This year marks the 30th anniversary of Roger Lancaster's landmark ethnographic work, Life Is Hard. It's being translated for the first time by the Argentine publisher Prometeo. At the time of its release, it was an “academic best-seller," appearing in the windows of bookstores across the country. Selected by the editors to appear in the University of California Press’s Centennial Books series, it won the C. Wright Mills Award and the Ruth Benedict Prize. The chapter, “Subject Honor, Object Shame,” has been widely reproduced in reader collections and translated into other languages. A link to the translated version can be found here.
David Gehring recently interviewed Dr. Lancaster about his book, the translation, and what we can still learn from it, 30 years after its publication.
This is the first translation of a book published over 30 years ago. Why now? How does a translation like this happen?
The publisher, Prometeo—a scholarly press based in Argentina—asked to include Life Is Hard in its series Pasados Presentes (Past Presents). Books in the series examine recent history with an eye toward understanding the present, foregrounding themes such as revolution, counterrevolution, genocide, and human rights, with a particular focus on political struggles in the Southern Cone and Latin America more broadly.
I suppose this means that Life Is Hard has become, with the passage of time, a historical work. It continues to be cited in scholarship at the convergence of gender, sexuality, personal life, and political movements, especially in Latin American contexts, and editors took note that it had never been translated into Spanish. I also wonder if the phrase “the intimacy of power,” which has been circulating in Spanish-language conversations, led someone willy-nilly back to its original source.
When translating a book, what are the underlying goals that guide your work and decision-making? Are there philosophical or theoretical frameworks that you contend with or borrow from? Or is it mainly about clarity and accuracy?
I was fortunate that the press enlisted an erudite and discerning translator, Matheus Calderón, a young Peruvian scholar. The book draws on Marxist, feminist, dialogical, and poststructuralist traditions, and Matheus understood this intellectual mix from the outset. On technical matters—such as how to render quotes in the Nicaraguan dialect—he consulted me and eventually sought input from a Nicaraguan colleague.
I know other scholar-translators and I’m impressed by the depth of reflection they bring to their work. In some of my other translated works, I’ve occasionally intervened to say, “This sentence was meant to be tentative—your version reads too definitively,” or even, “This phrase was deliberately awkward; could you retain that quality in Spanish?” But by and large, I leave translation up to the translators. I don’t pretend to be one myself.
Considering the years that have passed since the original publication, were there editorial changes to address historical or academic developments? (e.g., new sections, footnotes, revisions)?
The press didn’t request changes to the text, and I wouldn’t have been inclined to make them in any case. Once a book enters the world, it takes on a life of its own. Writers can do only so much to qualify what they once said or to shape how their work is received.
That said, the editors and I agreed that a new prologue would be useful—something to situate the theoretical shifts of the 1980s and 1990s and to reflect on historical developments since, including the return to power of a very different kind of Sandinismo.
In the synopsis of the book’s new edition, drawn from your prologue, you write: “If I have achieved my goal, then this work also represents a synthesis of the theoretical currents of the period.” Could you elaborate on those theoretical currents and their relevance today?
I was trying to weave together three primary threads.
First, I was a young Marxist ethnographer, trained in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what Francis Fukuyama would call the “end of history”—or more precisely, the collapse of the socialist bloc and the global ascendancy of uncontested capitalism, with no real alternatives in view. The 1990 Sandinista electoral defeat was very much part of this larger shift. The Nicaraguan Revolution was not to be a prelude to a socialist future but, it turned out, the last of its kind: a national liberation struggle culminating in a faltering attempt to construct a socialist—or partly-socialist—society. The first order of business was to grapple with those blunt facts.
Second, the dialogical turn was gaining momentum in anthropology, and I was grappling with questions of reflexivity and formal experimentation in ethnographic writing. Although widely discussed at the time, these concerns were still rarely realized in practice. For socialist scholarship in particular, the challenge of writing—of capturing dialogue, contradiction, and complexity—felt especially urgent. How could I make lived scenes come alive while also interpreting events in process? And how could I let interlocutors speak in their own voices, even when I might have wished for them to say something else? Drawing on the idea of “blurred genres,” I tried to infuse the book with a novelistic texture while maintaining the empirical rigor of ethnographic inquiry.
Third, I was engaging emerging work in feminism, critical studies of race/ethnicity, and gay studies to explore “what went wrong” in revolutionary Nicaragua. Testing these ideas in close-up, household-level ethnography, Life Is Hard helped open new lines of inquiry—especially at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies. There are chapters on domestic violence, child-rearing practices, life during wartime, skin-color discriminations, and more. Many of the book’s core questions remain relevant today—for example, how do the history of colonialism and forms of ethnic domination inscribe themselves in contemporary family relations?—and the chapter on homosexuality (derived from arguments hatched in 1986 and a paper published in 1988) anticipated key moves later associated with queer theory.
That long chapter, “Subject Honor, Object Shame,” shows how male same-sex practices in Nicaragua follow a cultural logic that labels and stigmatizes the “passive” partner while leaving the “active” one largely unmarked—reinforcing machismo and regulating gender relations more broadly. The result is a starkly constructionist argument: sexual categories do not translate neatly across cultures. Different societies produce different maps of the body, different regimes of access and privilege, and (in a Foucauldian register) different games of truth and power. The model I developed here put social constructionism on a solid footing and proved applicable in a wide variety of settings. (It even proved useful in HIV/AIDS prevention efforts, since, as I show, many of the men who have sex with men do not identify as gay.)
You speak of the gap between revolutionary aspiration and lived experience—an idea I’ve often reflected on in my studies at GMU. Has your ethnographic research in Nicaragua shaped how you think about activism and organizing in the U.S. today (e.g., enduring blind spots or overlooked possibilities)?
It’s worth recalling just how widespread revolutionary optimism was at the outset. In Managua, you could barely walk down the street without someone bending your ear, telling you how the moment felt filled with possibility—or how this small, impoverished country seemed to be positioned as the very beating heart of world history.
But we also need to understand what eroded that optimism. Material hardship, of course—but hardship was experienced differently by men and women, young and old, those with resources (including political connections) and those who were utterly dispossessed.
It’s not easy to extract lessons for today from a workers’ and peasants’ movement that rose and fell before the advent of email. Still, one thing I learned is that the gap between ideals and experience is lived differently by ordinary people and by political leaders. As the U.S.-backed contra war dragged on—and as economic collapse and hyperinflation, driven by war and embargo, took hold—Sandinista leaders increasingly leaned into ideological exhortation and heroic rhetoric: “Be like Che!” “Patria libre o morir!” What they heard in return from assembled crowds were not genuine expressions of commitment, but ritualized shouts of compliance—“¡Presente!”—while pervasive murmurings of fatigue and disillusionment went unheard.
Their ideology made them deaf to the people’s suffering and discontent. It need not have been that way. There are lessons there for us today, I think.
September 12, 2025