Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua

Rating:
Summary: mixed bag of insights and stereotypes
Review: An interesting analysis of women in Managua during the Sandinista era takes up most of the book. Lancaster does much to explain how the combination of US aggression and Sandinista ineptitude wearied Nicaraguans and standed many women.

The book is padded with two academic articles. These not only clash in style with the rest of the book, but are based almost entirely on conjecture rather than ethnography. One is on race, the other on homosexuality. Astonishingly, Lancaster who eventually admits (that is the most accurate verb for how HE presents it) he is gay, did not study males who have sex with males in Nicaragua. Joseph Carrier, Don Kulick, Annick Prieur, and others have done ethnographic work with males who have sex with males, while Lancaster just recycles dubious majority culture conceptions of shame and honor.The data on racial conceptions are also very thin.

In sum, good on women and how the revolution was lived in a Managua barrio, but the last part of the book is marred by stereotyped fantases about race and homosexuality.

Rating:
Summary: Life is Hard
Review: When people want to know what everyday life in Nicaragua was like during what Eduardo Galeano has called "the time of beautiful madness," they invariably turn to Lancaster's book. Life is Hard gives an up-close, personal, and often poignant accounting of the experiences of three working-class families during the Sandinista period. But this accessible, engaging book is also more than a classic ethnography. The latter chapters (whose theoretical arguments ineluctably flow from the more descriptive chapters) provide a highly readable short course on much of what is most exciting in twentieth century cultural theory: semiotics, deconstruction, neomarxism, and the origins of queer theory.

Over the course of the book, the author takes the reader through various vignettes, life stories, and analyses. At the same time, Lancaster reveals different facets of himself, in context-appropriate passages: socialist, Southern working-class origins, white, gay... The result is an implicit argument about how complex, compound, and contingent identities are. The result is also that alert readers get a very good sense of how the author's experiences shaped his research questions- and how they affected his interactions with Nicaraguan informants spanning a broad social gamut: single mothers, soldiers, adolescent boys and girls, "macho" men, and a number of gay men (clearly quoted, sometimes at length, in the chapter on same-sex relations).

Lancaster's overarching analysis is complex. In a feminist vein, he argues that the Sandinista revolution failed, in part, because its leadership failed to undertake an effective renovation of gender relations and family life. In a gay studies vein, the author shows how the everyday stigmatization of male same-sex relations regulates and supports conceptions of "appropriate" manhood (nobody wants to be called a "queer"!)-- and how, in no small part, it was this quotidian homophobia that undermined Sandinista efforts at changing family life.

The nuanced picture Lancaster draws of family life in a culture of machismo, and the innovative analysis he develops of how same-sex relations function in that culture, have been corroborated by a host of scholars working in different fields: Tomas Almaguer, Ana Alonso, Annick Prieuer, Don Kulick, David Whisnant, Richard Parker, and many others. With good reason, this important book received both the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award, and the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists' Ruth Benedict Prize. I should add: this book has been used in several undergraduate and graduate courses I've taken. Invariably, students vote this the best-realized ethnography in the class.