational enrichment project we have undertaken over the past one hundred years. In this way, the story behind the emergence of today’s adolescent society is one of both momentous change and major unintended consequences.

Yet there are also circumstances where the educational and social effects of schooling do not work at cross-purposes, but instead serve as allied agents of social change, working in concert with one another to generate more potent and positive social transformation than might be achieved by educational edification alone. Such synergistic effects are especially apparent in areas of social change connected to openness, innovation, and creativity, qualities reflecting a youthful outlook that are reinforced by educational experiences that serve to promote an inquisitive and curious mind-set. In short, education and adolescent qualities in tandem can be a potent combination for cultivating the open mind and leading us in exciting new directions both individually and as a society.

If the intimate link between education and ascendant adolescent qualities over the past century represents one important nuance to the argument, another is connected to more recent developments—in particular, an intriguing U-turn that has taken place since roughly 1990. Some of the trends that reflect the rise of the adolescent society, which appeared to be moving inexorably in one direction over time, have slowed or even reversed themselves in the past quarter century.

This more recent inflection hasn’t turned back the clock completely, but there are signs of change popping up everywhere, especially among today’s younger generation, who in many ways appear to be more adultlike in their habits and behaviors than young people of the past—more serious and conscientious, less given to impulse and whimsy, more likely to stay on the straight and narrow path as they make their way to adulthood. For every young person whose parents might have paid off a sports coach or built a new library wing to get them admitted to the Ivy League, there are many more who have studied, volunteered, and achieved relentlessly over their teenage years to achieve that same outcome.

It can frankly seem quite exhausting and daunting for those of us who grew up at a time when high school was more about friends and fun than painstaking preparation for the future.

Again, I am hardly the first to make such observations, as the serious and steadfast nature of the millennial generation has caught the attention of many observers.8 Yet their emergence remains something of a surprise and a puzzle.

Later on, we’ll see that this development may not be such a surprise after all but can instead be seen as part of the larger evolutionary arc of the adolescent society. In its more settled and established phase, it makes sense that we would see a countervailing trend of stronger adult inclinations emerging among rising ­generations—for reasons explained at greater length below. This more recent turn of events raises questions about our future social trajectory and prompts reflection on ways we might seek to steer that trajectory in desired directions.

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10 INTRODUCTION

How Did I Get Here?

In the course of developing this wide-ranging argument, I have strayed far from my academic home base, political science. But the work did originate with a classic issue of concern to political scientists: voter turnout. Like others in my discipline, I started to research voter participation as turnout took a sharp decline over the past number of years, particularly in some of the long-standing democracies. In searching for reasons why, one relevant clue that popped up in my research was a change in the character of nonvoting: instead of people missing the occasional election for practical reasons (too busy to vote, out of town that day), it was becoming increasingly common to abandon voting altogether, thereby rejecting, so it would seem, one of the traditional adult responsibilities normally respected by citizens in a democracy. The emergence of these “electoral dropouts,” representing a sizable minority of the population, wasn’t something that had happened overnight. On closer inspection, it was clear this was a problem that had crept up over time through steady erosion in political engagement among rising generations for a number of years, even decades.

The problem, as I saw it, was twofold. It was partly a matter of youth being immersed in their own social space and disconnected from the adult world, and therefore failing to develop some of the habits and motivations that underwrite democratic participation. Yet it was also a problem of adults who failed to advance beyond this youthful condition as they graduated from their teenage years, continuing to be politically disengaged and disconnected even as they moved into their twenties, their thirties, and beyond.

Out of this simple observation, the larger theme came into focus. A youthoriented society with a clearly defined adolescent stage of life doesn’t just alter the texture of teenage life. It has more general effects on society as a whole, as people move forward to adulthood with their youthful traits, habits, and instincts more fully intact. Stated this way, it was clear the idea could be applied to many facets of our lives, not just our participation or nonparticipation in democracy. The impact of adolescent ways on the adult world would have implications for all kinds of individual actions and decisions, as well as larger social, cultural, and political trends. This then shaped my research agenda going forward: to learn more about teenagers and the social dynamics of adolescence, and to trace the wide-ranging impact of rising adolescent traits across diverse sectors of modern life.

Learning about these subjects meant venturing into new academic territory.

Research from various disciplines was discovered to be relevant and has been brought into play in the pages that follow, including substantial doses of psychology and sociology, modest measures of economics and demography, and even a dash of neuroscience. Working across a wide range of fields meant it was

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ADOLESCENT SOCIETY, THEN AND NOW 11

sometimes necessary to draw upon seminal and synthetic works to help distill essential conclusions. The end result is a work favoring breadth over depth; much of the originality lies in connecting the dots, making linkages between established ideas and insights across diverse disciplines that have not previously been pulled together in one place. Evidence is also widely drawn, from both the serious world of social, political, and cultural analysis and the more vivid and immediate realm of popular ideas and culture. This method of research and presentation best serves my overarching goals: to provide a cogent narrative describing the emergence and consolidation of our adolescent society and to develop a persuasive argument demonstrating how this perspective both complements and challenges other prominent theories on the theme of social change.

If the academic scope of the work is wide, the geographic range is more limited. Much of the research, and many of the examples, are taken from the American case, in part for the simple practical reason that there was more evidence available for the United States that proved helpful in developing the ideas and arguments. But the theory of ascendant adolescence is not meant to be limited to just one place. Anywhere that adolescents are encouraged to congregate and cluster there will be a tendency for adolescent qualities to become more deeply entrenched and to exert greater influence on the norms and mores of adulthood over time. And so all those countries where universal secondary education has become the norm—in other words, countries throughout the industrialized world—have seen the development of their own adolescent society (in both senses of the term). The effects do incubate slowly and have emerged at different speeds in various places, but the same forces of change have now been set in motion in many different countries. That said, there are grounds for thinking that the United States, more than anywhere else, has provided particularly fertile soil for the processes I describe and has therefore been something of a forerunner in the emergence of the adolescent society—for reasons I’ll expand upon later.

This is why much of the argument in subsequent chapters is built around the American case, which serves as the bellwether model for explaining and illustrating many of the arguments. At the same time, examples and evidence, where available and relevant, are also taken from Canada and Western Europe.

Readers coming at this work from other places—other research traditions, other countries—may not agree with all I have to say about the adolescent society. But I do believe the core idea provides a new and useful conceptual prism, one that extends our understanding of the origins and evolution of some of the most important social changes of the past century that have so deeply influenced who we are and how we live today.

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