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ABSTRACT
This paper considers hope and utopia as value-making processes and their relation to space. It examines two localities built for homeless families and elderly individuals in post-disaster El Salvador during the early 2000s, and explores what these spaces say about their makers’ hopes for better futures. Drawing on recent works in the field of utopian studies that adopt a materialist view on utopia as an imperfect contingent process, this paper explores whether the notion of everyday utopia is helpful in order to appreciate the actualization of these spaces. It argues that anthropological scholarship on value and ordinary ethics can be a productive framework to study the pathways between hope, utopianism, and space.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I modified the names of people and places to respect anonymity and confidentiality of information.
2. The segment is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWj62MBTYCg
3. In Canada in 2011, 83.9% of the population aged 65 and over lived alone, 15% lived with a partner, and only 1.1% lived with relatives or non-relatives (Statistics Canada Citation2011).
4. One is the ongoing internal and international migration of Salvadoran adults, which has increased the number of households headed by seniors (estimated at 23% in 2011). Poverty is also an issue: a study based on the 2007 census reported that half the Salvadoran population aged 60 and over, or over 270,000 individuals, were poor (Soundy Ellerbrock Citation2011). Another issue concerns access to health services and to long-term care facilities. Only 16.6% of seniors have an old-age pension (Soundy Ellerbrock). As elsewhere in Latin America, the majority of Salvadorans are uninsured. Governments believed that development gains through industrialization would see a growing number of people “leave agricultural informal-sector jobs for salaried positions, and health care coverage would gradually become universal” (Clark Citation2015). But this did not happen everywhere, and ministries of health were left to attend to this population. In El Salvador, the Ministry of Health is responsible for the health-care services of 77% of the population, with a budget of only 1.5% of the GDP.
5. I am purposefully alluding to David Graeber’s article entitled “It is value that brings universes into being” in Hau (Citation2013).
6. In Lamaria in 2007, there were 3180 seniors out of a total population of 34,912, or 9.1% of the inhabitants, 43% of which were illiterate. Due to a lack of financial means, close to a third continued to work, mainly in the informal sector (Tablas Citation2012) [already said that 23% head households].
7. See Jansen in this volume for a detailed analysis of Murakami’s discussion on hope.
8. For example, a disaster victim may hope for humanitarian relief, which may likely arrive, or I may hope for peace on earth, a much less foreseeable outcome. Between the two extremes, the relationship between “subjective appropriations of external elements” and the “objectification of inner subjective reasons” varies (Giraud Citation2007, 45).
9. I find Van Hooft’s statement on the rational and realistic content of hope problematic. Saying that hope is rational and must be realistic (but whose reality counts?) allows him to distinguish hope from other forms of desires more akin to fantasy or wishful thinking—a distinction Crapanzano also underscored. This is a dangerous slope: someone’s reasonability may very well be judged senseless by someone else: ending the cycle of reincarnations for the Buddhist monk or entering the Kingdom of God for the devout Christian are reasonable hopes in specific cultural and religious contexts. They are irrational only insofar as a restrictive point of view on human belief systems is espoused. Perhaps the argument on the rationality and reasonability of hope signals the epistemological specificity of one’s interpretative hermeneutics.
10. Ernst Bloch, who thought that “real utopias” (like the Third Reich, Stalinist Russia, or the Cultural Revolution) were “pipe dreams” and travesties of hope, believed that utopianism, much like hope, was a human impulse without which we cannot live (Ashcroft Citation2012). Opinions vary as to whether utopianism is a transcultural phenomenon (Sargent Citation2010; Dutton Citation2010) or only a Western one (Kumar Citation1987).
11. A caveat is that the concept of value is polysemous. In anthropology, values have been discussed as (moral, ethical, symbolic) features of given cultural complexes with particular attention to their “comparability and incomparability” (Otto and Willerslev Citation2013, 1) and to the manner in which “value spheres” get reproduced and change (Dumont Citation1971; Robbins Citation2007).
12. Money is the most widely used medium that assigns values to things, cocoa beans were traditional tokens of value in pre-colonial Mesoamerica, but others exist as well, such as statutes, symbolic objects, and gifts conferred during rituals and ceremonies, such as the Kula. Moreover, Graeber explains that it is not happenstance that we use the same word for describing the “benefits and virtues of a commodity” and “our ideas about what is ultimately important in life”. While the first meaning rests on the notion of equivalence (money/price = value of a commodity), the second does not because there, values are “seen as unique crystallized forms” (Graeber Citation2013, 224).