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- Convenors:
-
Letizia Bonanno
Ahmad Moradi (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
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- Discussant:
-
Tatjana Thelen
(University of Vienna)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Health and Medicine
- Start time:
- 19 June, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how rules and their transgressions shape relations of care.Given the substantial opacity of care as an array of practices, expectations and moral imageries, we draw attention to the ways in which relations of care are entangled with forms of violence and acts of transgression.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores how rules and their transgressions shape relations of care.Given the opacity of care as an array of practices, expectations and moral imageries, we want to draw attention to the ways in which relations of care are entangled with forms of violence and acts of transgression.Anthropological scholarship describes care either as a moral good or services which can be paid for, as well as practices that create intimate relationships and uncanny forms of dependency.Care seems to also imply rules which dictate how, when and where care can be sought for, provided and enacted, granted and denied.Relationships created through care follow interpersonal and institutional rules whose transgression can influence collective and individual experiences of care, fraught with varying degrees of violence.However not all transgressions of rules are violating; they may even be generative of care relations. As humanitarian studies point out, provisioning care to undocumented migrants often entails the transgression of state regulations.Similarly many self-organised medical initiatives which have spread across Europe delve in an ambiguous domain where the boundaries between formality and informality, legality and illegality dramatically blur. In other contexts, transgressing rigid bureaucratic rules is seen as gestures of care by disabled war veterans.
We thus want to explore the role everyday transgressions of rules plays in arrangements of care relations.Can an act of care entail transgression or being in itself an act of transgression?How could transgression of rules become generative of care relations?How does ethnographic research offer challenging insights on care and violence as intertwined phenomena?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper examines water quality monitoring in Jerusalem as an act of care, where the transgression of standards and regulations can nurture historical relations of care, forge new bonds, and crystallise forms of slow violence. What constitutes both care and transgression is brought into question.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, care is examined in the context of water infrastructure in Jerusalem, as a utility network which performs an act of public health for the city. The focus is water quality, where at the particulate scale levels of bacteria, chemicals and minerals are meticulously monitored in the Jerusalem water utility lab through daily tests, seen by those who enact them as manifestations of a strategy of prevention to keep residents healthy and safe. International water quality standards and national water regulations are the rules which govern these care practices. When moments of transgression are driven by residents in certain neighbourhoods, they can nurture a different kind of caring relation with water which challenges its centralisation, and its politics. When moments of transgression take place within the water utility, they expand lines of responsibility to include service provision beyond municipal boundaries, which simultaneously extends care through good quality water and consolidates an infrastructure seen by some as deeply troubling.
Based on ongoing doctoral ethnographic research, these rules and their transgressions are traced to complicate understandings of care in a time of climate crisis. What constitutes both care, and transgression, is brought into question.
Care here – and the crossing of its contours – is explored in a constellation of intimate relations that encompass questions of environmental justice and slow violence, and spans infrastructures, the materiality of water, and the visceral affective experiences of daily lives.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores 'rule breaking' in an Italian eating disorders treatment centre. It suggests that patients’ everyday transgressions of rules, far from being simply acts of resistance to care that boycott treatment, end up generating more care, a kind of unruly care with double-edged consequences.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on fourteen months of doctoral fieldwork, the paper explores practices of rule breaking in an Italian residential treatment centre for eating disorders. On admission, patients are required to sign a therapeutic contract, which contains essential information regarding the organisation of the residential facility and establishes patients' 'rights and responsibilities’ during treatment. These include respecting a long list of rules – e.g. compulsory participation to the weekly group activities; being collaborative with 'nutritional therapy’; avoiding purging and other ‘compensatory behaviours’; avoiding self-harming behaviours; avoiding alcohol, drugs, laxatives and diuretics. Sustained transgression of the rules over time typically results in the treatment team questioning the patient’s motivation for treatment, and into a week of ‘pause for reflection’ which can lead to discharge. This is done on the ground that the waiting list for this public service is long, and that if a patient is not ‘motivated enough’, her spot could be better employed for someone else.
By focusing on the cases of three patients, I suggest that patients’ persistent transgressions of rules, far from being simply acts of resistance to care that boycott treatment and result into treatment discharge, can also function as a demand for care and be generative of more care. At the same time, these acts require the treatment team to themselves 'break the rules’ of treatment for the sake of patients, often with double-edged consequences for both patients’ lives and professionals’ own wellbeing.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses prayer meetings in private homes of Roma Pentecostals in England during the Covid-19 pandemic when visiting other households was not permitted, and asks what forms of care can exist in situations where rules are transgressed and which create increased risk of virus transmission.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses prayer meetings in private homes of Roma Pentecostals in England during the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on informal online and in person conversations with Roma that took place during the summer and autumn of 2020. Even though the British government put in place measures that limited the number of people with whom a person could interact, and there were periods of time when visiting other households was not allowed, Roma from the Life and Light Church continued to meet regularly for prayer meetings, thus breaking the restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the virus. Considering that many of those who belong to the Church are in a high-risk category for complications from Covid and there is an increased risk of transmission when people pray aloud next to each other, is it possible to look at these meetings as involving care? This paper argues that participating in religious meetings where people pray for others, both those who present and those who are absent, is a form of care even though it involves transgressing state-created regulations. Prayer is an intangible form of care, yet it is these expressions of care that help to forge, shape, and maintain social relationships. Additionally, the Church provides material support, in the form of financial, food or clothes collections and participating in Church activities, like prayer meetings, can help gain access to this material help in situations when access to state-provided care and material help is limited or absent.