C h a p t e r 1
Introduction
Heike Drotbohm and Erdmute Alber
In the course of the last two decades, the notion of care has become prominent
in the social sciences. A growing amount of literature is now focusing
on the intersection of work, gender, ethnicity, affect, and mobility regimes.
In anthropology and sociology, in political science, psychology, gender
studies, education, gerontology, disability studies, and nursing studies,
care is a relevant and timely tool for examining the multiple dimensions of
the distribution of gendered and generation-specific care, both within
societies and around the globe.
As a result of this proliferation of care as a theme in several disciplinary
fields, we are observing not only the expansion of its conceptual meaning
but also increasing fuzziness and imprecision in the use of the term. In
view of this growing field of literature and of the disciplines that work with
the concept our book offers a rethinking of care from an anthropological
perspective. Complementing common approaches, we argue that an interpretation
of care that is informed by the three different concepts of work,
kinship, and the life-course will facilitate empirical and conceptual distinctions
between the different activities that are labeled as care.
Our book is structured in accordance with these three concepts. In the
first part, entitled “Care as Work,” we examine the different contexts in
which care is carried out as a professional and commoditized activity.
Although these case studies deal with feminized and ethnicized types of
care work and hence could be read in line with earlier feminist and neoMarxist
approaches, they highlight multiple dimensions of care that
extend beyond the economic sphere. This part examines not only the
circulation of care between employees, employers, clients, local support
communities, neighborhoods, and distant kin, but also the culturalized
perceptions of certain types of care work.
E. Alber et al. (eds.), Anthropological Perspectives on Care
© Erdmute Alber and Heike Drotbohm 2015
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In the second part, “Care as Kinship,” we situate care in the context of
the anthropology of kinship, here understood as a mode of social belonging.
Since kinship, like other forms of social belonging, has to be actively
chosen, made, or maintained, care practices are needed to contribute to
the making and maintaining of kinship. Therefore, care in these chapters
is understood as a social practice that connects not only kinsmen and
friends, neighbors and communities, but also other collectivities such as
states and nations. In this rethinking of care in the context of kinship, we
highlight care as a social and emotional practice that does not necessarily
need to be defined in relation to the sphere of work but rather entails the
capacity to make, shape, and be made by social bonds. In this context,
care can be perceived as a duty or a burden, but also as a pleasure or as a
matter of course. In doing so we tackle the notion of care in its wider
sense in order to capture the duality between activities and services on the
one hand and social relations, emotions, and affects on the other—a dialectics
expressed in the English language through the opposition between
“caring for” and “caring about.”
In the third part, “Care and the Life-Course,” we examine care through
the lens of a person’s lifetime. We highlight the fact that the rights and
obligations of care change over time. Part III is connected to Parts I and II
in the sense that care has an impact both on one’s position within the
sphere of work and on one’s sense of relatedness and belonging. We direct
particular attention to the changing normative expectations of giving and
receiving care during the different phases of one’s life—an apparently selfevident
but often neglected insight.
Generally, we underline the meaningful distinction among these three
fields of study and highlight their possible combinations, complementarities,
distinctions, and mutual influences. We are also interested in the
boundaries between them and in the political consequences of these
boundaries. Given the contributions included in this volume, we encourage
these fields of discussion to take notice of each other.
Care as Work
In large parts of the social sciences, care has been discussed as a particular
type of working activity. Indeed, activities called “care work” encompass a
highly differentiated and diverse field. Highly professional “nurturant
care work” requiring bodily as well as emotional proximity, as carried out
in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and funeral homes, or through
other kinds of medical services (Brown 2012; Duffy 2011; Gottfried
2013), is labeled care work. A comparable field is the educational context
of kindergartens and schools, where younger, dependent members of
H e i k e D r o t b o h m a n d E r d m u t e A l b e r 3
society are taken care of. Another type of care work has been identified
among service-oriented professionals like flight attendants, employees
working in call centers or fitness centers (Hochschild 1983; Parasecoli
2012; Vora 2010), or those working in nail salons, brothels, or hostess
clubs (Agustín 2007; Allison 1994; Brennan 2004; Kang 2010). Recently,
even types of work that are oriented toward other species, such as plants
and animals, were included in the notion (Mol et al. 2010). And finally,
unpaid reproductive work for personal consumption or for others, such as
housekeeping, informal childcare, or care for the disabled or elderly—
often construed as the “female,” private, and informal counterpart to productive
public work—is also called care work (Abel and Nelson 1990b;
Benoit and Hallgrímsdóttir 2011; Boris and Parreñas 2010).
