Adrienne Pine. Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras
In this book anthropologist Adrienne Pine discusses violence, alcohol, and assembly plants as three windows into Honduran identity and subjectivity. Alcoholism offers an approach to subjectivity through consumption. Assembly-plant work provides a look at subjectivity through production. And violence, well, it just seems to be everywhere. Pine argues that Hondurans define themselves negatively, through what they are not: not civilized, not sober, not hard-working, and so on. This perverse self-image has deep colonial and neocolonial roots and it is produced and reproduced in our own time through poverty and the internalized symbolic violence through which the poor blame themselves for their misfortunes. Wherever Pine looked—and she looked in many places though never very hard or long in any one of them—the recommended solution for the nation's ills she encountered was "discipline," whether channeled through Alcoholics Anonymous or evangelical churches or simply imposed by the state. Selfcontrol and renunciation serve the powers that be well because they displace the source of the problem and put the solutions on the victims themselves. Though certain of her diagnosis, Pine is less sure of the cure or even whether there is one—though to be fair she does note isolated cases of protest and rebellion.