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- Convenors:
-
Giuseppe Troccoli
(Universidad Católica de Temuco)
Angélica Cabezas-Pino (Universidad de La Frontera)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Assumptions of care as inherently good have been unsettled, revealing its entanglement with its apparent opposites. It is time to place the care–violence nexus centre stage. What theoretical, analytical, and methodological possibilities emerge when they are examined explicitly together?
Long Abstract
Anthropologists have long engaged with the concept of care, exploring its relationship with abandonment, neglect, harm, exclusion, suffering, and control. These dynamics emerge both when care is reduced or absent, and as intended or unintended consequences of practices and discourses centred on care itself. Such work has deepened our understanding of care by revealing its complexity and contradictions. Yet, while care has been directly linked to its apparent opposites, it has been less frequently examined in relation to violence.
Now that care is no longer unequivocally associated with the “good”, it is time to advance an understanding of care—and of violence—that addresses these two concepts directly. We ask what possibilities emerge when violence is seen as manifesting through the absence of care, through care itself, or even as care. This is not only to unsettle assumptions about care, but to extend our understanding of both care and violence, each with longstanding anthropological trajectories and distinct theoretical lenses for capturing human experience.
This panel invites theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that centre on care and violence, including those engaging with the following questions:
– How might care and violence offer new perspectives on a world increasingly polarised, where care often becomes a language of sameness and violence an act directed towards otherness?
– What insights into care and violence arise from ethnography, given the often ambivalent and unsettling lessons from those who practise or receive them?
– What methodological innovations are needed to confront the conundrums of researching care and violence?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography in a primary healthcare facility, this presentation examines how care and violence intertwine in the treatment of a chronic condition such as hypertension. It shows how moral judgments, racialization processes, and routine delays turn care itself into a form of violence.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines the intimate entanglement of care and violence through the ethnographic case of Geny, a non-white woman living with hypertension and severe circulatory complications in the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in a public primary healthcare service, it explores how violence emerges not only through the absence of care, but also through care practices themselves, particularly in the management of chronic illness. Geny’s condition, ischemia progressing toward cyanosis and requiring urgent surgical intervention, was repeatedly acknowledged as severe, yet systematically treated as something that could wait. Despite formal referrals and clinical recognition of urgency, hospitals refused to admit her, sending her back home to “await” specialized care. This repeated deferral shows how chronicity can operate as a temporal form of violence, in which deterioration unfolds through delays framed as routine care management. Engaging María Puig de la Bellacasa’s question “how to care?”, the presentation interrogates not how to provide more care, but how care is enacted, withheld, or transformed into harm within unequal healthcare systems. Violence here is neither exceptional nor external to care, but it materializes through everyday clinical routines, moral judgments, and classificatory practices that racialize patients and legitimize inaction. By foregrounding ethnography, this presentation contributes to anthropological debates on care and violence, showing how their entanglement reshapes experiences of chronicity and raises ethical and methodological challenges for studying care in contexts where harm is produced through its very practices.
Paper short abstract
In this paper, I examine the kinship relationship between mothers and daughters in southern Chile through what I conceptualize as “violent care.” These forms of care are significant insofar as they are activated when daughters confront situations of violence in adulthood.
Paper long abstract
This paper seeks to complicate and move beyond the dichotomy that frames gender violence research in terms of a female victim versus a male perpetrator. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in southern Chile, I analyze the relationship constructed between women identified as victims of gender-based violence and their mothers. Within a sociocultural context marked by impoverishment, racialization, and persistently tense gender relations, mothers and their daughters creatively weave and unweave their kinship ties. Among the main findings, I argue that the continuity of various forms of violence operating at the social level can be transformed into “violent care” practices enacted by mothers toward their daughters. These “violent care” practices—or their lingering effects—are reactivated in daughters’ adult lives, playing a crucial role when they confront gender-based violence and evaluate how to position themselves and how to act in response to these experiences.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines care not as the moral opposite of violence, but as one of its most legitimate and durable forms. Violence is enacted through everyday languages of concern and responsibility, where caring becomes a means of control.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines care not as the ethical opposite of violence, but as one of its most durable and socially legitimate forms. Drawing on long term research on coercion in mental health systems in Southern Europe and ongoing fieldwork on pasung in Indonesia, it analyses how practices framed as protection, treatment, or responsibility systematically enable domination, silencing, and bodily harm. In these settings, violence is rarely articulated as such. It is instead embedded in everyday languages of concern, duty, and benevolence, where to care for someone becomes synonymous with controlling them for their own good.
