This text is dedicated to Maria Armanda
Epigraph
― What was the worst moment since you’ve been taking care of our mothers?
(silence)
― That late afternoon, when mummy couldn't get to the bathroom in time and peed all over her legs, she cried. I cried too and I realised that the time had come for me to take care of her so that she would never again cry from peeing down her legs.
(silence)
For the past four years my sister Ana and I have been caring for our mothers, Armanda and Isabel, who are both bedridden and suffering from dementia. This situation has revolutionised our lives and theirs. The house has been transformed, our daily timelines too, clothes have changed, and smells as well. Our comings and goings home, our sense of being out, of what is private and public, everything has changed. Our emotional life and caring for it, caring for the flowers that my mother Armanda planted and always loved and that we keep in the backyard, are part of our lives. I feel real pleasure in talking to and kissing my mothers, in feeding them, in leaving them smelling good at every nappy change. This is care and it is work and, on many days, emotional exhaustion. But without it, life would not happen for the flowers, nor for so many other things beyond their inert bodies and minds, populated by dreams and monsters they can no longer talk about. And it is from here, from this place, that I begin to think about the politics of care, the ontology of care and my own ignorance about it all.
Introduction
The pandemic brought about the need to talk about caring and care. It seems that, almost suddenly, everyone has understood how fundamental life and care are to societies and to guarantee the necessary conditions for our existence. The hypertrophy of reflections, publications and news about care ― in particular about health care due to COVID-19 infection ― has revealed an undoubtedly important part of what is at stake. However, at the same time, they have been subsumed within sanitarian rhetoric, and war metaphors have colonized the pluriverse of care that sustains life in all its forms and which is ultimately the foundation without which we would be unable to survive. This is what the epigraph of this reflection is about: without care, life would quickly turn into fear, discomfort and the dirtiness of not arriving in time to pee in a proper and clean place. Without care, insecurities, illnesses, shame, and feelings of abandonment quickly follow. And it is not only the elderly or those who, because of their age and more vulnerable living conditions, become defenceless, unprotected, or weakened. Without care, all of us would no longer be able to live a dignified and enjoyable life. Thinking beyond the current discourses on care and disclosing all that is hidden and undervalued in the act of caring for oneself, for others, and the Earth is what moves me in this essay.
This essay is methodologically inspired and based on the auto-ethnography of care that, over the last few years, I have been carrying out regarding the care that my sister and I decided to provide to our mothers. It’s about bringing into academic reflection the idea that knowledge is generated in the permanent intersection between feeling-knowing-doing. This theoretical proposal stems from those feminisms for which what is personal is always political (Hanisch 1969), knowledges are always embodied and expressed by a concrete body that lives and feels in a specific context (Celentani 2014; Cunha 2014), and the more knowledges interact together, the more rigorous and powerful our science will be (Harding 1998). This symbiotic interweaving between thinking, acting, and feeling is both a corazonar (Arias 2010) and another rationality (Cunha and Valle 2022) that, besides sustaining a critique of the hegemony of the Kantian, pure and disembodied reason along with all its modern Western derivations, seeks to contribute to decolonizing the social sciences.
This essay is structured in two main parts. In the first part, I briefly reflect on contemporary political economy and, in the second part, I put forward a theoretical proposal on care based on the epistemologies of the South (Santos and Cunha 2022).
Beginning to think about contemporary political economy and care
I begin by arguing that capitalism―with its obsession with the absolute commodification of life―colonialism―and its racist drive that continues to produce a world divided between metropolises and colonies whose main language is violence and plunder―and heteropatriarchy―for which the maintenance of the ontological and social minority of human females, and all beings that represent themselves as female,[1] is central and indispensable―are the three great contemporary systems of domination and exploitation. They create and maintain a system of privileges, hierarchically constituted, and diligently guarded which, among other things, equates woman and nature, transforming both into objects of exploitation, further naturalising the idea that it is their duty to care through different social spheres: domestic, community, and institutional. This way of understanding what it is to care and what care is does not only cover up all the work therein involved, but also downgrades, disqualifies, and stigmatises it, wherefore it comes to be regarded as subsidiary, residual, and unproductive. This view of care, experienced in the daily lives of almost every woman on the planet, is what Amaia Orozco (2014) calls the reactionary ethics of care. This has served to justify the subalternity of women-females, their agency and knowledge, to legitimise the accumulation of money, power and authority by a small elite, composed especially of white men, and to maintain their disdain for life in all its forms. This distortion of the reality of care is quite apparent in the hegemonic force of the reactionary ethics of care that inhabits my sister's response when someone asked her what she did―that is, what profession she had. The following excerpt is part of the auto-ethnography on the care of our mothers.
