Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia, this article puts forth the concept of imaginal caring to examine a form of caring that is fantastical, exaggerated, and counterfactual. To develop this concept, I take the vantage point of young children (ages eight through twelve) who lived in households with persons who were suffering from tuberculosis and HIV. The children were involved in providing day‐to‐day care in many ways. They were also constrained in their efforts to give and show care because of their social positions, their access to resources, and their small human bodies. Through a series of examples, I demonstrate the ways in which children created and played with often visual images of giving care to family members in the past, present, and future. I show that fantastical imaginations and images of children's involvement in caring not only expressed that they cared for others but also served as ways for them to provide or perform care. There were high social and personal stakes for children in not being able to care for others, and children's efforts to care imaginally responded to such stakes, envisioning futures different from those scripted for them by global health discourses and the conditions of marginalization and exclusion into which they were born.

Legal Care and Friction in Family Detention

“…Care is simultaneously done, thought, and felt. Starting with Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher's broad definition of care as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair 'our world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Tronto 1993, 103), my analysis also aligns with scholarly views of care that emphasize its embodied, situated, and contingent qualities (e.g., Hamington 2004; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) and caring practices as characterized, in part, by their relationality and interdependency (e.g., Kittay and Feder 2002;Cooper 2018) and fantastical or "imaginal" potentialities (Hunleth 2019). Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols's (2010) articulation of care, which involves "tinkering" on uncertain grounds and living with "the erratic"-emphasizing unpredictability as well as a commitment to continuous engagement-is instructive for making sense of the emergent and urgent environs of family detention and legal advocates' necessarily experimental tinkerings.…”

White men and electric guns: Analysing the Amazonian dystopia through Shipibo-Konibo children’s drawings

“…This collective and bilingual process of creation produced a drawing in mediation between ‘the drawer, the thing drawn and their hypothetical viewers’ (Taussig, 2009: 265). The latter, as Hunleth (2019: 167) wisely noted, are less hypothetical when there is a present audience observing and contributing to the drawing’s creation.…”

Is It AIDS? Or Is It Kaliondeonde? Preliminary Assessment of an Indigenous AIDS-like Illness in Zambia

“…Three additional studies (Green 1999 33 ; International Planned Parenthood Federation 34 2014, Hunleth 2019 35 ) stipulate that kaliondeonde was probably one of several local names for AIDS, rather than being a separate medical condition.…”