The analysis combines ethnographic material, institutional documents, and first person accounts to show how care operates as a moral technology that neutralizes contestation. Psychiatric interventions, family mediated confinement, and administrative decisions are justified through appeals to vulnerability, incapacity, or risk, while those subjected to them are progressively deprived of credibility and agency. The paper argues that this configuration produces a specific epistemic asymmetry, in which harm becomes invisible precisely because it is enacted through care.
Methodologically, the paper reflects on the conditions required to study care related violence without reproducing its effects. It addresses the risks faced by researchers working in close proximity to victims, the limits of institutional protection, and the ethical implications of relying on state or medical authorities as interlocutors. By placing care and violence in direct analytical relation, the paper rise awareness of care as a contested social practice whose moral authority demands continuous scrutiny rather than presumption.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in western Kenya, this paper examines okuseno eshisero, a postpartum ritual, to show how care and violence are co-produced within reproductive practices oriented toward securing fertility under conditions of uncertainty and patriarchal authority.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in Khwisero, western Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines how care and violence are co-produced within reproductive practices oriented toward securing fertility under uncertainty. The analysis centres on okuseno eshisero, a postpartum ritual requiring husbands to perform minimal vaginal penetration after childbirth, widely understood as care that "opens the womb," restores reproductive balance, and prevents spiritual affliction. Methodologically, the paper attends to moments of hesitation, delay, refusal, and compliance in ritual practice, treating these not as deviations but as analytical sites where moral evaluations of care and violence become visible. I argue that care and violence are not stable categories but relational effects emerging through enactment, timing, and anticipated outcomes. Whether okuseno eshisero is experienced as protective care or embodied violence depends on how the ritual is performed, who controls its conditions, and whether it secures future fertility.
Theoretically, the paper advances a pragmatic approach to care and violence, showing their inseparability within gendered hierarchies of reproductive authority. While the ritual situates women's bodies within male-mediated moral orders, women actively navigate these constraints through strategic compliance, selective refusal, and alternative therapeutic itineraries. COVID-19 vaccination intensified these negotiations. Many women feared vaccines would "close the womb" prematurely, disrupting temporal and moral sequences through which reproductive futures are secured. Vaccine hesitancy emerges as pragmatic reproductive reasoning rather than misinformation, revealing care and violence as intertwined modes of navigating uncertain reproductive futures under conditions of gendered constraint.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in the Swiss penal system, this contribution seeks to complicate the relationship between state care and state violence, moving beyond binary conceptions of both.
Paper long abstract
This contribution reflects on ethnographic research into state-provided alternatives to imprisonment in Switzerland. In this setting, “care” has become central for professional practice: sentenced people are addressed as “clients” (Klient:innen), social workers replace the traditional role of wards, and “caretakers” (Betreuer:innen) accompany individuals throughout their sentences. Drawing on ethnographic material from this field—which is inherently punitive and thus retains state violence at its core—this paper seeks to complicate the relationship between state care and state violence, and to move beyond binary understandings. Rather than evaluating whether state servants act in caring ways or exercise violence, it argues for a shift in analytical attention towards how care and violence emerge as relationally, situationally, and practically entangled—or even as the same thing—in the everyday of the penal system.
The paper invites reflection on how we can critically analyse such caring modes of punishment and their role in confronting and addressing precarity and vulnerabilities—precarity and vulnerabilities that the criminal justice system itself simultaneously intensifies, as extensive empirical research has shown. Ethnographically engaging with everyday practices may help not only to grapple with this paradox but also to illuminate this often normalised status quo as a form of slow, ordinary violence; one that obscures the socially selective conditions under which state punishment operates, while maintaining the collective and often hostile fiction of punitive (and no other form of) justice as inevitable and unquestioned.
Paper short abstract
how does an otherwise violent institution enact care for families bereaved by suicides? the involvement of police in suicide prevention programmes presents a fruitful ground to explore the mutually constitutive nature of care and violence within mental health infrastructure in Tharparkar, Pakistan.
