Paper short abstract:

Precarious households in Dakar increasingly manage “multiple manifestations” of malnourishment, from stunting to diabetes. These divergent experiences pique epidemiological interest in the domestic distribution of food and the cultural politics of nourishment.

Paper long abstract:

Low income and precarious households in Dakar increasingly manage a « double burden » of malnutrition. These households contain “multiple manifestations” of malnourishment including stunting, wasting, overweight, and diet related chronic diseases, in particular diabetes and hypertension. As debility in middle age and at the end of life becomes ubiquitous, practices of eating and sharing food are increasingly blamed. The emergence of metabolic syndrome in the heart of households appears to signal a maldistribution of household nutritional resources, piquing interest in a range of cultural practices associated with the domestic division and distribution of food. Meanwhile people living in precarious and low income households ask pointed and pertinent questions about connections between insecurity, proletarianisation and chronicity. Moving between epidemiology and household ethnography I examine the epidemiological sense made of cultural practice as nourishment becomes a new kind of global problem. Diagnoses introduce unfamiliar and unappealing nutritional repertoires in households built on solidarity and collective eating. Young women struggle to provide "good care" to their older relatives as safe nourishment increasingly means restricting access to shared food.

Paper short abstract:

We examine the medicalization of households using the lens of Hoarding Disorder (HD). Using interviews with patients/clinicians, and representations of HD in the media, we analyze contested beliefs about pathological household practices to both critique and better understand models of the household.

Paper long abstract:

Households of patients diagnosed with Hoarding Disorder (HD) have become contested as sites for domestic, psychological, bureaucratic, media, and professional management interventions. Since 2013, HD has been formally included in the DSM-V, a manual for diagnosis used by American Psychiatry, and is defined as a persistent difficulty associated with discarding possessions. In order to diagnose HD, clinicians often consider not only the patient, but also their home space. This paper uses a careful examination of the ways that clinicians, professional organizers, and individuals with hoarding problems come to understand households as “sick” or “well,” “normal” or “abnormal” and “homey” or “uninhabitable,” to critically unpack these binary concepts. We further seek to apply this critique of normative household practices beyond HD to better understand models of households and homes.Using 30 semi-structured interviews with clinical experts, we examine the process of HD diagnosis. We combine this analysis with talk of domesticity and homes within several long-running reality television shows featuring individuals with HD. Finally, we draw from 30 interviews with individuals diagnosed with HD, in which they describe their notions of space and household. In the encounter of these different groups and interventions, “households” and “hoarding disorders” become mutually shaped and constituted through practices, ideas, and evaluations of hygienic standards, household management, mental diagnoses, waste disposal, and food and storage practices, and family socialities. These fraught dialogues provide a lens through which normative models of domesticity, homes, and household become visible, as well as suggesting productive avenues for critique and reimaginings.

Paper short abstract:

In 2014, Peru declared that Indigenous peoples in Amazonia are ‘extremely poor’. Since then, the lives of Shipibo children are permeated by social programmes. This paper looks at how State interventions are altering household dynamics and childhood experiences in a rural Shipibo village.

Paper long abstract:

Shipibo-Konibo parents and elders complain that younger generations are becoming like the mestizos. They are lazier, weaker and lack interest in Shipibo culture. The responsibility for this change is mostly placed on children’s themselves, but also on the school, ‘where they learn to value modernity’. Shipibo children are at the centre of development policies in Peru. Since 2014, when the country adopted a geographical criterium for the socioeconomic assessment of Indigenous peoples, the native communities in Amazonia are officially classified as ‘extremely poor’. Subsequently, existing social programmes were strengthened in the region and now govern a large portion of children’s lives. With the aim to safeguard the wellbeing of children, the State provides recognised Shipibo communities with conditional cash-transfers (Juntos) and industrialised school meals (Qali Warma). But those programmes come with formal and informal conditionalities, promoting changes in children’s livelihood strategies and food habits. For instance, children spend time in a school without classes instead of learning from their caregivers. They are also more reliant on industrialised food (e.g. canned tuna and dry pasta) than in the local cuisine (based on plantain and fish). Apart from consequences in knowledge transmission and nutrient provision, these changes can be grave as they affect the formation of Shipibo personhood and communal values. Considering parental frustrations with children, I will grapple with the changes of children’s routines and evaluate their detachment from Shipibo modes of living. Then, I will discuss how modern values of childhood, which guide the implementation of social programmes by government staff, may impact cultural transmission and produce this generational gap. The paper acknowledges the importance of State compensation for Shipibo communities, since they endure increasing precarities with the unequal development of Amazonia. However, I argue that Shipibo cosmologies should be valued and incorporated by social programmes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how modalities of care and provision converge within the households of Koya adivasi shifting cultivators. In the form of 3 family profiles I document the seasonal allocation of labour within each household and examine how such responsibilities are locally evaluated.

Paper long abstract:

Pitched against the popular narrative of adivasi transition away from shifting cultivation, towards greater dependency on precarious migrant labour and state Affirmative Action, this paper describes Koya adivasi households as sites where different modalities of care converge. Households are the units to which publicly distributed state grain is allocated; they are measures in the implementation of state-sponsored wage labour for families below the poverty threshold; they are also the units in which traditional mixed-crop, rain-fed shifting cultivation is undertaken on hill slopes, and manifestations of local kinship patterns.

The paper focuses on contrasting logics of provision implicated in different forms of labour: shifting cultivation and sporadic state wage labour (practiced in family units), seasonal migrant labour (undertaken individually), and labour within the home (stratified across genders and generations). The ethnography tracks how three families exemplify competing modes of production and modalities of care, as state healthcare provision and market forces become increasingly intermeshed with local notions of family wellbeing within households.

Significant fluctuations in access to state support, and in the success of seasonal cultivation, mean that inequality between households can quickly become exacerbated to produce class-like divisions between families. Rather than analysing these changes as new class distinctions, the paper suggests that these families are situated between competing generational conceptions of wellbeing and family provisioning which actually overlap within and between households.