This understanding of care provides a common basis for comparing and
differentiating paid and unpaid care work. For instance, neo-Marxist and
feminist reflections on unpaid care work within households is grounded in
the assumption that care, which is often provided by women, should be
valorized as an important part of national economies (Abel and Nelson
1990a; Feder Kittay and Feder 2002; Glenn 1992; Meillassoux 1975).
At the same time, efforts have been made to identify the significance
of (feminized) care work within the global world economy: concepts
such as the global care chain (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002), the new
world domestic order (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1997), or the global care economy
(Yeates 2004) place the emphasis on the links between different
informal as well as formalized kinds of care work that extend across
national borders. These authors argue that family-based care norms and
practices and care-related labor1
markets can no longer be seen as independent
of one another. Instead they place the emphasis on the entanglements
of care regimes within a globalized economy: more and more
women from the so-called Global South are leaving their homes (and
their caring obligations) behind to carry out (paid) care work in private
households or institutionalized care services in the Global North. By
doing so, they leave their family member behind, in order to provide
adequate care, often through the sending of remittances. The global
extraction of care, here understood as a crucial social and emotional
resource, has been labeled the “care drain” (Hochschild 2002; Lutz and
Palenga-Möllenbeck 2014).
However, it is important to note that this “care gap” not only concerns
migrants who work in the care sector. In any kind of migration, even
within a given nation-state, the absence of those who have left for workrelated
reasons eventually creates voids in the place of origin, where care
now needs to be reorganized. As the large body of the so-called global care
chain literature has demonstrated, the value of intimate care obligations
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in the domestic sphere is replaced by paid and often ethnicized labor and,
as a result, by monetary reward (Anderson 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo
2001; Parreñas 2001, Yeates 2004, 2009). Thus, debates around care
often tend to valorize an often underestimated, gendered, ethnicized but
definitely central type of work in the global world society.
Along with the valorization of care work in a wide range of professional
and domestic activities, the concept of work has been extended
into spheres that are not usually labeled as such and hence remain invisible.
A good example is Arlie Hochschild’s classic term emotional labour
(1983), which illuminates emotions as necessary elements of professional
behavior, particularly in the service sector. Another example might be the
term kin work, which was first used by network theory–inspired authors
to capture networking activities (Di Leonardo 1987; Lomnitz Adler
1987) and later expanded to the kinship literature. Kin work refers to
social activities within kinship networks, such as the organization of
birthday parties, family dinners, or other activities that not only consolidate
social networks but also make use of them for economic and political
purposes. On a more general level, American sociologist Viviana
Zelizer has provided the most prominent examination of the interpersonal
linkages that enter into the production, distribution, consumption,
and transfer of economic value. In her book The Purchase of Intimacy
(2005), she made it clear that intimate relations coexist with economic
transactions without being corrupted. According to Zelizer, the assumption
that human interaction keeps or should keep the sentimental and
the rational as two distinct spheres is false because it prevents us from
understanding the affective element of social encounters in formal organizations
(Zelizer 2005).
