Balancing the Quotidian: Precarity, Care and Pace in Anthropology’s Storytelling

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• care
• pace
• caretaking
• storytelling
• quotidian
• anthropology

Introduction

In this special issue of Medical Anthropology, we focus on notions of precarity and care viewed through the lens of pace. We were inspired by Elizabeth Povinelli’s effort to track the way ‘events’ structure ethics in late capitalism (2011; also: 2016). Povinelli brings this to light in Economies of Abandonment (2011), describing a long and dull story about a boat trip in which she and her friends are at risk of capsizing, but never do. Ordinarily such a processual ethnographic moment would be swapped out and replaced by an alarming story about a capsized boat, or another event that makes the high-risk stakes crystal clear. Bravely, she does not take this tack. Following Povinelli, we argue that rather than focusing on catastrophic events, which are often made to carry too much of the narrative meaning, we would do better to turn our attention to the ethical implications of forms of suffering and dying that are “ordinary, chronic and cruddy” (2011: 13). This change in orientation allows ethnographers to take in stories of what might happen, and what does happen (2011: 3). As ethnographers we often miss the full range of life textures when our storytelling focuses solely upon jarring and climatic events. Such adjustments can reorient field sites and interpretations in significant ways, allowing the ethnographer to ‘see’ different aspects of things; and making new modes of attention and understanding possible. These are the ‘events’ that get described as that moment when things finally ‘clicked’. But, back to Povinelli’s boat trip, what happens before that ‘click’, during all the long dull stretches when things are still messy and unextraordinary?

An attention to pace in storytelling, then, we argue is especially critical when engaging in conversations about precarity and care. In this late capitalist landscape storytellers find themselves having to describe seemingly benign structures that actually beat people down and keep them alive just enough to continue participating. It is often in slow and unhurried ways that the harm is done. We are aiming for a mode of storytelling that is itself paced to detect the shell game that creates precarity: delay, forgetfulness, inattention, and misuse. Care itself has become entwined in these late-capitalist strictures, offered in the hope of improving the situation, but too often implicated in the violence of dashing those hopes (see Lovell and Rhodes 2014). To tell these stories and capture their contradictions requires a pacing that can apprehend practices as betwixt and between; and illuminate the ways they flourish, wither, and stagnate under different arrangements of power and practice. Tying pace to both precarity and care, we suggest, opens up a space for novel contributions showing how and why we tell the stories we do, what we expect a story to do in the world, and how our ethnographic practice can shift in critical ways if we pace ourselves and our stories differently. Applying the lens of pace may even heal the breach that has so often fractured classic works, like Bronislaw Malinowski’s, whose scientific writings were produced separately from his diaries. The latter, more free-flowing accounts, allowed the story to unfold at a crawl, creating space for texture and detail, and allowing his own inner boredom and violent assumptions to emerge.

A significant number of works regarding pace have emerged recently, particularly regarding notions of slowness, and ethnographies of care would do well to take their place in this arena (see Adams et al. 2014; Pandian and McClean 2017).¹ This is not to suggest that the mundane and the slow are new phenomena in ethnography. Rather, we simply encourage paying more attention to pace in order to reconceptualize cruddiness and the ordinary as conventions in themselves; as foreground rather than background. Second, we believe that we cannot engage with the meaning of care amidst precarity and precarity amidst care, if we are not attentive to the different versions of care in story telling that pacing creates. Here we are reminded of Marjory Wolf’s A Thrice Told Tale (1992) where she takes a story from her fieldnotes in rural Taiwan from thirty years ago and reinvigorates her analytical lens by telling the story three different ways. First as a piece of fiction, second as unanalyzed fieldnotes and the third as a scholarly conversation on the dilemmas of postmodern analytics. Telling a story three ways means moving through different paces theoretically and analytically where we transform ethnographic storytelling into something timeless.

