Paper short abstract:

I discuss how crises complicates care to the degree that people who are unable to turn towards the state for help, turn away also from each other. Poverty in rural Estonia provides the backdrop against which to discuss the institutional and communal changes and the ability to care for and care about.

Paper long abstract:

The times of crises and stringent measures on the national level in Estonia have been experienced by the rural population for the last two decades. This long-term situation has implications on the daily ability of people to care for themselves and their immediate and wider social circles. As the state is rolled back, communal self-help has been touted as the key to replacing state welfare systems. I will look at the South East Estonian fragmented ex-communal-farm villages where poverty and stratification, triggered by post-Soviet changes and matured in neoliberal conditions, have driven people to avoid caring and being cared for by each other. By contrasting this with the community development initiatives and activities to care for community, I will demonstrate how inclusions and exclusions generated by such focuses on the community affect the vulnerable individuals who are assumed to benefit from those endeavours.

I will approach those processes from the framework of Foucaultian theory of governmentality and its extensions by Nikolas Rose, to discuss how the “new technologies of power” help those in positions of responsibility and power to establish institutionally the requirement of self-care and its extensions, such as the care for one’s social environment, community and ultimately, the state itself. Not caring and/or avoiding care appear in such circumstances to generate new hierarchies of deserving and undeserving poor and deserving and undeserving communities.