[Philippine corruption] Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines #11/204

We propose the overarching concept of communal intimacy to develop the understanding of this form of politics. The concern with intimacy emerged for us long before Duterte’s drug war, when we did field- and survey work in Bagong Silang around 2010 as an intuitive way to understand a range of empirical incidents revolving around and given force by the density of communal relations.¹⁰The concept of communal intimacy has important scalar dimensions in our attempt to understand what happens at a communal level between the household and, for instance, electoral politics. Typical of other poor neighborhoods in the Global South, residents live close together and have quite an extensive, if sometimes slightly distorted, knowledge of each other that needs to be managed carefully. Life is lived within so-called path walks, that is, narrow streets lined with attached houses. Little more than the thickness of a concrete wall or zinc roof separates what goes on in these path walks. This includes happy moments as well as desperate times; periods of abundance and love and stints of hunger, violence, and neglect. Intimacy—intimate knowledge—is unavoidable. As Lauren Berlant suggests (1998, 281), it is both intimated and explicated. Furthermore, most residents have stayed in the same place for years, producing temporally and spatially dense, sometimes claustrophobic, communities. In that sense, intimacy is imposed on people; it is inescapable in terms of bodily and sensorial presence (Böhme 2016). One sign, photographed by Karl, captures both the spatial and temporal dimensions of sensorial cohabitation when it informs potential culprits not to “throw dead mice here; we know who you are.” In another example from a survey, we asked if people trusted their neighbors, to which a staggering 95 percent responded in the affirmative. When quizzed further, one informant responded, “Yes, because I don’t give them any chance to cheat me.” Communal intimacy can also be managed by forms of silencing of, for instance, domestic violence or by engaging in commentary via what is known as tsismis(gossip) or sabi-sabi(hearsay). In both cases, there is an ongoing oscillation between knowing, not knowing, and pretending that others do not know in ways that make particular events public. In one case, for instance, our friend Ken was known to have frequent violent rows with his wife that people would ignore and pretend not to hear, even when we were around. However, one day she yelled at him that he had been lying about his credentials to his neighbors—and suddenly the row made it across the zinc wall and became public, with severe consequences for Ken.¹¹

While intimate, communal, and interpersonal dynamics contribute to intricate webs of relationships in Bagong Silang, they also animate local and national politics and state formation. For example, families and family relations are absolutely central for almost all communal relations, as both our interlocutors and the literature testify (McCoy 1994; Roces 2000). Finally, the drug war is also steeped in issues concerning communal intimacy. Take, for example, the so-called watch lists of suspected or known drug personalities. As we show in chapter 2, local leaders with intimate knowledge of families and households compile the lists, which are also based on reports from neighbors through the MASA-MASID program (Mamayang Ayaw sa Anomalya, Mamayang Ayaw sa Iligal na Droga, which roughly translates to Citizen Watch against Corruption and Illegal Drugs). Indispensable, life-saving forms of relationality and intimate knowledge became dangerous and unknowable—who said what to whom? Intimate knowledge and affective relationality are what help people survive crises, but during the drug war, they are also what put them at risk.

In studies of the Philippines, violence is often explored as a function of electoral or elite politics (Anderson 1998; Sidel 1999), whereas the concept of intimacy has been used to understand domestic and gendered power dynamics (Cannell 1999).¹²In our adaptation of communal intimacy, we aim to combine these discussions by invoking three distinct theoretical movements within anthropology and gender studies on intimacy, exchange relations, violence, and power that link the communal sphere to larger political processes. These concern the public nature of intimacy, the governance of intimacy, and unequal, affective exchange relations. The three movements can be seen as dimensions of communal intimacy, of which some will be more relevant at certain moments. In the first movement, on the public nature of intimacy, Lauren Berlant (1998) asserts that while intimacy is set “within zones of familiarity and comfort, …the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness” (281). To Berlant, the intimate needs to be public as well. For Bagong Silang we may say that the intimate always, or at least very often, has to be public, as the fate of Ken suggests.