In the present volume, we aim to reveal the multiple economic, social,
and emotional dimensions of care work, highlighting those aspects that
reach beyond the economic sphere of work. While the challenges of a
gendered and ethicized type of exploitation have already received lots of
scholarly attention, we wish to reflect on the quality of care work and its
relationship to other concepts that are emerging in other anthropological
fields of study. Is it the quality of an activity that allows it to be labeled as
“work,” or is it rather the institutional and social framework in which it is
performed? Does “care work” refer to the fact that a certain type of activity
is delegated to another person who is paid for this activity? In some
contexts or institutional settings, such as kindergartens or nursing homes,
care is perceived as professional and monetarized work. In other contexts,
the same activities, such as spending time with a child and caring for it,
are interpreted as an expression of parental responsibility and not necessarily
as work. How do they differ from one another?
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Several chapters in this volume explore the fuzzy boundaries of work
in care-related activities. In Chapter 2, Claudia Liebelt concentrates on
Filipina migrants working as domestics in Israel. These women provide
care work not only for elderly and disabled Israelis, for which they are
employed and paid. Additionally, they care for other people, with whom
they get in touch through their labor relations. By means of understanding
care as a “gift” in the Maussian sense, Liebelt extends the notion of
care beyond the domestic working sphere and includes activities such as
remittances sent to families living in the Philippines, the sponsoring of
Filipina community events in Israel, or women’s activism in church-based
charity groups. According to Liebelt, we need to examine care in its multiple
dimensions as a material, bodily, affective, and emotional practice, as
well as a kind of paid labor. Furthermore, in order to understand how
value is created in this particular context, care should be examined in its
local as well as its transnational settings.
In Chapter 2, gender and generational roles, as well as normative perceptions
of care work, are adapted through “cycles of care” that are related
to the life-course: when mothers leave their country and their families in
order to work abroad, their husbands who have remained behind have to
reestablish their gender roles, while the children grow up with their fathers
or grandparents rather than their mothers. Thus, the chapter shows how
care work, kinship, and the life-course have to be brought together in
order to fully understand the particularities of care in this context.
Several other chapters in this volume deal with care-related labor
migration. In Chapter 3, for instance, Anna Skornia concentrates on the
situation and perspectives of migrant domestic workers both in Peru and
among Peruvian migrants in Italy and on the emerging “entangled
inequalities” in this transnational social field. She describes how Peruvians
who traveled earlier to Italy and were able to legalize their status often
have access to official work permits, whereas those who traveled more
recently usually have no access to the formal labor market. Hence, those
who work officially in Italy often informally employ family members,
who provide domestic care work in these households. In the end, the
progress some migrants make as paid workers and mothers in local childcare
arrangements is built upon the informal work of a more recent generation
of migrants, who flexibly adapt to the needs of the more established
migrants, at least temporarily. Against this background, the author argues
that intrafamilial inequalities that may shape care-related practices locally
do not vanish in contexts of transnational migration. Rather, they are
reproduced and deepened as a product of new hierarchies that are emerging
from restrictive citizenship and migration regimes. At the same time,
migrants’ strategies of reconciling multiple and entangled forms of local
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and transnational caregiving are also flexibly adjusted according to the
conditions and regulatory frameworks of the countries and places in
which they carry out their caring practices. Thus, the chapter contributes
to an understanding of the complex and highly differentiated types of
care work and their dependence on a legalized citizenship status on one
hand and kinship relations on the other.
In Chapter 4, Maria Lidola examines Brazilian professional waxing studios
in Berlin, focusing on the position of female migrant workers in the
context of a globalized waxing industry that is understood as a certain type
of intimate labor (Boris and Parreñas 2010). Waxing includes various
bodily contacts and intensive emotional interaction between client and
the servicing person. Far from being the victims of a structure of global
exploitation, Brazilian women working in this economic niche commercialize
their exotic image as good waxers and stylists and create their own
social spaces in the metropolis of Berlin. Based on ethnographic fieldwork,
Lidola explores the intersection of gendered and ethnicized stereotyping as
encountered in care-related jobs and shows how spatial setting, work wear,
and certain emotional distancing mechanisms contribute to the objectifying,
controlling, and professionalizing of body labor. In this way, Lidola
also includes a debate on sociocultural notions of beauty, hygiene, and
corporeality, as well as discussing the impact of the earlier care work experiences
of Brazilian migrant women in order to understand the manifold
layers of their individual boundary work in Berlin’s waxing studios.
