Care

This entry traces the different practices of care around the world and asks what cross-cultural ethnographic research contributes to our understandings of these basic human relationships. First, we explore the structures of care: and how care is organized and distributed by contemporary states and markets, as well as how it is configured and transformed in relation to capitalism, globalization, and migration. Second, we analyse how care’s political, economic, and moral dimensions become ambivalently entangled in everyday relationships. We take ethnography as a starting point to understanding the ethics of care and what is considered ‘good’ or ‘efficacious’ care in different cultural contexts and in different settings, such as in medical care institutions or in the relationships between carers and those for whom they care. Finally, we explore caring roles and relationships in kinship and in communities, how they might question taken-for-granted assumptions about what care ought to look like and where it should be located, and how they are changing. There is nothing universal or given about care. This is precisely why anthropology is distinctive in its ability to illuminate diverse, unequal, and ever-changing expressions of care around the world