Reading Hunger in the Voice of a Child

Very few anthropological studies of hunger and violence include children’s voices, mainly because of the ethical issues involved. In this brief communication, I would like to capture the voices of hungry children from my ethnographic fieldwork in a Brazilian favela (Rigaud 2021) and present them here as a form of philosophical language that responds to the subject’s experience of this limit: the crucial point at which personal grammar fails and subjectivation emerges through the subject’s experiences and narratives, as Das (2007) argues. Faced with this limit, my primary question asks how the everyday life experiences of hungry children shape their forms of language and responses to hunger. In other words, far beyond food itself, I would like to think about the philosophy of everyday life (Das 2007; Das 2020) from its lack, or rather, what children do in the face of lack.Although few studies approach hunger from the perspective of philosophical anthropology (see Borghini and Serpico 2021), it is important to note that the convergence of anthropology and philosophy is not new. Many authors are interested in demonstrating the correlation between philosophical questions and anthropological theory, especially anchored in ethnographic fieldwork (Das 2007; Das 2020; Das et al. 2014; Brandel and Motta 2021). Drawing inspiration from Das’s (2007) “descent into the ordinary” as an ontological-epistemological principle, I emphasize that an ethnography deeply committed to the ordinary can access and perceive the way in which philosophy penetrates the textures of the everyday world of our interlocutors. Thus, in this essay, I am interested in understanding the philosophical questions that are anchored in the most banal interstices of everyday life—the kind of information that we usually deny or are not even interested in.In the book Affliction, Veena Das (2015) presents us with the story of Meena, an interlocutor who was diagnosed with severe tuberculosis and who, despite years of treatment, ended up dying from the effects of the disease. In the next chapter, Das tells Meena’s story through the eyes of Mukesh, her son, who is faced with the turbulence of his mother’s illness, as well as the ambiguous state of caring for others while also being cared for as a child. Das’s (2015: 59) proposal, which I borrow in this communication, is to understand how the experience of illness (or hunger) shapes a child’s world, as well as to ask “how do children learn to set individual norms for themselves in relation to the adult world,” to the extent that “illness and misfortune erodes their taken-for-granted categories of understanding?”In terms of the language codes that compose the daily experience of hunger, although I agree with Das that children are not blank slates and that they are important interlocutors for anthropology, throughout my ethnography I never asked them questions. Firstly, because of the ethical issues involved in not recalling their pain and suffering in fieldwork carried out in contexts of hunger and violence and agreeing with Frosh (2019: 153) in believing that “the words will not flow,” because “…‘[c]areless invitations to conversation’ will not access them and indeed may silence them.” And finally, by taking on the epistemological challenge of listening to and understanding children’s issues without having to invoke them directly. Nevertheless, even though I did not ask them any questions, they insisted on appearing and being centered in the conversations through their own language, which included direct narrative, babbling, and crying. On the days when our conversations took place in the presence of the two children, Fátima, the mother, chose to remain silent or even to whisper and make hand gestures so that the children would not understand what we were talking about. As a way of caring for and protecting the children, we spoke using a kind of verbal and tactile code that Fátima created so as not to utter the word “hunger” in her voice. However, just like Fátima, the children also had their own codes of language and silence that I noticed in the following examples.On one of the visits I made to the family, there were two situations that made me think about how the children characterized their daily lives (and their languages) in the face of hunger. In other words, there were situations in which the children showed me how they capture (and evoke) different languages that are codified enough to give meaning to their own hunger, both for themselves and for adults. The first situation was when I asked the two adults directly what would be prepared for the children to eat for lunch. In the room, the kids did not seem to be paying any attention to our conversation, they were playing and talking to each other in the same environment as us adults, and before Fátima could even answer, Helena turned to me and yelled, “BARBECUE!” Her parents laughed and then scolded her, saying, “What barbecue, girl? Where have you seen barbecue?” The second situation took place on the same day, at a different time, when I asked the parents what foods the children most asked to eat on a daily basis. The father replied that the children asked for yogurt, cookies, and snacks, while Helena once again