Care as Kinship
The last paragraph situates care in the economic realm and highlights the
fuzzy boundaries of “the intimate” and “the monetarized” spheres of
human interaction. Kinship studies constitute another scholarly field, one
in which care has become prominent in recent years. Here, care has been
conceptualized with respect to its social, emotional, and affective
dimensions.
Since the introduction of a constructivist perspective, kinship has
been understood as constituted by “nature, nurture and law” (Howell
2006: 9)—thus principally not as a given, but as enacted through human
behavior and social interaction as well as through subjective interpretations
of social relations (Alber et al. 2010; Carsten 2000; Notermans
2004; Parkin and Stone 2004). While some scholars, such as Signe Howell
(2006: 9ff.), used the term nurture for those types of human action that
create kinship, others refer literally to care. Mary Weismantel (1995), in
her study of Ecuadorian fostering practices, argued that caring practices
such as feeding, nurturing, or spending time under one roof constitute
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kinship. Kinship, according to her, is lived and created through care.
These understandings of care were taken up by the so-called new kinship
studies, which perceive care as an activity that presumes, produces, or
confirms kin relations or perceptions of relatedness (Carsten 2000, 2004).
In these approaches, two ways of linking care and kinship can be
identified. First, care can be a practice complementing and confirming
biological and juridical understandings of kinship.This has been described
in the case of parents who are acting as caregivers to their children. By
responding to normative understandings of parenthood, providing care
makes them “proper” parents and thus reinforces and confirms their
parenthood. In this sense, care is the fulfillment of an expected form of
behavior associated with a specific kinship role. LeVine and LeVine
(1994) especially have shown that norms and expectations about parental
caregiving vary with societal context. This has been confirmed by other
authors who have looked at the specific expectations of parental care in
different societies (Gottlieb 2000; Holloway et al. 2010; Stansbury et al.
2000). Similar arguments about how existing kinship relations can be
complemented through care have been made for relationships between
grandparents and grandchildren. These types of relationships are likewise
characterized by society-specific expectations of both care and practices,
the latter fulfilling, but eventually also neglecting, these expectations
(Carling et al. 2012; Geissler et al. 2004; Thelen 2005).
Second, anthropological studies of kinship have argued that care not
only complements and confirms biological kinship, it also provides an
alternative way of creating kinship in the absence of biological ties. This
has especially been discussed in the literature on adoption or child fostering
(Alber et al. 2013; Bowie 2004; Howell 2006, Yngvesson 2010). For
processes that generate kinship through social actions such as adoption,
Signe Howell has introduced the term kinning (Howell 2006). According
to her, the making of kinship in the context of adoption is not a single act
but rather a social process that involves several individual actors as well as
institutions. For instance, family members other than the parents, namely,
grandparents, aunts, or uncles, may “kin” the adopted child by integrating
it into their social lives through care. Seen in this way, both ways of
connecting people prove that care is a particular type of social action performed
among people who understand themselves as belonging to each
other by kinship and who are performing belonging through care.
The importance of care in the creation, maintenance, or affirmation of
kinship ties seems to have a special weight in transnational families. As
the literature has shown, care needs to be understood as the key practice
through which kin ties are lived across long distances. In transnational
social fields, migrants try to harmonize the duty to work and finance the
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lives of others with the different qualities and socialities of several places.
Being adult and hence being responsible for others goes along with the
obligation to leave one’s place of origin and to search for better living
conditions abroad. Under ideal circumstances, emigration and the
assumption of upward economic mobility will provide the migrant with
the capacity to care (Baldassar 2008; Baldassar et al. 2007; Brijnath 2009;
Drotbohm 2009). After reestablishing themselves in their countries of
destination, migrants care, or wish to care, for those they have left behind.
