COMING OF AGE IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Francisco, Marianne Millen J.

2023
 Chapter 1
Coming of Age: Concepts and Contradictions
SUMMARY

A Career to Defend Yourself

Andrea and Veronica, 13-year-old girls from Santa Luca, Venezuela, visited the author to
help them with their English homework. The town was prosperous due to the horticultural and
horticultural production of small family farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers. The Motatán
River, mythically attributed to a precolonial water god, could either strengthen or shrink the local
economy. The narrator was the first U.S. anthropologist to come to Santa Luca and was
interested in studying the town's schools. She taught English classes at the newly inaugurated
Casa de la Cultura, one for adults and one for youth.

The failure of the attempt was both disheartening and instructive. The author attended
meetings of the Damas Voluntarias, a group of women spanning three generations, to organize
volunteer work and share stories about personal and family issues. Angel Rosenblat noted that in
Venezuela, students do the minimum necessary to pass and graduate, which is a lesson in
pedagogy and knowledge. Most of the Liceo Parra English teachers did not know how to speak
English, and they were disposed to learn English in a rote fashion that discouraged problem-
solving or analytic thinking. The episode was part of an ongoing lesson in the spontaneity of
social interactions in Santa Luca and across the region.

Two visitors had decided to drop in on a teacher or school principal after learning their
regularly scheduled class was cancelled. As they walked through the patio gate, Eduardo, an
artist from Mérida, was painting. This gesture conveyed shame, righteous reserve, and timid
willingness to be coaxed out of that reserve. Roberto da Matta's discussion of street and house as
two basic social domains reveals a shift from one "sphere of meaning" to another, with the house
a private, intimate, and familial space marked by cooperation and reciprocal exchanges, and the
street a public, impersonal, and individual space marked by competition and unequal exchanges.
The power of house and street to organize, signify, and symbolize cultural, ethical, and aesthetic
norms and sensibilities of daily life was produced through the division and signifying of social
space and productive labor.

The two girls, Veronica and Andrea, have different interpretive inclinations when it
comes to adult life. Veronica loves English and wants to be a journalist, while Andrea prefers
Science and wants to be a Forestry student. Both girls are going to continue their studies after
graduation, but Veronica wants to have a family after finishing her studies. Veronica's
declaration of "negligent patriarchy" is an ethnographic exploration of the contradictory and
uncertain social and material conditions of its production. It considers how Veronica, Andrea,
and other Santa Lucian secondary school students learned about, made sense of, and worked with
the conflicting dreams, disillusions, promises, and expectations of formal education and
patriarchy. It also suggests that the ethnographer's role as legitimizing other to her subjects' self-
imagining is as constitutive of power as it is of self-recognition.
 Becoming Someone in Life

Veronica's declaration of needing a career to defend herself when her husband leaves her
struck the author as both personal avowal and ethnographic instruction. Over time, the author
learned that few students who started secondary school passed their baccalaureate exam or
graduated, and it was the rare female graduate who went on to pursue a higher educational
degree. However, a young woman's fate was not sealed by motherhood, and the demands and
constraints of family life did not always quell their aspirations of becoming someone in life.
Santa Lucian women faced conflicting life aspirations when they returned to school, often
risking their husbands' ire or abandonment. To pursue their careers, many had to leave children,
spouses, or dependent parents behind, and staying in Santa Luca was difficult to justify.

Male students had to do their own hard, cultural work of spinning life plans out of a
patriarchal cloth worn ragged by modern disruptions to extended familial relations. Male
students in secondary school began to elaborate life plans that responded to uncertain terms for
constituting a career or a household. Alvaro and his peers planned to complete a career in
"computer engineering" and have a family, both as soon as they graduated from Liceo Parra. Ral
planned to get married, have a few children, and move to Maracaibo. Alvaro and his peers
narrated their futures in the first person as protagonists of their own lives over which they had
complete control. Veronica constructed her adult life in defensive response to the man with
whom she would have to contend.