We also need to consider both the range and the impact of pace in the lives of those we study, therefore, an initial question is, how can an attention to pace capture the ‘cruddy’ in ways that a focus on ‘events’ might miss? In order to look at the laboriousness of the crummy, we may need to reconsider pace in the lives of those with whom we do research, and for whom precarity is a constant bedfellow. With these provisos in mind, we can turn our attention to acts of care, asking, how does caretaking illuminate the compromises and negotiations of disparate players, including those in the positions of receiving and giving care? Can care truly sit between these extremes, allowing the pace and precarious of life to move betwixt them in complicated ways? As we look more deeply into pace itself we may ask, what kinds of paces should we include: dream pace, snail’s pace, or hyper-pace? And can we agree that we miss the broader meaning of care and precariousness if we are not paying attention to the various versions of pace, that is slow, stagnating, pulsating or sharp?

There is some risk in over relying on pace, or using it as an organizing principle, however. Therefore, to a void getting stuck in pace, we focus in this issue on storytelling rather than theory making. This collection shows that stories can grant lives a full range of tempos. While some argue that storytelling has its own pitfalls, that stories can validate, but may also undermine, falsify, or trivialize experience (Woods 2011). We suggest that a way around this problem is to slow the stories down, making them richer, fuller, and ultimately, more honest.

In this collection, we bring together a group of articles that aims to do just that, each drawing on long-term ethnographic research in novel field sites across North and South America and Southeast Asia. Joshua Griffin’s work in Alaska slows the pace of ethnography to the point that we might reinterpret the narrative as a kind of violent ‘whimsy’. In Felicity Aulino’s work, we see how simmering silences and embodied routines of care in Thailand tell us more about democracy, activism, and state violence than ‘events’ that boil over. Marlee McGuire’s piece on neonatal rare diseases traces the laborious pace of orphan drug development, revealing the ways that caretaking is entangled in economies of scientific knowledge in British Columbia, Canada. Laurie Denyer Willis’ work considers temporality and pain in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, showing how attention to the slow pace of bodily movements tells us about the precarity of hope amidst violence. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research, these articles move us to rethink our notions of precarity and care in myriad ways and encourage us to focus on the reason that pace is critical to this work. Slowing our own practice helps us engage with and write ethnographic stories that are fuller deeper, and we suggest, more important in the long run.

A willingness to look at the way tempo, both in stories and experiences, pushes us toward new realities, brings us to one of the most important ways that we are impacted by the times in which we live. We agree with these authors that precarity marks us and our time, and we must notice it and think it through in careful ways. Indeed, while precarity was initially conceptualized as a description of the experience of late-stage capitalism and its tilt toward irregular and contingent work opportunities, anthropologists have since enlarged our understanding of precariousness, noting that precarity is something we can ‘sense’, that it is atmospheric (Allison 2013: 15).

Precarity

The introduction of the term precarity to anthropology can be traced back to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979) early work in Algeria. Bourdieu postulated that precariousness occurs when there is a large reserve labor force available and workers believe themselves to be replaceable (Jonna and Foster 2016). The precarious situation of laborers is far from being a new topic, it has long been the subject of socialist and Marxist critiques (see Engels 1892; Marx 1996). While precariousness is linked to the contradictions of capitalism, and subject to decades of research in the social sciences, recently the term has resurfaced and been applied to subjects beyond the conditions of working life. To paraphrase and quote Appay (2010: 34), the term precariat comes from a contraction of the words ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’, where it regroups “the unemployed and the precarious (manual and intellectual) workers in struggle in all sectors of activity”.

