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Contribution short abstract

Drawing on fieldwork with rural women doing informal piecework in eastern China, this paper explores how care, ethics, and affects entangled in elderly lives. It proposes “collective care”: a semi-public atmosphere of labor, humor, bodies, and care that sustains coexistence beyond empathy.

Contribution long abstract

Drawing on two periods of fieldwork conducted in 2024 and 2025 in an eastern Chinese village, this paper examines how the non-stop laboring tendency, fragile affects, and care are entangled in villagers’ ordinary lives, especially older women engaged in informal piecework. Moving beyond accounts centered on structural precarity or individual agency, we approach “tendency” as a historically and bodily sedimented combination, paying more attention to affective atmospheres and ordinary ethics, and a new imagination about relationship to understand their life.

Yet fatigue does not fully organize the experience or atmosphere of this labor. In semi-public domestic spaces, light and interruptible work unfolds alongside sunlight, humor, silence, and talk of illness, aging, and death. We call the nurturing atmosphere generated through these elements “collective care”. It emerges through the bodies, through the relationships in which the bodies enter the world rather than through asymmetric caregiving roles. Within it, fatigue and other fragile emotions remain present without always occupying the center of attention and are distributed to all elements.

The paper develops “bearing witness through presence” as a way that villagers enter a state of seeing, hearing, mutually understanding, and remaining with one another while preserving distance to care for each other through the scene of people watching a funeral from across a river. We ask how people continue to inhabit the world together amid labor, pain, care and vulnerability, and we offer an ethnography of the present while gesturing toward “the not yet”, and toward another possibility for living with others.