In this key aspect of “transnational care,” our understanding is not limited
to the sending of remittances. Rather, many migrants develop multiple
care strategies to articulate their intimate feelings and make
themselves socially present. Established social practices such as calling,
sending gifts and cards, and regular visits constitute and reaffirm social
bonds which otherwise might suffer under the experience of separation
(Drotbohm 2011; Parreñas 2001).
In Chapter 5, Heike Drotbohm highlights care as both a transnational
capacity and a duty which changes its meaning according to changing
conditions and circumstances among transnational Cape Verdean families.
She concentrates her reflections on the links between care and the
notion of crisis, understood as a certain moment of accelerated change
when care is needed in particular ways. In her reading, crisis not only
refers to individual or biographical shifts (such as disease or death), but
also to perceptions of radical societal change. Drotbohm shows that contemporary
living conditions under the current financial or banking crisis
in 2008, with rising rates of unemployment, low incomes, and the state’s
withdrawal from many programs of social security, can increase the pressures
on relatives living in different areas of the world. In moments of
state failure, such as can currently be observed all around the globe, earlier
forms of social security become relegated (back) into the private realm,
where expectations toward care change and where multiple actors, such as
communities, neighborhoods, and individual family members, have to
(re)turn to informal ways of coping with individual challenges. In this
case study, expectations of care between kin change in the course of societal
transformations. In the end, however, the attitude and care behavior
of other family members remain important points of reference for reflecting
on one’s own position in the world.
Chapter 5 shows that the modes of belonging produced, transferred, or
confirmed through care refer both to the sphere of kinship as well as to
other kinds of social belonging. In the other two chapters in this part, care
also refers to other types of collectivities, such as communities, nations, or
states. In Chapter 6, Jessaca Leinaweaver, working with Spanish parents
who have adopted Peruvian children, describes these activities as endeavors
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to incorporate the “foreign child” into their own intimate worlds. Unlike
the approach developed by Howell (2006), Leinaweaver does not focus so
much on the processes of “kinning” through which feelings and perceptions
of parenting are produced and legalized, but rather examines other
types of caring activities, which these parents also perceive as being crucial
for their child and thus enact as a part of their kinship obligations. Spanish
adoptive parents try to care properly for their “foreign” child by creating its
relatedness to its country of origin. They do so by caring for Peru through
the participation in solidarity work and other activities in favor of this
nation, and for the community of Latino migrants in Spain. Hence, as
they assume a certain type of relationship between their child and the latter’s
country of origin, Spanish adoptive parents are caring not only for an
individual but also for a migrant community and for a nation.
In Chapter 7, on care in rural Romania, Tatjana Thelen examines
how the notion of care is used in comparing settings, values, and selfperceptions
in different societies. Since care in many cultural contexts
needs to be understood as a highly moralized and normative social practice,
collective reflections on doing care in “the right way” serve as a backdrop
for assessing societies which are imagined to be different. When
comparing perceptions of “our” (i.e., Romanian) and “their” (i.e.,
“Western”) ways of caring for elderly family members during the late
1990s with more recent statements, Thelen observes a striking shift: while
initially placing an elderly person into a care institution had been considered
a “bad” or “immoral” (Western) care practice, ten years later the
same type of action was being accepted or even appreciated. Thelen relates
this shift to societal changes, such as out-migration, changing selfrepresentations
within local communities, and the rising dependence on
institutional care in rural Romania. Thus, she not only highlights the
changing and highly normative aspects of care, but also shows how these
are used to create a moral order that distinguishes between professional
care work and kin-based care by classifying them as good or bad, modern
or old fashioned, “Western” or “traditional”.
What also becomes obvious in Chapter 7 on changing perceptions of
care in rural Romania finds its parallels in research on domestic care labor
when personal capacities of care, such as patience, obedience, or “servicemindedness”
are culturalized (Amrith 2010). In a different but comparable
setting, Brazilian depiladoras waxing their German clients, who are
examined in Chapter 4, by Maria Lidola, are imagined to be beauty specialists
who know the “adequate” technical performance and the perfect,
nonpainful type of touch. These examples again highlight the fact that
care is a highly moralized practice that is framed, enacted, and perceived
differently by those providing it and those receiving it.