Santa Lucian boys in their twenties and thirties began to learn life's lessons by watching
the lives of older brothers, relatives, and friends. They noticed the number of young, unmarried,
or recently married men returning home to compensate for the added household expense of
younger siblings. Even students from economically comfortable families watched student
demonstrations, teacher strikes, and budget cuts interrupt their older siblings' university studies.
This led some older Santa Lucian students to wonder about the value and practicality of a
university degree. They were surprised to find themselves becoming fathers before they had a
chance to become modern workers.

Young Santa Lucian men faced the challenge of creating a life plan between the
challenges of an educational meritocracy and the challenges of the crisis. They responded by
proposing an enlightened, Rousseauian version of the patriarchal bargain, imagining an adult life
in which they would work and their wives would raise the kids with greater competence for
being educated women. Some older male students went even further in their modern aspirations,
expressing the desire to marry women who also wanted to become someone in life and claiming
they would support their wives in their careers. The girls' skepticism was not surprising, as it was
likely the same young men who had averred their support for their wives-to-be would later
renege on those modern, gender egalitarian family promises and try to prevent their wives from
studying or working outside the house.
 Concepts for a Feminist Ethnography Coming of Age

Jules Henry's Culture against Man was a powerful and unabashedly critical ethnographic
essay in 1963. He wrote about the research from an interpretive, value-laden point of view. This
book was written with the understanding that feminist ethnography is a similarly interpretive and
critical endeavor. The research was conducted by direct observation and informal conversation in
the school and around the town, supplemented with surveys, interviews, and formal group
discussions. Over time, the author was invited to take on more participatory roles in the school
and community, and many of the stories in the book are based on their interactions with students,
teachers, and parents.

The most important details in this text are that the feminist ethnographer must find a way
to think and act through and between her own dichotomizing practices and those of her subjects,
without reducing one to the other. She has used the concepts of negligent patriarchy, coming of
age, and crisis to explore the instability of the social relations and cultural processes those
dualisms propose to explain, and to problematize the relationship between the conditions of
Santa Lucian students' lives and the conditions of her research. The book examines how crisis
worked as a dehistoricizing discourse to mystify the uncertainties of local and national life by
implying a condition of normalcy and stability. It also naturalized the contradictions between
patriarchal gains and realities, in the realm of the family and the school. It focuses on the
concepts of patriarchy and coming of age, as these function more as framing concepts than as
subjects of interpretation.

The concept of patriarchy is, in a sense, the key organizing principle of this book. Like
Maria Mies, I find patriarchy particularly conducive to feminist praxis, not as an explanatory
device but as a "struggle concept". On the one hand, patriarchy is able to express "the totality of
oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women... as well as their systemic character".
On the other hand, patriarchy "denotes the historical and societal dimension of women's
exploitation and oppression, and is thus less open to biologistic interpretations, in contrast, for
example, to the concept of 'male dominance'". Where Teresa Ebert has proposed that "patriarchy
is primarily a material practice of labor" and "only secondarily a regime of power of men over
women", I would argue that the conceptual value of patriarchy derives from its ability to account
for both. It is precisely because of its systemic quality that patriarchy, more than gender, sustains
a unity and tension between the cultural and material, the individual and collective, dimensions
of social life while alluding to the inseparability of these dimensions that modern social theories
have insisted on differentiating and prioritizing."
At the same time, the concept of patriarchy addresses and destabilizes the dichotomies of
the universal and the particular, the global and the local, the premodern and the modern. Because
patriarchy describes the unequal and exploitative arrangements of the family as well as other
realms of social life-the workplace, the church, the state, the schools- it has a quality of
universality or totality that is in tension with its geographic specificity and historical
particularity.12 Capitalist patriarchy implies both the historical specificity and global reach of a
modern patriarchal social formation that has organized and legitimized the flows of production
and consumption that Santa Lucian farmers and merchants live by, as well as the terms by which
the discipline of anthropology has constructed its ethnographic practice. Meanwhile, the notion
of negligent