In relation to her political patron, Oca Malapitan, for example, Maricel was adamant that theirs was a purely transactional relationship. She did not feel any debt to Oca. At other times, she had incurred emotional debts to people who “had” been there for her. This suggests that people constantly negotiate these emic concepts. As one of our friends, Eric, advised, as Steffen asked him whether Aldin was indebted to him after he had assisted with medical expenditures for Aldin’s child, “It’s up to you.” Apart from the infuriatingly vague answer, it revealed a deeper truth: choice, relationship, and even practices enter into and are negotiated and contested through an interpretative scheme of affective relationality. The objective situation—that thing that happened—did not determine the outcome—a debt was incurred. It was up to protagonists as well in the intimate space made up of the path walk.
In their analysis of civility, Sharika Thiranagama, Toby Kelly, and Carlos Forment (2018) suggest that this is exactly what civility is about—finding arrangements that allow people to share the same public space. Contrary to normative celebrations of civility, they insist that civility is not the opposite of violence. There are dominant ways of being civil; manners that cannot be negotiated. This is so for the very local, intimate politics in the pathway. It is equally so for the relation between authority (state or nonstate) and residents, whereby particular forms of civility are allowed and sanctioned. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s 1994 analysis, they assert: “Civility is reproduced in a context where violence has been radically reorganized, monopolized by the state and placed quite literally out of sight. But at the same time, it is important to remember that the military can be sent back onto the street at any moment. Civility does not see the eradication of violence, but its reorganization, with the state playing a crucially important role” (Thiranagama, Kelly, and Forment 2018, 162).
This is what happened in a radical sense with the war on drugs. The police were sent back in. Sanctioned forms of civility as a type of state coercion have always been entangled with intimate relations in Bagong Silang. Again, Maricel’s fate is illustrative. While she was known as an effective political operator and skilled in social exchange relations, she was also known as someone who had had serious problems with drugs. In 2016, this came back to haunt her as Duterte initiated his war on drugs. She was one of the first to be included on the watch lists of the drug war. After months of anxiety, she finally escaped Bagong Silang to another part of Metro Manila. She could not escape or hide from the intimate relations that before the war had maintained her and given her a position in the path walk, but that after the war made her vulnerable to state-sanctioned forms of civility. State-sanctioned civility is, predictably, often at odds with local forms of civility, but as the war on drugs shows, this difference is then dealt with through violent politics.
To sum up briefly, the way we employ the concept of communal intimacy allows us to explore, simultaneously, how intimate affective relationality is, and has been, central to how people in Bagong Silang are able to survive at the same time as it is inescapable due to the space in which they are confined. This has led to the production of particular forms of cultural intimacy whereby people know, sometimes in distorted ways, a lot about their neighbors and the state. A certain style of coping and morality had developed in which people knew how to engage with each other and with the state through particular forms of exchange relations. However, this intimacy—or the intimate knowledge people have of each other—also forms the very backbone of the drug war, in both its lethal and extortionist forms. Hence, the intimate affectionate relationality that keeps people alive is also what puts them at risk. While the war on drugs has often legitimately been cast as the ultimate sovereign act of creating disposable bodies (Reyes 2016; Quimpo 2017), our work in Bagong Silang also suggests that the war itself as carried out on the ground relied on intimate relations and in turn reconfigured and disfigured the very same intimate relations between residents of the path walk and between state authorities and residents (Warburg and Jensen 2020a). In this way, the Philippine war on drugs highlights the need for anthropological analyses of intimacy, violence, and local politics to pay acute attention to how the local—Bagong Silang—is reconfigured, structured, or animated by larger societal and historical processes at both the metropolitan and the national levels.