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Discussing care as work and care as kinship, we highlight the potential
for fusing these two fields of study, which have been kept entirely separate
until today. As a consequence, the prevailing discussions around care
work in the social sciences have underestimated the aspect of relatedness
and have neglected to question the limits of the concept of work. The
possibility of examining care beyond the sphere of work has been more or
less ignored. At the same time, kinship studies have underestimated the
aspect of work in relation to care, even within the realm of kinship. As a
consequence, the questions regarding whether and in what ways the professionalization
and commercialization of care changes the meanings as
well as the activities which formerly occurred within the realm of kinship
have not been discussed extensively.
Care in the Life-Course
The capacity and the duty to provide care and the need to be cared for are
closely linked to age-specific requirements and are situated in specific life
phases. Life-course-related transitions imply crucial changes with regard
to the individual’s position in his or her kinship network (Dannefer and
Uhlenberg 1999). Birth, childhood, youth, the phase of reproduction,
parenthood, age, and death are all understood as going along with changing
rights, entitlements, responsibilities, tasks, and needs vis-à-vis others
(Elder 2001; Kertzer 1989; Sackmann and Wingens 2001). The roles of
kinship in care, as discussed in the previous part, always have a temporal
connotation, as they are related to gender- and generation-specific changes
of duties and rights throughout the life-course. New kinship roles, such as
parenthood or grandparenthood, are created in a given individual’s life
stage within the life-course. Furthermore, they are always embedded in
and related to changing societal expectations, and thus to what Tamara
Hareven calls “historical time” in addition to “personal and family time”
(Hareven 1991).
The changing rights and duties of care become most obvious in the
transition from childhood to youth or adulthood (Christiansen et al.
2006; Tafere 2011). In many societies children are defined as being vulnerable
and as needing to be cared for, not only by their kin but also by any
member of society (Montgomery 2009; Woodhead 1990). Additionally,
the early phase of socialization also entails a specific and often gendered
understanding of care. For instance, anthropological studies of childhood
in African societies have shown that girls are often supposed to take over
household tasks or responsibilities for their younger siblings much earlier
than their brothers, who enjoy the freedom to play and to move around
independently for a longer period of time (Abebe 2011; Dinslage 1986;
H e i k e D r o t b o h m a n d E r d m u t e A l b e r 11
Spittler and Bourdillon 2012). For both girls and boys, the end of childhood
and the transition from youth to adulthood and then parenthood are
marked by a gradual attribution of changing care duties. In turning into
mothers and fathers and accepting these new roles, they are also turning
into adults who are in charge of those in need in almost every society
worldwide. These obligations not only concern their offspring and the
children of others but also the older generation, which may be in need of
care too at a certain point in time (Climo 2000).
These insights highlight two interrelated assumptions. First, transitions
in the life-course transform the duty as well as the right to provide
or receive care. In this sense, care is a life stage–specific practice which
cannot be analyzed from an individual perspective, but connects individuals
within and across generations (Braungart and Braungart 1986).
Second, care contributes to the construction of life stages in a double
sense, namely, the normative expectation of receiving care and the duty
(or ability) to provide care. In other words, each society and every historical
time goes along with specific assumptions regarding the questions of
what kinds of care duties are adequate in which life stage and which members
of society are eligible to care and to be cared for. Being a respected
person means providing support at appropriate times. The opposite also
holds true: receiving care at certain moments of need also demonstrates a
particular social status (see Coe, Drotbohm, and Häberlein, Chapters 9,
5, and 8, respectively, this volume). Hence, in many parts of the world,
neglecting care duties at certain life stages would be interpreted as an
expression of disrespect or personal failure.
