?Que significa cuidar y que es no cuidar? Los retos de la diversidad cultural.
| Autor | Anderson, Jeanine |
| Cargo | MONOGRAFICO |
What is care and what is not caring? The challenges of cultural diversity
Sumario. 1. Introduction. 2. Concepts. 3. The case. 4. Care and cultural variation. 5. Caring about and caring for strangers. 6. Conclusions.
Como citar: Anderson, J. (2020). What is care and what is not caring? The challenges of cultural diversity, Cuadernos de Relaciones Laborales, 38(2), 305-325.
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Introduction
After decades as a backdrop to major social questions, care has at last come to the forefront as an issue of social justice, social policy, personal morality and human rights. Given questions of health and illness, it was always assumed that caretakers existed who would complement the ministrations of specialist cures and medicines. Discussions around children's development and education took caretaking functions for granted. But it is only recently that care and caring are being given their due. There can be no doubt that this is largely the result of gender scholarship and feminist activism. In every society on record, the persons tasked with the larger part of caretaking responsibilities are adult women. It is no accident that protests, debates, statistics and testimonies drawn from the lives of adult women have been the catalyst for opening up an entire new line of inquiry and reform.
In the new field or discipline that is being constructed around the concept of care, most of the attention has been focused on the acts of caring and the social locations of caregivers as actors. Yet all caregiving involves a reciprocal relationship. The recipients of care, the beneficiaries of others' care work, are an equally important topic. Undoubtedly the discussions around dependency have contributed greatly to bringing them into focus. Given the dramatic changes in the demography of contemporary societies, so have the reflections on the aging process as a gradual decrease in the possibility of self-care and increase in the need for care by others. All humans go through stages of life that involve illness or incapacitation that demand care. All humans are both givers and receivers of care, of one kind or another, in one measure or another, throughout our lives.
In this paper I propose to explore some aspects of care, in particular the motivation to care, by bringing into focus the reverse side of caring: not caring. Not to care may mean limiting empathy and concern for someone or something, rejecting the obligation to care, and/or withholding practical actions that caretaking entails. My main body of evidence is a set of data compiled from demands for child support in Peru and the discourses that men and women deploy in speaking about their roles and obligations in situations of family breakdown. I will draw on other examples, however, to explore the various levels at which the negation of care may occur: through individual decisions, as shared social norms, or as a result of the operation of varying cultural systems. Thus, cultural differences in the definition of care and not caring, and in understandings around the morality of care, are an important thread throughout the discussion.
All societies contain norms that define the type of care that corresponds to different categories of persons or segments of the society. All societies draw lines around who should be cared for and cared about and who should not (not in any real sense; or only under exceptional circumstances). These are supported by reasons, myths, beliefs, rationales, and philosophical disquisitions. At issue is where and how are the lines are drawn concerning who should care, how much should they care, who should be cared for and how intensively. Persons on the margins of society are open to suspicion about their deservingness of care. Some of the most radical exclusions from care spring from cultural differences which make the Other seem outside the scope of its rules and reasons. In building our theories of care, its limits and conditionalities, and the claims that societies deem can be delayed or ignored, are as important as care effectively given.
My discussion relies heavily on philosophers, especially feminist moral philosophers. For the recipients, caring is linked to the most profound questions of living and dying. Deficiencies of care shorten lives and increase suffering for many people in the world today. For providers, caring is linked to the profound questions of human life in another way, and that has to do with the sense of purpose and transcendence that gives it meaning. Did I do right by "X"? Whom did I fail? Did I reach the end of my life with my moral sense intact; my sense of having risen to the demands that others placed on me? Our sense of moral standing in the world typically revolves around relationships of care, shortcomings in the care we gave, and the denial of care, for reasons we and others can debate. When, if ever, is "not caring" a defensible moral stance?
The article is organized as follows: Part I presents the concepts that are particularly relevant to my problem. This is followed, in Part II, by the case study of demands for child support in Peru. Part III is an excursion into cultural diversity in Peru and its implications for theories of care and the concepts that flow into them. This is amplified in Part IV in a discussion of "not caring" in a world of strangers and radical cultural difference. Finally, in Part V, I draw some conclusions and suggest the relevance of a concept--hope--that emerges as key.
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Concepts
The motivation to care
For both givers and receivers, care involves a mental attentiveness and emotional state of concern. These two facets of meaning easily become confused in English. "I care" in English can mean that the speaker is in charge of caretaking for someone or something, or it can express concern and commitment. On hearing the phrase "I don't care!" we understand that the speaker is expressing her unconcern for someone, event or thing. A Spanish speaker would express the same state of mind or lack of identification with "no me importa" or "no me concierne". Other languages undoubtedly parcel out in many other ways the multiple dimensions of the concept of care (Hughes 2002:106-129). Meanwhile, can good caring occur even though the caregiver doesn't sincerely care about the person in her charge? For many, emotional commitment and the presence of positive emotions in a care relationship mark the difference between care posited on authentic bases and bad-faith care (Zelizer 2005:196-207).
The alignment of emotion, identification, affinity, morality, sense of self and sense of transcendence is a major issue in the study of care. Most of our analyses of the norms and organization of care involve intimate relationships, as Zelizer (2005) uses the term. Most often, caring involves persons who are in constant direct contact and committed to relationships that are expected to be prolonged in time, life-long or even lasting beyond the grave. Zelizer speaks of affective intimacy (love, emotional involvement), physical intimacy (hands on care, sexual intimacy) and the intimacy involved in possessing deep knowledge of others. A domestic servant long in his or her patron's employ may have more knowledge of that person's needs and capabilities than their family members and thus be in a better position to respond to them. A nurse has information about a patient's physical state and is able to provide effective care, based on evidence that is not available or interpretable by the patient's loved ones.
Family and kinship relationships are often taken to be a reliable roadmap to concern and care: presumably, we care for and care most about those we are related to. Yet kinship is being redefined all around the world. Family takes forms that were unimaginable before the era of new reproductive technologies and changing legal frameworks concerning marriage and adoption (Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Fineman and Karpin 1995). Even if kin are often privileged in the demands they can make for care, emotion does not necessarily follow the lines of genetics.
Ethicists speak of "special relationships" that create a particular class of obligations to care. This usually implies either that we are intimately involved with those persons, for example close family members, or that we are thrust into their proximity in emergency situations, such as coming upon a drowning child in a pond. These are persons, things and events whose welfare and even life is dependent on our actions and decisions: to care or not to care. Their vulnerability is not the only factor in play, however. At stake is the quality and continuity of the relationships themselves, both of which depend on the accumulation of trust, shared experiences of pleasure and fulfillment, esteem and security (Walker 1998:92).
Care is a complicated matter and ensuring that caretakers are appropriately motivated is one of its central complications. This involves a combination of positive and negative sanctions.
Practices of responsibility are as marvelously intricate as philosophical accounts of responsibility have tended to be austere. Practices of responsibility include attributing some states of affairs to human agency; taking ourselves and others to be (variously) answerable for these; setting terms of praise and (more elaborately) blameworthiness, excusability, and exculpation for what is or is not done, and for some of what ensues as a result; and visiting (in judgment, action, speech, and feeling) forms of commendation, or of criticism, reproof, or blame, on those judged in those terms. Sometimes rewards and honors are bestowed, or sanctions, penalties, or punishments applied. These range from smiles to military decorations, and from withdrawn confidences to death by lethal injection. (Walker 1998:93-94)
The practicalities of care
The complexities of care are material and logistical, too, as DeVault (1991) shows in excruciating detail in her study of feeding the family...
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