Anthropological Perspectives on Care Work, Kinship, and the Life-Course

In the course of last two decades, the notion of care has become prominent in the social and cultural sciences. As a result of this proliferation of care in several disciplinary fields, we are observing not only the expansion of its conceptual meaning, but also an increasing imprecision in its usage. A growing amount of literature focuses on the intersection between work, gender, ethnicity, affect, and mobility regimes. In view of this growing field of literature, Anthropological Perspectives on Care looks at the notion of care from an anthropological perspective. Complementing earlier approaches, Alber and Drotbohm argue that an interpretation of care in relation to three different concepts, namely work, kinship and the life-course, will facilitate empirical and conceptual distinctions between the different activities that are labeled as care.

Erdmute Alber is Professor of Social Anthropology at Bayreuth University, Germany.

Heike Drotbohm is Associate Professor and Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

1. Introduction; Heike Drotbohm and Erdmute Alber
PART I: CARE AS WORK
2.The Gift of Care: On Filipina Domestic Workers and Transnational Cycles of Care; Claudia Liebelt
3.Renegotiating Child and Aged Care in the Context of Family Migration: Transnational Arrangements and Entangled Inequalities between Peru and Italy; Anna Skornia
4.Of Grooming Bodies and Caring Souls: New Old Forms of Care Work in Berlin's Brazilian Waxing Salons; Maria Lidola
PART II: CARE AS KINSHIP
5.Shifting Care among Families, Social Networks and State Institutions in Times of Crisis. A transnational Cape Verdean Perspective; Heike Drotbohm
6.How Internationally Adoptive Parents Become Transnational Parents: 'Cultural' Orientation as Transnational Care; Jessaca Leinaweaver
7.Elder Care, Migration and Constructing the 'Self': Explorations from Rural Romania; Tatjana Thelen
PART III: CARE AND THE LIFE COURSE
8.Intergenerational Entanglements: – Insights into Perceptions of Care for the Elderly and Life Courses in Northern Togo; Tabea Häberlein
9.The Temporality of Care: Gender, Migration, and the Entrainment of Life Courses; Cati Coe
10. Mothers on the Move: Mobility and Intensive Care Work among Cameroonian Migrants to Germany; Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg