Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I conceptualize care trajectories as narratively layered ethical processes that may unfold in, and conjure, nonlinear temporalities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on HIV care in Indonesia, I show how attending to narratives and silences point us towards moral ambiguities of care.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Aceh, Indonesia, this paper follows the quest for diagnosis and treatment of pain symptoms of one HIV-positive woman, Rina, to show how ambiguities of care are folded into nonlinear narratives and temporalities that make up care trajectories. Over a period of almost one year full of frustrating biomedical consultations and other healing efforts, she told me and others stories about her past and present struggles, with each narrative expanding, revisiting or undoing previous accounts. Rina’s subjunctive narratives invoke possible causes of her symptoms and future (im)possibilities of healing. Her stories reveal experiences of care across institutional boundaries of the clinic and the family as continuously ambivalent, entangling violence and responsiveness (Garcia 2010, Stevenson 2014, Varma 2020). By attending to the gaps, tensions and potentialities of these folding and unfolding narratives, and by building on anthropological scholarship that shows how the nonlinearity and ambiguity inherent in many narrative acts is fundamental to navigating situations of trouble in everyday life (Ochs and Capps 2001, Pinto 2014, Shohet 2021), I conceptualize care trajectories as narratively layered ethical processes that may unfold in, and conjure, nonlinear temporalities. The uncertainties, silences, and sideshadowing narratives (Shohet 2021) that shaped Rina’s trajectory and suffused the fraught affectivity of her social relations, moreover, destabilize boundaries of clinic and family, biomedicine and religion, and point us towards the moral ambiguities of care.