Jumping forward to contemporary anthropology, Allison (2013, 2016) in Precarious Japan, notes that across the globe, societies that once relied on lattices of work relations for stability can no longer count on this structure being the support it once was. This is because work provides not only income and a job, but an identity and a lifestyle. As employment becomes precarious the desire for security increases and society itself comes under stress. Marx’s prediction that Capitalism will succumb to its own contradictions is borne out as destructive affective drives increase (see Berlant 2011; Muehlebach 2012; Stewart 2017). Where anthropologists once singled out the subaltern, the working class, or the immigrant minority, today’s citizens, regardless of their circumstances, seem to experience their lives as being “without the promise of stability” (Tsing 2015: 2). Precarity has become not the exception but the rule. As Felicity Aulino points in this issue, Judith Butler (2009), among others, distinguishes between the earlier politically and economically induced state of precarity and are more current affirmation of the overall precariousness of our human condition. As Andrea Muhlebach sets it out in a review piece from 2013, “precarity, in short, is a shorthand for those of us documenting the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails”. In this vein, Anne Allison (2013) has hauntingly described the demise of the social; the ways that precarity has reconfigured temporality such that we live in a kind of presentism, where people can only be focused on survival or resilience. The way that precarity forecloses the future. Mittermaier (2014) has called this an ‘ethics of immediacy’ where there is simply no hope only the now, wherein lives are reduced to survival. Kathleen Millar (2014), writing about Rio de Janeiro, describes how precarity is so designed into the system, that insecure wage earners even come to rely on the flexibility that precarity entails . Here, then, is a central paradox between freedom and capture that precarity plays and toys with.

Care and caretaking

Ethnographic stories that frame the anthropology of care and caretaking (Kleinman 2019; Aulino 2019; Bocci 2017; Hyde 2017; Kaufman 2015; Giordano 2014; Stevenson 2014; Ticktin 2011; Garcia 2010;; Mol 2008 to name a few) have emerged as one of the more fascinating strains of thought within medical anthropology today. And because contemporary conditions require all of us to grapple with uncertainty, we are compelled to ask, can stories of caretaking disrupt prevailing conditions of precarity? To answer this question, we considered Angela Garcia’s (2010) idea of giving heroin as caring, Lisa Stevenson’s (2014) notion of care as neither a means of translation nor a means to destroy, Eli Clare’s (2017) work marking the terrible elisions of cure and care, and Michelle Murphy’s (2015) call for the affective unsettling of care. We also think with Sharon Kaufman’s (2015) work on how extraordinary end of life care became ordinary for American physicians who push biomedicine to its lifesaving extremes. These anthropologists reject still concepts, and demonstrate that care and caretaking are socially constituted and also flexible, often uncontainable categories.

Annemarie Mol noted in her early work that through the “logic of care” one can find a “local, fragile, and yet pertinent coherence” in caretaking. In her later work, Mol et al. (2010), with Ingunn Moser and Jeanette Pols, defines a concept of care that is not only about the human warmth of bodily or embodied interactions, but also involves tinkering between machines. These are the cold aspect of care’s tools. However, if we draw on Donna Haraway’s (2016) call ‘to stay with the trouble’, we also destabilize standard thoughts about the way to manage care and caretaking. Sandra Hyde, building on Mol’s work, pulls out another element within practices of caretaking, the ongoing discussions, and sometimes verbal battles, over what she calls “clashes in care” (Hyde 2017: 64). In her fieldwork with a Chinese therapeutic community for drug users, she chronicles the way such conflicts develop as social and political understandings of care evolve. She describes the dual nature of therapeutic care, both as a threatening clinical gaze, and as a source of hope for recovery. Furthermore, as Paolo Bocci (2017) reveals in his work on campaigns to rid the Galápagos of invasive species of goats, care does not always operate in the service of others. Indeed, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) extends the concept, a way of caring over here could kill over there. Kim TallBear (2016), in writing about the women of the Standing Rock movement, speaks of how many indigenous and anti-colonial movements derive from women’s caretaking. In his autobiography about caring for his wife with Alzheimer’s, psychiatrist and medical anthropologist, Arthur Kleinman (2019) illustrates that caretaking moves far beyond the walls of biomedicine into our souls. In this issue, caretaking is not limited to earlier cognitive anthropological approaches that relegated caretaking to cis-gendered or heteronormative familial relationships, but expands toward a variety of objects and subjects, including Buddhist philosophy, food and hunting, rare drugs, and Pentecostal healing ceremonies.

