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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how moral economies of care are negotiated amid everyday violence in diasporic and transnational contexts. It advances a theory of diasporic ethics, in which the pervasive structures of inequity and neglect underpin everyday ethical decision among post-colonial communities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the moral economies of care are negotiated amid the slow erosion enacted by everyday violence in diasporic and transnational contexts. It advances a theory of diasporic ethics, in which aspirations, orientations, imaginations, and translations of values are entangled with the pervasive structures of inequity and neglect that underpin everyday ethical decision among post-colonial communities.

Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork with Yoruba women and their families in London and Nigeria, the paper explores how mothers’ narratives of loss generate shifting alignments and polarisations in moral judgment. It centres on one Yoruba woman who loses her firstborn child to the consternation of religious female peers, and a decade later, deliberates whether to attend the funeral of a female pastor’s son. “That Oyinbo land has changed her”, is a third-person narrative the mother projects onto herself, voicing collective judgment while simultaneously resisting it. The utterance reveals how collective moral voices inhabit the everyday (Mattingly 2014) through narrative (Das 2012) and practice.

At the same time, the narrative demonstrates how violence is recast through a ‘new lexicon of moral sentiments’ (Fassin 2012), in which structural inequities are translated into personal moral failings, and community alienation for perceived moral wrongs is construed as care. By combining ethnography with attention to narrative and ethical entanglements lived and enacted, this paper reveals how moral economies of care emerge within, and in response to, structural violence, and how judgment and moral repair among post colonial communities are underpinned by a recognition of shared precarity.