Larissa Adler Lomnitz: Anthropologist who showed how the poor used social networks to survive and the rich to thrive

Abstract

Larissa Adler Lomnitz, whose work on informal exchange networks influenced researchers across disciplines and laid the foundation for social capital theory, passed away in Mexico City on April 13, 2019, at the age of 87. A social anthropologist, she specialized in the microsociology of interpersonal networks and the uses to which social ties are put by people to advance their well-being under contrasting social and economic circumstances. She was born in Paris on June 17, 1932, to parents from Eastern Europe who had independently emigrated to Peru with their parents to escape the region’s antisemitism. Although her parents met and married in Peru, Adler Lomnitz was born in Paris because her father was studying anthropology there under the direction of the French anthropologist Paul Rivet. Larissa Adler Lomnitz at Berkeley (1966). Image credit: Cinna Lomnitz. After completing his studies in France, her father and his young family moved to Colombia, where Adler Lomnitz grew up. In 1948 when she was 16, her parents migrated to the newly founded State of Israel to join the Kibbutz movement. Two years later, at the age of 18, she met and married 25-year-old Cinna Lomnitz. Like her, he was from a European Jewish family and had emigrated with his parents to Latin America to escape antisemitism, settling not in Colombia but Chile, where in 1948 he earned an undergraduate degree in engineering. After visiting Chile, the newlyweds moved to the United States, where Cinna Lomnitz completed a master’s degree in soil mechanics at Harvard, and in 1955, finished his doctorate in Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. Returning to Chile in that year, Cinna founded the University of Chile’s Geophysics Institute and taught and did research there for 9 years before going to the University of California at Berkeley as a faculty member from 1964 to 1968. It was at Berkeley that Larissa Adler Lomnitz undertook her undergraduate studies while simultaneously working to raise their four children, completing a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology in 1970. Around 1970 the family moved to Mexico City, where Cinna had founded the Institute of Geophysics at the National Autonomous University in 1968, and Adler Lomnitz entered the doctoral program in social anthropology at the Iberoamerican University, working with Angel Palerm and Rodolfo Stavenhagen. During the early 1970s, she undertook ethnographic fieldwork for her doctorate, which she completed in 1974. As a doctoral student, Adler Lomnitz embedded herself as a participant observer in a poor shantytown composed of some 200 ragged structures clinging to the slope of a ravine just below an affluent, upper middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City. The residents, most of whom were migrants or descendants of migrants from rural villages, supported themselves and their families through menial work in the city’s informal economy. The women mostly worked as domestics, many in the adjacent affluent neighborhood, while the men worked as unskilled laborers in construction or were skilled day laborers who worked independently. At that time in Latin America, the residents of poor marginal neighborhoods were known as marginados (marginals) and through her fieldwork, Adler Lomnitz sought to learn how they managed to survive day-to-day and year-to-year on low wages earned in precarious, unstable jobs at the bottom of Mexico’s occupational structure. In 1975, she published a revised version of her doctoral dissertation as a book entitled Cómo Sobreviven los Marginados (How the Marginals Survive), now regarded as a classic in urban social anthropology. In 1977, the book appeared in English as Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown (1). In the book, Adler Lomnitz drew upon her extensive interviews and field notes to argue that survival among poor urban dwellers was achieved through the strategic cultivation of social ties to create diverse exchange networks, which residents turned to for support during times of need. Analogous to the way investors compile a diverse portfolio of investments to diversify risks to capital, and working-class families diversify their labor portfolios to diversify risks to household income, the poor work to create and maintain ties to a diverse set of social others to insure themselves against episodes of economic hardship. Although the social networks they build may consist mainly of other impoverished people, the larger and more diverse the network, the more likely someone within it will be in a position to provide material assistance or to work collectively with others in the network to provide such assistance during times of social or economic stress. Like disadvantaged people everywhere, the Mexican poor naturally turn to kin for support during times of trouble, but the number of family members available to help out at any point in time is fixed. Family ties also tend to be homogenous rather than diverse, and in order to expand the number and range of ties, the poor turn to a Mexican cultural tradition of fictive kinship known as compadrazgo, derived from the Spanish word compadre, which literally refers to the relationship between a godfather and a godchild (the word is comadre when the relationship is between a godmother and a godchild). In Catholic tradition, godparents are typically chosen by the child’s parents; and if the godparents accept the invitation, they stand with the parents at the time of baptism and in theory agree to pray for and care for the child, and to set a good example by remaining faithful to God, Jesus, and Catholicism. In Mexico, becoming a compadre also implies an informal commitment to provide material support to the child and by extension to the parents, thereby creating a special bond between godparents and parents as well as the child. Mexicans have also extended the system of compadrazgo to the celebration of other life-course events besides baptism, such as first communion and marriage. Exchanges within the networks created through kinship, compadrazgo, and friendship are governed by a principle of reciprocity in which resources are extracted from the network and retuned when necessary to sustain a rough balance of social indebtedness over time. In a follow-up book coauthored with Marisol Pérez-Lizaur, entitled A Mexican Elite Family 1820–1980: Kinship, Class, and Culture (2), Adler Lomnitz undertook an in-depth multigenerational ethnographic analysis of an elite, entrepreneurial family. In contrast to the poor, who seek to enlarge and diversify their social networks beyond kinship, she found that the wealthy endeavor to limit their social networks to close family members, expanding blood ties sparingly mainly through marriages to members of other elite entrepreneurial families rather than through fictive kinship systems, such as compadrazgo. In this way, the wealthy build a stock of social capital and interpersonal trust to reinforce the social networks that undergird most Mexican business enterprises. The basic structure is that of a three-generation “grandfamily” in which male relatives populate key positions within a family-based conglomerate and groom the next generation for leadership positions in the enterprise. Maintaining interpersonal ties of the underlying kinship structure falls to “centralizing women,” who share news about the well-being of family members and organize the ritual events that mark births, deaths, baptisms, first communions, birthdays, and celebrations of family achievements, thus renewing and reinforcing the strength of social connection over time and across the generations. Subsequent books focused her expert ethnographic vision on the microsocial structures and cultures of other social niches within Mexico and other Latin American nations, including the Chilean middle class (3), Mexico’s scientific community (4), the Chilean political system (5), and Mexico’s own distinctive political establishment (6). Adler Lomnitz spent her entire academic career as a Professor and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics in Mexico’s Autonomous National University, interspersed with visiting professorships at universities such as Columbia, New York University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Notre Dame, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Chicago, the University of Paris, and other distinguished centers of scholarship and learning. Her biography, Larissa Adler Lomnitz: Antropóloga Latinoamericana by Guillermo de la Peña (7) was published in 2004 by Mexico’s College of Social Ethnographers and Anthropologists. For her contributions to social science, Larissa Adler Lomnitz was elected as an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.