As we take in these works, care and caretaking may become such malleable concepts that they encompass both the ability to harm on the one hand, and to nurture and empower on the other. This leads to a consideration of the ethical implications of caretaking. Miriam Ticktin (2011) and Didier Fassin (2011) have tracked the ways that in our very neoliberal notions of care mold how ‘victims’ are made and how bodily, institutional caretaking often hinges on moral biopolitical economies that create layers of bodily and psychological violence. In other words, how realms of care come to be produced or what Povinelli (2016) calls forth as the violence of late-neoliberalism. Lisa Stevenson turns our attention away from simply focusing on ‘the good’ in order “to nuance the discourse on care so that the ambivalence of our desires and the messiness of our attempts to care can come into view” (Stevenson 2014: 3). We also concur, here, with Murphy (2015: 731), that care has long been a hegemonic force in our world. But as anthropologists we cannot take for granted that we understand care. We must pause to ask about the particularities, the immediate details, and to grapple with the pace of ethnographic stories about the sociopolitical and biomedical regimes of caretaking and precarity. Each of the authors in this Special Issue deal with this entanglement in painstaking ways.

The papers

Felicity Aulino’s multilayered article attends to Theravadin Buddhist philosophy – Buddhaghosa and the Pali canon’s Jataka tales – providing a framework for deciphering social caregiving in contemporary Northern Thailand. In particular, she focuses on how Buddhist texts inspire and help bring forth a local theory of mind that illuminates the intertwining of care and precarity in the everyday routines of providing for others. Buddhism, here, becomes a moral phenomenology concerned with the lived experience of equanimity and peace, while recognizing precarity as a foundation. In other words, care emerges through an appreciation for precarity. Aulino pays attention to bodily comportment and the logics of engagement through careful excavation of practice. In doing so, she asks, how can such things as silences and gestures be described and interpreted? How do we tell boring stories that matter? One answer is that by sinking into the seemingly uneventful, toward a slow pace, we come to appreciate the ways that habituated routines serve as moral practice. This is a morality, then, defined not by ethical choices, but rather, by embodied repetition and care. What is critical here is how we tell these stories of routine care. Aulino shows that group interactions are a form a care in a society that moves people – and anthropologists – to produce stories that are more than singular or unidirectional. In this way, she provokes us to reclaim the narrative form as multilayered, so that our own anthropological storytelling becomes both a form of care and more robust. As Aulino concludes, both forms foster an appreciation for the multitude of precarities in lives ethnographically portrayed, as well as the care people show one another in the face of insecurity.

Marlee McGuire’s article teases out the stories behind the ‘worth of cost’ of rare genetic disease treatments in Canada’s universal health care system. The hyper valuation of therapies to treat rare genetic diseases – somethings costing over 1 USD million per year – has led to intense negotiation over who should be provided these treatments, and under what circumstances. The result has been two seemingly contradictory paces of care. On the one hand, free market imaginaries have pushed forward the idea that the pace of care provision should be fast: everyone should have the quickest possible access to expensive drugs. On the other hand, the same free-market approach has created a roadblock – and a slow pace of actual treatment – as public managers undertake intensive cost-benefit studies to decide who actually gets these drugs. Parents push back against this system by creating highly effective, quickly-paced, and eventful stories of suffering in the hopes that their child’s disease gains ‘orphan drug’ status. McGuire’s work explores what happens when complex processes of valuation (and devaluation) of bodies and live restructure the way parents care for their very ill children. McGuire also shows that unpacking the category of rare disease is essential to understanding how Canadian health care reforms can actually produce harm and precarity by foreclosing larger questions of social and medical justice.

Joshua Griffin’s article takes us to an Indigenous community called Kivalina, in Northwestern Alaska, posing the question: At what pace do storytellers represent climate change in a rapidly changing Arctic? Too often, writing about climate change has meant marking it as a singular event. Here, however, Griffin paces climate change differently. Depicting the impacts of climate change on food insecurity, for example, Griffin underscores the necessity of thinking through multiple layers and lenses – ecology, society, and political structures that often speed up and slow down the impacts of still unfolding climate change. Thus, when thinking of climate change as a single-issue, we risk silencing ongoing relations of colonial violence, including both the forms of endurance and struggle that are essential to understanding collective responses for improving future health, resilience, and sovereignty. Griffin joins other critical thinkers of climate change that urge us to trouble the pace of storytelling that is often normalized by scholars and popular writers alike. Through this all, his article re-envisions biopolitical interpretations of Iñupiaq community members hunting practices by considering the qualitative and value-laden meanings of a ‘successful’ caribou hunt. By thinking differently about the pace of Iñupiaq’s hunting story – from one about an imminent crisis to one that is attuned to ongoing struggles to care amidst uncertainty – this article situates one ‘event’ within a history of the politics of care, sovereignty and well-being in Indigenous communities. In Kivalina, then, subsistence hunting, fishing, and associated networks of food sharing are practices of care for one’s children, elders, family, self, and community.