At the same time, this imagination of life stages through the provision
or reception of care is a normative one that needs to be confirmed or
questioned through caring activities by concrete individuals. Again, societal
change leads to changing practices that can go along with changing
norms. In Germany, for instance, there appears to be a new trend toward
the “young old” providing care for their elder siblings or parents
(Borneman 2001; Thelen and Haukanes 2010). In other contexts, not
only are adults expected to provide care but even children may have cer-
taincareobligations,suchascaringfortheiryoungersiblings.Furthermore,
not everybody provides care according to general expectations: sometimes
constraints, such as conflicting role expectations within the family or economic
difficulties, complicate the adequate provision of care. Not respecting
the life-course-related care norm, however, can also be an active
decision, for instance, when relatives are neglected or abandoned.
Imagining the life-course in clear-cut stages, as in classical anthropological
work on initiation rituals or age-grade societies, has also been criticized
for being simplistic (Kertzer 1989). Jennifer Johnson-Hanks (2002)
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introduced the term vital conjunctures for those moments in the lifecourse
when decisions with long-term consequences have to be taken.
These can occur, for instance, when unexpected pregnancies of teenage
mothers supposedly lead either to marriage and the foundation of a new
household or to abortion and the continuation of education. Here, the
general openness of the situation and of the inherent decisions is seen as
crucial, an openness which also refers to the expected (or rejected) life
phases. Building on this approach, Mette Ringsted, who explored the role
of teenage mothers in Tanzania, demonstrates how teenage mothers who
supposedly had to care for their newborns rejected the new duties involved
and relegated them to their own mothers. When teenage mothers neglect
their children or hand them over to their own mothers, they chose to
continue being “children” by performing children’s roles, while the infant’s
carers—grandmothers in this case—have to resume their mothering roles
again (Ringsted 2008). Hence, even motherhood does not necessarily, as
is often assumed, bring an end to youth and introduce adulthood—the
boundary crossing also proves to be reversible.
In this volume almost all chapters address the impact of the life-course
on care and vice versa. Three chapters, however, place the life-course at
the center of their argument. In Chapter 8, Tabea Häberlein examines the
particular situation of the elderly in Togo who have to rely on the assumptions
underlying the so-called generational contract in order to secure
their well-being in times of weakness and dependence. Obviously, in a
place where hardly any public social security institutions function adequately,
this contract cannot be invoked by legal means. Those of the
younger generation who provide care tend to refer to a normative understanding
of generational reciprocity. In contrast to Liebelt’s and Skornia’s
studies, in which elderly care was performed with the aim of earning
money and transferring it to people back in the carer’s country of origin,
Häberlein describes family members who do not perceive their caring
activities as a kind of work. Rather, they consider it to be a kind of
generational reciprocity and kinship activity related to the individual’s
specific age class-related stage within his or her life-course. For this type
of activity she uses the expression “kinning by care,” which is, according
to Häberlein, a key task during the whole life-course.
In Chapter 9, using a different theoretical lens, Cati Coe also focuses
on the temporal dimension of care during the life-course, which needs to
be “orchestrated” within a family and needs to take into account the different,
sometimes interdependent and sometimes divergent, life-courserelated
transitions of other family members. She argues that Ghanaian
transnational migrants try to entrain multiple linked lives because doing
so is the key to being a respected person who fulfills what he or she is
entrusted with. One way to do this is through migration because one can
H e i k e D r o t b o h m a n d E r d m u t e A l b e r 13
accumulate the necessary resources to demonstrate the social maturity of
caring for others in more precarious situations. The regulation of crossborder
mobility, she shows, complicates this endeavor, as it creates delays
that ignore the process of growing up or elderly people’s declining health.
Coe pinpoints the multiple ways in which Ghanaian migrants adapt to
these challenges and create alternative chronotopic strategies for filling
care slots and compensating for absences.
In Chapter 10, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg concentrates on
Cameroonian migrant mothers in Germany and the multiple forms of
belonging (and nonbelonging) that they forge through their reproductive
and care practices. Being pregnant, giving birth, having children, and caring
for children tie mothers to different social and institutional spheres.
