From “making toast” to “splitting apples”: dissecting “care” in the midst of chronic violence

Abstract

Scholarship has tended to focus on the deleterious impacts of chronic exposure to violence, to the detriment of understanding how residents living in dangerous contexts care for themselves and one another. Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines two sets of practices that residents exercise in the name of protecting themselves and their loved ones. The first set (Bmaking toast^) includes the mundane, Bsmall acts,^-often embedded in routinethat residents draw on in an effort to form connections and create order in a fundamentally chaotic and stressful environment. The second set ("splitting apples") involves the teaching and exercise of violence in the name of protecting daughters and sons from further harm. Using interviews and field notes, we argue that both sets of practices, when viewed in situ, reveal an Bethics of care.^Resisting the urge to either romanticize or sanitize these efforts, we engage with the difficult question of what it means when an expression of Bcare^involves the (re)production of violence, especially against a loved one.Keywords Protective carework . Family violence . Argentina . Violence in Latin America . Urban ethnography Decades of research have established the durable and pernicious impact that chronic exposure to violence has on poor communities (Brennan et al. 2007;Schwab-Stone et al. 1995). Clark et al. (2008 have dubbed chronic exposure to violence a Bmental health hazard,^in reference to its harmful developmental, emotional, and behavioral impacts on individuals (see also, Farrell et al. 2007;Friday 1995;Holton 1995;Popkin et al. 2010). Exposure to community violence is strongly associated with post-traumatic Theor Soc

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