Laurie Denyer Willis’ work on pace in Rio de Janeiro’s suburbs takes the varieties of pain that Afro-Brazilian women are forced to endure as her stating point. She writes about physical pain in prose meant to slow the reader down, and focus attention on movement amid a landscape of harms. In doing so, she invites the reader to consider a more bodily ethnography. Denyer Willis’ article traces the ways that bodies have become entry points for understanding the emotionally charged and sensorial rich ways that worlds and atmospheres are generated and endured. Her storytelling pace allows anthropologists to let bodily sensation and affect enter into conversation with hegemonic power systems.

Here, Denyer Willis suggests that wounds and (Neo)Pentecostal healing practices meant to assuage them form a matrix of relations both within organizations of the state and those of religion. This is part of the larger story of how in Rio, as elsewhere, racial capitalism and religious ordering organize bodily experience. Spacialized practices such as policing, in turn, set the conditions by which physical and affection labor must be negotiated. In this way, Afro-Brazilian women are made to bear the violence of white supremacy. By focusing on pain and its amelioration Denyer Willis’ work provides a fresh way to approach bodies and their experience of precarity within racialized spaces.

Conclusion

Storytelling, that uniquely human activity, is one of the most enduring parts of anthropological work. Accounts of what we have seen and experienced linger on the page long after we have left the field. Creating narratives does more than ensure a facsimile of an experience that will travel into the future. It helps us grasp the worth and meaning of that experience. Why use the term storytelling and not ethnography²? We think that storytelling captures an attitude of thoughtfulness and deliberation. As we linger over stories, the concepts we have explored above – pace, precarity, and care – all fold together. Stories become pieces of history. Marking the pacing of those stories becomes a way of looking toward healing amidst the pain of loss and grief in uncertain times and difficult places. Each of the authors in this issue thinks this through in different, and we believe you will agree, profound, powerful and fresh ways.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

Sandra would like to graciously thank the following people for their careful readings of this special issue and for helping to conceptualize and reconceptualize it from start to finish: Miriam Ticktin, Sharon Kaufman, Lenore Manderson, Victoria Team, Laurie Denyer Willis, Claire Barnes, and our authors, Felicity Aulino, Marlee McGuire, and Joshua Griffin. Laurie would like to thank Graham Denyer Willis in helping conceptualize the introduction, Sandra Hyde for moving this issue from an idea to actual print, and to Claire Barnes for her superb editorial skill. Overall, both authors would like to thank each other for the friendship, collaborative work and thinking that went into making this piece possible.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Teresa Hyde

Sandra Teresa Hyde is an Associate Professor at McGill University in the Department of Anthropology, and an Associate Fellow in East Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, and Social Studies of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine. Her research interests include therapeutic treatment for drug addicts in Southwest China, and a new oral history project on octogenarian female physicians in the United Kingdom. Contact her at Department of Anthropology, 855 Sherbrooke St. W, Montréal, QC H3A 2T7 Canada. E-Mail: [email protected]

Laurie Denyer Willis

Laurie Denyer Willis is a post-doctoral fellow in medical anthropology at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Address for correspondence: Laurie Denyer Willis, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, 7 West Road, Cambridge, United Kingdom. E-Mail: [email protected]

Notes

1. These two references are by no means representative of all the recent work addressing questions of slowness. In fact, there is renewed attention to slowness across disciplines and genres.

2. Of course, we are winking at work on voice and authorship here, recognizing much earlier works written by Ruth and Gordon (1996), and James Clifford (1988).