Care

Abstract

There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms of support. This entry presents three areas of anthropological work on how care is practised around the world in order to challenge these assumptions and demonstrate how care varies in unexpected ways. First, the entry explores how care is structured and, in particular, how it is organised by contemporary states and global markets. Second, the entry provides an overview of how, in everyday relationships of support, the political, economic, and moral dimensions of care become entangled in one another. This demonstrates how ethnography offers a different way to approach ethical and practical questions about what makes care good or effective in different cultural contexts and in different settings-such as in medical institutions or in the relationships between carers and those for whom they care. Finally, the entry shows how the different ways that care works in families and in communities challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about what care ought to look like and where it should take place. Overall, the entry illustrates that care varies greatly across social contexts. Anthropology distinctively illuminates how deeply these variations change the experience and consequences of care in ways that require our detailed attention.This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.For image use please see separate credit(s). ISSN 2398-516Xto be natural, universal, and immovable. This entry explores care in its different guises, in order to see more expansively what care means around the world, to illuminate its diversity and to question our assumptions. Anthropological work on care demonstrates how many dominant assumptions about care arise from specific ways that care is structured in contemporary Euro-American capitalist states. It shows that such assumptions do not help us understand how care appears in other societies, and risk blinding us to the complexity of caring relationships within Euro-American societies themselves. Anthropological studies of care thus illustrate that to understand the actual role of care in human life, we must expand our imagination about what, where, and how it is given. Structures of careNation states and economic markets play a central role in distributing and regulating care in contemporary societies. They function to define who is worthy of care, who should be responsible for giving it, and the contexts in which it is given. Attending to these diverse ways of structuring care reveals how different they are from one another-and thus the significant effect they can have on the kind of care people receive and, in some cases, on the possibility of receiving care at all.Capitalist economies typically connect care work and dependence with the private sphere as opposed to the public sphere of the market and politics. Relatedly, care is often held in these con...

Care During Pandemic Times: Digital Ethnography with Mental Health Professionals in Equatorial Guinea

“…I took advantage of my training and experience as a medical anthropologist to further my career through a Ph.D. In 2019, I enrolled at a distance‐learning graduate school in Madrid (Spain) to attempt at least a development in the understanding of relations that may or may not offer possibilities of sustaining life (McKearney and Amrith 2021), matters of “tinkering” (Mol et al 2010, 11), or ambivalent actions that “transform over time in ways that are often unpredictable, complicated or conflicted” (Cook and Trundle 2020, 179). I intended to analyze or “locate” actions and exchanges between actors that are supposed to be beneficial within physical and conceptual fields of interest (Offenhenden 2017).…”