On the Importance of Wolves

Abstract

What would it mean for pastoralism to be a matter of wolves rather than sheep? Across Guatemala City, Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers provide one possible answer. These are onetime factories and apartment buildings that have been renovated for rehabilitation with razor wire and steel bars. Largely unregulated, these centers keep pace with Guatemala’s growing rapprochement with illicit drugs by holding drug users (often against their will) for months, sometimes for years. They also warehouse the mentally ill, whom the faithful call wolves (lobos). While Pentecostals understand these wolves as incapable of governing themselves, a mix of faith and pharmaceuticals has made this otherwise surplus population central to the management of populations. Providing a provocative counterexample to celebrated ethnographies that tell terrible tales of societies that let die rather than make live, this essay details how and to what effect pastors actively acquire rather than abandon these so-called wolves.

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…In contrast to earlier scholarship on globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, a core set of work in 2018 explicitly engaged with people being held captive—for example, mentally ill men in Guatemala (O'Neill ) and Ebola patients in Guinea (Gomez‐Temesio )—to examine violence, care, dignity, and the limits of the human. Across this work, I see people using captivity and the ways these incarcerated people are seen as—or become—wolves (O'Neill ) or zombies (Gomez‐Temesio ) to engage with questions others ask using different words: What makes the human related to but distinct from other species and landscapes? How do we think about what constitutes a worthy or dignified life and what constitutes care?…”

“…Focusing on people held in cages in Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers in Guatemala, O'Neill () drew attention specifically to the brutality inherent in Pentecostal efforts to care for them, rather than let them die, analyzing what this oscillation between care and violence means for governance. These seemingly “irredeemable figures,” he shows us, are framed as “wolves,” outside the human (500).…”

“…Captivity usefully displaces bare life or biological life as a key analytic in understanding hierarchies of life by considering what constitutes a dignified or worthy life across a wide range of species. O'Neill (, 514) invited anthropologists to spend more time “consider[ing] the importance of supposedly incorrigible creatures,” whether wolves or oil palms or zombies, and to recognize that “it is the wolf that sometimes sets the very conditions for being human.” What is the relationship between captivity and dehumanization? What imaginaries of other beings justify their incarceration, whether in cages and prisons, health centers, or laboratories?…”

“…What transformative possibilities and politics are enabled by escape from these forms of captivity? This ethnographic work holds captivity alongside the transformative or healing potential in seemingly irredeemable figures produced within sociotechnical infrastructures ranging from Pentecostal pastoralism (O'Neill ) and global humanitarian aid (Gomez‐Temesio ) to enviro‐technical management schemes (Errington and Gewertz ) and restoration ecologists (Wanderer ).…”

“…Captivity has long been central to empire, settler colonialism, capitalist expansion, and imperialism—and the forms of violence and genocide that accompany them—as well as in the anthropological work that examines those themes. In 2018, cultural anthropologists circled around captivity through analytics of enslavement (Lainez ; Wengrow and Graeber ), containment (Cons ; Gershon ; Hamberger ; Stone ), control (Cardoso ; Cooper ), confinement (Besteman, Biondi, and Burton ; Gomez‐Temesio ), compliance (Kazi ), suppression (Berman ; Sen ), constraint (Degani ), concealment (Hackl ; Rakopoulos ), boundary (Elisha ), exile and entrapment (Hinkson ; O'Neill ; Saleh ), and harmony (Yang ).…”