Unruly Domestication: Poverty, Family, and Statecraft in Urban Peru

Unruly Domestication examines how Peru's international war on poverty shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima, revealing the entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life and exploring how families are made and unmade through political practices and how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 03 June 2024
Publisher: University of Texas Press

Unruly Domestication is a groundbreaking ethnography that explores how Peru's ongoing international war on poverty shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima. Drawing on a decade of embedded, ethnographic research in Lima's largest and most recently founded "extreme poverty zone," Kristin Skrabut reveals how Peruvian efforts to fight poverty by formalizing property, identity, and family status perpetuate environmentally unsustainable urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians' faith in public officials and in one another. In the process, Skrabut uncovers the intricate entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life, shedding light on how families are made and unmade through political practices, how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy, and how Peruvians' everyday pursuits of state-sanctioned domestic ideals reproduce informality and landscapes of poverty in the urban periphery.

Unruly Domestication is the only full-length ethnography written about Lima's iconic and policy-inspiring shantytowns in thirty years, providing valuable insight into the dynamics of housing and urban development in the Global South and elucidating the most intimate and profound effects of global efforts to do good.

Weight: 486g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781477329108