Relational chronicities: kinship, care, and ethics of responsibility

ABSTRACT

Care for chronic illness in clinical and everyday settings is relational and underpinned by ethical dilemmas about kinship care responsibilities as much as it is about self-care practices and technologically aided living. Such is the central argument of this special issue, which explores kin care and ethics of responsibilities in the everyday lives of persons and families with chronic illness across different locations globally. Rather than outlining the importance of kin care in times and spaces where clinical attention and healthcare are absent, or examining kin care as a modality of care that is separate from, contradictory, and incompatible with the clinical one, we examine how clinical modes of attention dovetail with the ethics of kin care and relational knowledge. We explore redistributions of care responsibilities between the family and the clinic by paying attention to kinship dynamics and argue that chronicity and kinship co-constitute each other in everyday life and clinical settings.

Keywords:

• Chronicity
• care
• kinship
• responsibility

Acknowledgements

The initial discussions and ideas outlined in this introduction were discussed in a workshop ‘Chronic Illness, Kinship and Responsibility of Care’, organised by Emilija Zabiliūtė at the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, in 2019. The authors would like to thank the discussants for the rich discussion and comments: Lotte Buch-Segal, Letizia Bonanno, Janet Carsten, Ian Harper, and Alice Street; workshop participants as well as the contributors to this special issue. We are grateful to Ayo Wahlberg for the generous comments on a draft of this Introduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use Kleinman’s (1988) notion of illness meaning making. However, we do not limit our inquiry to the socially produced meanings of chronicity only to patient experience, and to what earlier medical anthropologists have called ‘illness’ as opposed to ‘disease’. Instead, we explore both biomedical and everyday settings as reciprocating sites that produce relational meanings of chronicity.

Additional information

Funding

The editorial work for this special issue was funded partly by Zabiliūtė’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship of The European Commission Research Fund (H2020-MSCA-IF-2017), grant number 798706, and Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology.