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Game libraries

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Street game libraries (continued)

As we say goodbye, prolonged with hugs and kisses for the women, the girls' names emerge more easily. The ladies call a taxi, and we take the opportunity to point out that people are leaving the last performance. We improvise a song with clapping so they learn how to ask gracefully: "Ma'am, sir, give me some money, please." The girls laugh but don't sing: instead, they prefer to improvise the song "Let's see, let's see, how she moves her tail," after which my friend and I start swaying our hips ridiculously.

Creating need versus creating demand

Returning to the notion of risk at the social antipodes, we find that a girl who throws herself off a railing may be bringing the slide into her workplace or including risk in her action. It's clear that cultural specificity in these strata brings with it an acceleration of processes that, evolutionarily, occur later in the more affluent strata, such as the need for money (at any age, one finds people who perform this characteristically infantile action of begging). But the attainment of the notion of risk is constitutive alongside the elaboration of space. And at a crucial moment in these structurings, the attitude of the girl at the railing is, to say the least, defiant. While I wouldn't risk saying that the girl is fully aware of the fifteen-meter ladder, it's true that there is a universal phobia of heights. An adult's interdiction acts as an easily surmountable obstacle that will account for the first notions of danger, of the limiting horizons of space. The intervention here is to emphatically foster this development, because the notion of the value of one's own life will also emerge, when confronted with the intention to preserve it brought by someone from outside. To respect the culturally specific way in which certain acquisitions develop in childhood, on these occasions, it would be best to accompany the child's journey along the railing to catch them in case they fall, while pointing out and attempting at every turn another possibility for playful release. This means not interfering, but rather offering something in return, serving as a third party who sets some reference regarding the risks.

We see that adopting risky behaviors may not be a disguised suicide or "parasuicide" (as many professionals working with this population are often given the impression). The risk lies in the way they challenge their entire reality. Otherwise, without this awareness, they would be unable to survive and the earth would swallow them up (now I wonder, what chance was there that the girl on the stairs would actually fall or throw herself?). There isn't a lack of awareness of the possibility of death, but rather an active disregard for it. If this were not the case, there would be no difficulty in working with a population that "slowly commits suicide"—suicide, as so often we pretend to see it. It is only because of the observer's blindness to these notions that it becomes necessary to think of other ways to recover the value of life for children as a projection toward the future, without fostering the (bourgeois?) fear of dying in the street. This is, when the time comes, one of the most complex objectives of an "anthropological play hour": through subjective elaboration, fostering a mechanism for taking off from a risk, one that doesn't involve the extremes of sanction or challenge.

Another difficulty relates to historicity. To think that, because they have no notion of a past, these girls cannot understand the concept of the future is to dismiss them from the theoretical perspective, from our mobilizing fear. Since this fear is unidentifiable to them, we run the risk of becoming alienated from their possibilities of conception and hindering the task we ultimately set ourselves.

The most identifiable physical place where personal history is constructed is probably the bed: we are born, die, and reproduce, generally, in a bed. However, these children don't each have a bed, even though they don't literally live on the streets. This is cited in reference to the degree of intimacy that can exist in the bed where the child spends the night: a hard urban floor or a suburban mattress, which is almost always shared. For the observer, this would immediately contrast with indigenous cultures, to whom various development plans provide implements that have nothing to do with their needs—sometimes even achieving their purpose: generating that need. One example is that of an ethnic group that lives in the Ecuadorian mountains of the Chimborazo province. When UNESCO provided mattresses to improve their living conditions, they soon noticed that their pigs were sleeping there, while the indigenous people continued to sleep on the floor. This is, in some ways, the luckiest of cases.

And although from an evolutionary perspective all cultures are modern, I will also refer to the street children of another, more urban environment, close to this one: Toctiuco, on the outskirts of Quito. At a documentary film and video exhibition where I presented a work about a festival in the Bolivian Amazon, I had the opportunity to see Bertram Doll's work about the street children of this poor neighborhood in the Ecuadorian capital. The beginning of the documentary was close-up shots of a series of children answering a question about their expectations: one said he wanted to be a soccer player, another a firefighter, and there were also astronauts and doctors. Where do these ideas come from? Why is there talk of a lack of future, of a strict experience of the present in the marginalized individual? Or is it merely a attempt to eliminate the anxiety of working with this population? After all, "the others always die," reads Marcel Duchamp's epitaph. And the desire to grow up, as Freud would say, continues to propel childhood forward despite both individual and social barriers. The question here is what idealized adult fulfills this guiding role? Faced with a precariousness of the father's role, we witness how the street adopts children, both in the popular imagination and from a more exhaustive analysis. Stolkiner wonders if this variant is merely an emerging structure, a new social modality, or actually consists of a weakening of certain cultural parameters. This is important when defining the operability and possibilities of establishing a strategy based on the interventionism considered ethically appropriate.