joined the conversation and said, unlike her parents, a list of fruit and vegetables such as apples and onions. I will therefore call these two examples indirect ways of evoking language and silence codes. That is, in both situations the children evoke their different ways of organizing hunger by conjuring up language codes that go against the silence expected by adults.Note that in both examples, the children entered the narrative spaces without being directly called upon but rather are indicated and evoked indirectly by the adults who spoke about and for them. The children, however, codified and brought to the surface some of the ways in which their hunger takes shape through language. They demonstrate their responses to silence through narrative codes conjured up as if calling for their own presence in the world: I am here and I feel hungry—that is what I can interpret from this clamor. From the same perspective, when thinking about the ways in which children’s voices take shape as an effect and consequence of critical events of violence, Veena Das (1989: 286) already pointed out that it is not that adults don’t care about children’s pain, but that children are usually thought of “only as characters in the lives of adults.” However, she also states that, contrary to this perspective, children are those who “create social worlds of their own which are impenetrable to adults.” (Das 1989: 291) So, when I try to narrate the importance of understanding hunger from the perspective of children’s voices, I am trying to affirm that, just like adults, they are always acting out their hunger and negotiating limits in their daily lives through speaking, crying, and other ways of responding to the way in which life and language present themselves.Let me explain better. Like Das (2015: 60–61), I do not want to defend the idea that children are “unformed potential adults,” but they are small individuals who give expression to certain “philosophical perplexities” that we adults are not used to thinking about. In other words, in their everyday lives, children are constantly stealing and producing forms of language that express their capacity to be and exist in the world—even if adults often do not realize it. We can therefore say that children give birth to philosophical questions that are deeply rooted in the experience of being somebody in everyday life and especially in their social world. In my fieldwork, the children talked about foods that were not part of their routine and usual diets, as well as talking about foods they had never eaten directly, such as onions. In this case, Helena does not put the onion in her mouth and eat it raw. The onion is part of a group of foods that her mother uses to cook the food she eats every day. Even as a child, Helena understands, delimits, and determines, through language, what food is (or is not), as well as what hunger is. Helena’s evoked response when she asks for barbecue as her lunch shows us, through language, the verbalization of her desire for a food and, at the same time, denounces the distancing of this food from her usual routine. It is through the evocation of lack that Helena demonstrates the meaning of her hunger.Therefore, just like violence, hunger is not a foreign entity in children’s lives. I would venture to say that they know exactly what it means and how it structures the pragmatics of everyday life. This also extends to the fact that children often complain and even cry out of hunger: “Mama, I want bread. I say: ‘There isn’t any, Helena.’ They cry. They want it at any cost,” as Fátima says. The language of crying in the face of hunger and wanting at any cost is also “how children learn the meanings of tears, admonishments, silences, and restraints” (Das 2015: 72) in the face of their own positions within a family. The idea of crying has a direct impact on their identities as hungry children, just as the response through crying—another form of language, it should be emphasized—constructs meanings in the face of the philosophical perplexity of the codes of hunger. Even though Fátima creates codes of language and silence to spare them, the children know about hunger and create their own codes to operate within everyday life all the time, even if the adults do not think so.In conclusion, by using the voices of hungry children from my fieldwork as a philosophical and ethnographic artifact, this brief reflection has attempted to demonstrate how children evoke codes of language and silence that give shape and meaning to their hunger in the interstices of everyday life. Based on the two ethnographic situations discussed, an intimate understanding of the relationships between agency, care, language, and silence can help us establish concrete ways of reading hunger through children’s voices. As long as we do not take children’s philosophical perplexities seriously, we will always be condemned to a reductionist, partial, and limited understanding of the daily experience of hungry people.I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valuable comments and insights that made me build stronger arguments for the manuscript. This work was carried out with financial support from CNPq, Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (process number: 140829/2022-9).