Paper Short Abstract:

Based on ethnographic work with palliative care volunteers of one association in Zagreb (Croatia) this paper discusses the notion of love as a signifier of volunteers’ professionality. Even though Croatia lacks an institutional framework for transmitting an ‘appropriate’ cultivation of love paramount to liberal democracies (Nussbaum, 2013; Brković, fortcoming), this lack of institutionalisation paradoxically enables volunteers to develop a meaning of love as a skill which is nurtured throughout their lives and carefully employed to demarcate their professional boundaries.

Paper Abstract:

Based on ethnographic work with palliative care (PC) volunteers of one association in Zagreb (Croatia) in 2021 and 2022 this paper discusses the notion of love as a signifier of volunteers’ professionality. For the philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2013) love is the means through which liberal democracies acquire justice, with a ‘right’ form of institutionalised pedagogy being crucial in that process. Drawing from here, anthropologist Čarna Brković (forthcoming) in her work on humanitarian practices in Montenegro argues that such pedagogy of love has not been entirely successful in the post-Yugoslav region as these countries still have some work to do in educating their citizens to love ‘properly’, which prevents them to become full members of Western democracies. Even though Croatia lacks an institutional framework – particularly in the field of PC – for transmitting an ‘appropriate’ cultivation of love, this lack of institutionalisation paradoxically enables volunteers in Zagreb to develop a meaning of love that is not simply ‘there’, an inexhaustible (self-renewable) source of energy, but a skill that is nurtured throughout their lives and employed to demarcate their professional boundaries. This understanding of love is also shaped by the Catholic context of the association and the country’s ‘custodial’ relationship to volunteerism manifested in the need of state to control volunteering and civil society, while simultaneously not providing sufficient conditions for its development.