In any case, I would try not to contribute to that marginalization that consists of considering cultural change as pathological. Regarding the observer's position: it's not about the stoicism of entering the world of the discriminated against, but rather about embracing their (to us) alienating situations. Naturalizing isn't about understanding, but rather something more: the step after the search for explanations and cultural coincidences—which arise nowhere but from common sense. And it's also the step prior to the search for a solution to a certain need, something that must be achieved jointly—otherwise, there's no risk of being ethnocentric, but of being something as terrible and commonplace as an "ethnoimposer." Naturalizing isn't anything more than forgetting the observer's own environment for a while. It's a constant investigation of the reactions and changes generated by a cultural endeavor.

Those fabulous projections in time by the children of Toctiuco perhaps represent the flip side of the globalizing effect of a visual culture.

By relating the supposed dependence on the present moment, so often attributed to "savages," evidence emerges that we are probably all savages. In some Bakairí villages in Mato Grosso, they now have electricity (the mayor of the nearest town has a farm bordering the indigenous area). One of the leaders explains: "Now the Bakairí think about tomorrow; they no longer eat everything in a single day." Thinking about a history beyond today is a sign that we are approaching modern Western culture, but it is not enough. In a certain sense, it is nothing more than a slightly more prolonged present, which makes us all savages in more than one way. How can a child who was born and always slept on the floor want a bed? The answer: to see it. It is no longer news that visual culture has a powerful impact, being a triggering source of what they call "globalization." Does seeing what is outside happen as a consequence of a discomfort within? Why then does it happen in all classrooms, in all countries, and at all ages? Why are children called "I see ass-I want ass" and not, for example, "I touch ass-I want ass"? As difficult as it is to find an "inside" in people who don't have a home—from the ethnocentric perspective of a Western observer—it's enough to think of each subject as a house. It's a good motto (one I used in a workshop with the homeless in a hospital) to delve into immediate issues: "I am my house." This is obvious to them, but it never hurts to address it. On the other hand, those who once had a home and lost it—instead of always seeing them from the street—are possibly the most exposed: their notions of intimacy, of what is inside and what is outside, have been disrupted.

Children are the most sensitive to discerning the problem of being outside or inside (as they go through the initial stages of learning that constitutes their self-concept), just as they are highly sensitive to the realities of being alone or accompanied (both "good" and "bad"). In some social experiences housing street children, it has been described that, for up to two years after their stay, the children sleep in a bed but with their clothes on, as if they were on the street. This reflex arises from the postural habit so that no one robs them, and, for Moffat, the addition of "their butts against the wall, so that they don't get raped" is also present. These experiences speak not only of an attitude but of a past, associated with a need. Customs are gradually losing meaning, like so many others around us. This historicity is what should not be confused with a lack of value for life, or a notion of death. If we take that for granted, there is nothing more to do.

Marc Augé is moved by the attempts of psychologists in refugee camps, the new non-places, where they always try, with some success (inherent in a "transcultural" human condition), to reconstruct something of their own in these depersonalized spaces. In this case, overcrowding once again comes into play as the primary factor of abuse.

This question arises again further. Aggression, Konrad Lorenz's "so-called evil," is expressed here as physical and verbal contact between two social classes (one in its individual structure, the other theoretically with its more sophisticated structure). The girls in the experiment never lost sight of the fact that we belonged to different worlds. The game served precisely to defuse that reality. It can be seen that the physical contact and the crush of girls on top of each other that amused them so much, in another context, are now experienced by them in their living situation.

It is moreover clear that while they must defend their historicity, so must those who leave the cinema. Each one, on their own, becomes less able to redefine what they are doing and experiencing, as the individual disappears, isolating themselves from those who are different and amalgamating with their supposed equals (what limits exist between the cramped humanities of a stadium during a concert?). Each class, taken separately, annihilates the chance of a shared and conscious historicity: on one side, the group of those who end their day in extreme solitude; on the other, those who group together in order to survive and end up eliminating the limits of their personhood from the moment they sleep.