Paper long abstract
The discovery of coal reserves and its subsequent extraction through China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in the last decade transformed the socioeconomic and ecological landscape of Tharparkar, Pakistan’s largest and arguably the poorest district. During the same time, the news of alarmingly high number of suicides, largely among young Hindu women from scheduled castes, have created cause for concern among various public and private health actors on local and regional levels. This concern has led to a series of mental health interventions aimed towards Tharri people. These interventions together form a makeshift health infrastructure, where actors improvise providing care in absence of sufficient funding and support from the state.
In this paper, I focus on one actor within this infrastructure, the local police, and examine two aspects of their involvement in suicide prevention in Tharparkar: the bureaucratic process of producing evidence of a suicide ‘crisis’ and managing ‘anti-suicide cells’ in local police stations. While policing in Pakistan is associated with physical violence and brutality, Tharparkar police officials see themselves as agents of care. Through fieldwork carried out over 14 months in Tharparkar and neighbouring cities, I demonstrate how police officials understand their work as caregivers for bereaved families. Doing so, I argue that, through relying on intuition and embodied cultural norms, the police involvement in suicide prevention enacts forms of structural violence (Gupta 2014) that they nevertheless understand as acts of care. The paper illuminates the mutually constitutive nature of violence and care in mental health work in South Asia.
Paper short abstract
Building on my experience as a prison ethnographer, student activist, and mentor to incarcerated students, this paper offers an intervention on the possibilities of doing ethnography in a way that takes seriously the intricate and immutable intertwining between violence and care.
Paper long abstract
Lebanon’s state institutions are mostly discussed in relation to an absence or lack of care. Yet care is administered by state and non-state institutions in unlikely, contradictory, and subtle ways. These care mechanisms work alongside practices of domination and control rather than countering or undoing them. My paper takes Lebanon’s prison system as a case study towards analyzing how the state’s dual impulses to govern and tend to the population intersect in disturbing ways as well as the implications this may have for anthropological research. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with ten former prisoners in Lebanon, I examine the forms of care that are undertaken by prison authorities to trace how care is experienced, channeled, and reverberated through the state/carceral violence – and what forms of resistance or refusal are subsequently possible. How to conduct fieldwork with and “care” for one’s interlocutors without reproducing or reiterating carceral violence, surveillance, control? What might an ethics of care, reciprocity, and solidarity look like in such circumstances? Building on my experience as a prison ethnographer, student activist, and mentor to incarcerated students, this paper offers an intervention on the possibilities of doing ethnography in a way that takes seriously the intricate and immutable intertwining between violence and care.
Paper short abstract
In a rural Pehuenche community in southern Chile, COVID-19 containment reactivated dense networks of care while expanding local and state surveillance. Following women’s accounts, I show how “protection” became a hinge through which care was enacted as control and, at times, as racialised violence.
Paper long abstract
This paper places the care–violence nexus at the centre of an account of COVID-19 in Pehuencura, a rural Pehuenche (Mapuche) community in Lonquimay, southern Chile. The paper’s guiding question—how care, surveillance, violence, and protection become entangled in pandemic experience—emerges from a local paradox: “Those who beat us on the other side of the tunnel, now come to care?”
Drawing on repeated phone interviews with three Pehuenche women (conducted fortnightly over two months), complemented by local media tracking and later retrospective conversations, I examine how care was practised through—and sometimes indistinguishable from—technologies of control. Within the community, kinship, neighbourhood and church networks intensified support for elders and families, yet also enabled micro-surveillance (of young people, visitors and outsiders) and a collectively organised sanitary barrier at the community entrance.
Simultaneously, state “care” arrived as emergency cash transfers and food boxes, while external surveillance expanded via police patrols and public-health enforcement.
i trace how violence surfaces not only as an absence of care (historical neglect of services), but through care itself: funerary restrictions that broke communal rites, racialised stigma, and a violent episode in a neigbouring city where “order” and “health” rationales aligned with anti-Mapuche hostility.
By foregrounding women’s situated decisions—who to let in, who to accompany, who to fear—this paper argues for understanding care and violence as co-produced within pandemic governance, rather than as moral opposites.