Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the role everyday forms of attention play in assistance provided between co-resident members of a disabled and deaf women’s organisation (and their children) in a Ugandan market. It pays particular attention to the socio-spatial bases of ‘somatic modes of attention.’

Paper long abstract:

In an intellectual context in which discussions of attention predominantly focus on attention as a scarce resource, this paper expands on an insight from literature on practices of mindfulness: that valued forms of attention can be cultivated through bodily-mental practice. However, rather than looking at people who deliberately foster the capacities of their own (individual) minds, I consider how ordinary repeated bodily-mental acts of attention sediment in collective intersubjective space. Drawing on anthropological work on care and the body, I examine the role that everyday forms of attention play in the intersubjective forms of assistance provided by co-resident members of a disabled and deaf women’s organisation (and their children) in a Ugandan market. I identify a specific ‘somatic mode of attention’ (Csordas, 1993) that is prevalent among this social grouping, which is characterised by a disposition to attend to bodily-mental variation and to perceive and address the needs for assistance created by misfits between non-normative body-minds and social environments. This is similar to what Dokumacı calls ‘care intimacy’ (Dokumacı, 2020) – routine ‘unspoken’ attention paid to others’ needs for assistance. However, where Dokumacı investigates pairs of carer and disabled person, I focus on a dense collective of disabled people, investigating how the spatial, temporal, and relational features of this urban grouping produce the affective engagements that elicit attention to needs for assistance. In doing so, I demonstrate the importance of considering the materiality of social spaces to understanding the development of ‘care intimacy’ and other desired forms of attention.