Building on recent ethnographic research on social provision in the global South, this article examines the everyday construction of a welfare state that links distributive inclusion with social degradation of the urban poor. The Chilean state has long affirmed its responsibility for housing poor citizens, and claimed considerable success in doing so. Since 1979, subsidized provision of privately built housing has moved millions from precarious residence into formal homeownership. In beneficiaries’ eyes, however, state housing agencies often appeared not as benevolent guarantors of social inclusion but rather as producers of material and symbolic indignities endured by poor city-dwellers. This ethnographic study of social housing in Santiago examines how residents’ understandings of social rights, and of the state itself, are produced in routine encounters with agents of housing provision. In particular, it traces two competing images of the state that emerged in state-citizen interactions. First, grounded in lived experiences of claiming and inhabiting social housing, residents envisioned a denigrating state that regarded the poor as second-class citizens and willfully relegated them to substandard conditions. Second, housing officials challenged this view by presenting the alternative image of an incapable state, which was unable to guarantee dignified housing in a market-oriented society. Each of these images, in turn, informed residents’ everyday political practices. While the denigrating state-image elicited contentious claims-making for better conditions, official performances of an incapable state encouraged residents to abandon collective action in favor of costly private strategies of home improvement.

本文基于最近关于全球南方社会供给的人种学研究，考察了福利国家的日常建设，该福利国家将分配性包容性与城市贫困人口的社会退化联系在一起。智利长期以来一直在肯定其为贫困公民提供住房的责任，并声称在此方面取得了相当大的成功。自1979年以来，私人住房的补贴提供已使数百万计的人从from可危的住所转变为正式的房屋所有权。但是，在受益者眼中，国有住房中介机构往往不像是社会包容的仁慈保证人，而是作为贫穷的城市居民所忍受的物质和象征性侮辱的生产者。这项关于圣地亚哥社会住房的人种学研究，考察了居民如何理解社会权利以及对国家本身的理解，是在与住房供应代理人的日常交往中产生的。特别是，它跟踪了状态-公民交互中出现的两个相互竞争的状态图像。首先，根据申领和居住社会住房的现实经验，居民设想state视将穷人视为二等公民的国家，并故意将他们降级为不合格的条件。其次，住房官员通过提出一种无能的国家的形象来挑战这一观点，这种无能的国家无法在市场社会中保证有尊严的住房。这些图像中的每一个反过来又为居民的日常政治活动提供了信息。尽管贬低的国家形象引发了争夺更好条件的主张，但无能为力的国家的官方表现却鼓励居民放弃集体行动，转而采用昂贵的私人家装策略。