Geographically distant kin, fellow migrants, and German institutions
give mothers moral support, practical help, cash entitlements, and social
services. Feldman-Savelsberg also shows that striving for the sense of positive
value and recognition that comes with belonging affects mothers’
reproductive decisions, the care they receive, and how they care for their
children.
In addition, she describes how the bureaucratic system of health control
can contribute to a structuring of life stages such as childhood or
youth. In both Chapters 10 and 4, it becomes obvious that institutions
can provide assistance not only with regard to decisions, but especially in
matters of practical, technical, and medical concern. In moments of
important biographical transitions, but also at times of personal crisis,
care institutions are expected to provide emotional backing and reduce
the responsibility as well as the burden of the individual carer. At the same
time, institutions can substitute for family members and set normative
standards for how care should be carried out in an adequate manner. This
aspect of monitoring and control, which can go along with care practices,
needs to be understood as a possible pitfall of care, which might serve the
creation of asymmetric power relations and reinforce patterns of dependence
(Robinson 2011).2
In Feldman-Savelsberg’s example, Cameroonian female migrants
understand their position within German society through their caring
activities: they read medical documents, such as the Mutterpass3
or
Kinderuntersuchungsheft,4
in order to pursue their “mothering career,” as
she calls it, and also as a way to structure the life-course-related stages
through state actors. These medical documents require, and encourage
but also eventually force, mothers to visit a medical institution. In general,
the notion of care invites us to reflect on the normativity of practices
that are meant to respect the order of the life-course. Chapter 10 also
shows what happens with these practices and norms if they are reorganized
across national borders.
A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l P e r s p e c t i v e s o n C a r e14
In line with these thoughts, we are particularly interested in both the
political and moral connotations of the notion of care and in the processes
in which these nuances and standards are produced. These are articulated
in debates over “good standards” of care that have to be negotiated between
actors of different status groups and power hierarchies. Care in these institutional
contexts can even be understood as a fiction, serving the interests
of both care providers and care recipients, whose moral positions are
defined through expectations regarding the provision or reception of care.
Conclusion
In this volume, care emerges as a notion that transcends categorical
boundaries: moving between different institutions and actors, times and
places, care connects its recipients and its providers and crosses private
and institutionalized settings. In doing so, it brings together individuals,
relatives, working relations, communal services, societies, policies, and
nation-states. Care traverses national borders and ties together people
living in different areas of the world who nonetheless consider themselves
as belonging to the same social field and, even more important, as belonging
to each other.
In this sense, care connects different categories of anthropological
thought: work, kinship, and the life-course. We argue that these categories
need to be discussed in terms of their mutual interdependence and
constituency. The chapters included in this volume provide examples of
how to combine the three in order to arrive at a better understanding of
the complex ways in which care is perceived, how it is enacted, and what
it contributes to a world in which questions of belonging and relatedness,
services, obligations, emotions, and often hierarchical positions of provision
and reception refer to constantly changing empirical grounds. Our
reflections on the interdependencies among work, kinship, and the lifecourse
could be extended to a more general rethinking of these three key
concepts in the social sciences. The next chapters shed light on these complex
entanglements and will stimulate fruitful discussions on the multiple
meanings of care as a cultural and social practice.
Notes
1. In our volume, the emphasis is not on the conceptual distinctions between
labor and work, since these are not differentiated similarly in the literature. We
mainly use the concept of work, but refer to labor if others do so.
2. We appreciate Caroline Bledsoe’s comment on the meaning of monitoring in
the context of care, which she contributed during the conference “Rethinking
Care,” organized in Berlin in December 2012.
H e i k e D r o t b o h m a n d E r d m u t e A l b e r 15
3. A “mother’s pass” is a document given to every mother in Germany that documents
the health examinations of the mother and the newborn child.
4. A “child’s examination booklet” is a document given to every newborn child
in Germany, that documents the results of the child’s obligatory medical
health checks.
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