― I am an informal carer. I don't work. I look after them, I clean, I cook, I prepare baby food, I clean their clothes, I iron, I give them their medication, I change their nappies four times a day, I go shopping, I see what there is to eat and decide what to cook. I have not slept outside the house for five years because they cannot be left alone.
This myth of women's natural obligation to care is so powerful that to give up on it in order to give meaning to the care we choose to provide for our loved ones seems to dismantle our identity as good and self-sacrificing women. Thus, not only is care expunged from its political dimension―because, after all, it has been constructed as something belonging to the private sphere where the presence of the political is viewed as an intrusion or a limitation of sacralised individual freedom―but all such work is erased from the so-called productive economy. The result is the reduction of the knowledges and skills imagined, constructed and transmitted from the diverse experiences and practises of carers―mostly women, but also some men―to impertinence and irrelevance. The disdain with which the knowledges generated by care have been treated―ridiculed and reduced to "woman stuff"―has made it possible to create an epistemological hierarchy that justifies and legitimises the political devaluation of care in its social, ecological, and ontological dimensions.
However, the simple daily observation of life leaves no doubt about the fact that caring is an absolutely necessary, uninterrupted and demanding job, which requires a permanent resistance to frustration; a job that requires concentration, creativity, strength, courage, patience, persistence and loving. After all, care is a kind of work without which life cannot be sustained in any of its forms and, therefore, it is the work of all for all.
For this reason, the narrative created in the media that prevailed throughout the most severe period of the COVID-19 pandemic, proclaiming that the economy had stopped, needs to be deeply questioned. Based on my personal experience as a caregiver, but also on close observation of reality and the knowledge exchanges that took place during those two most difficult years, I argue that, on the contrary, the economies of care that relentlessly produce life, have always been and are functioning at their maximum capacity. The real and gigantic care economy has never stopped protecting, feeding, sheltering, healing, producing food, cleaning, supporting and loving. Countering the narrative of another global economic downturn, I believe it must be said that the care economies are on the move, albeit often muted, disregarded and weakened. Despite everything, they remain acutely present in our days, creating alternatives and giving us the signals we need to look for the alternatives that can save us now and in the future.
Caring and being cared for and the feminist artisanal rationality
The epistemologies of the South draw our attention to the need for the end of the cognitive empire of Western European modernity (Santos 2018). They further call upon us to unlearn in order to be able to relearn, to desire the unexpected and to silence our arrogant abstract reason in order to be able to see the many worlds (Escobar 2020) that live and thrive beyond our minds narrowly trained in lazy concepts and ideas. In this sense, I am led to think that caring and care can be thematised and understood from what, in the Macua societies of central and northern Mozambique, is called Wunnuwana. Wunnuwana means "to grow up with": both in the ordinary sense in which we use the expression and in the sense of a three-dimensional relationship of reciprocities between people, the beings beyond humans and the sacred (Cunha e Silva 2021). One only is and one only grows, that is, one only flourishes and becomes human, by participating in the life of the community, which always involves the creatures of all time: those who are with us; those who have been, and continue to be in another way; those who are yet to come, but already belong among us. The plenitude of beings is only achieved in the care that these sophisticated and permanent relationships demand and promote.
I strongly argue that care work is not the natural role of women-females nor is it their obligation. Yet over centuries, perhaps millennia, and in many places around the world, it is we who have taken on these tasks and responsibilities. This millennia-long responsibility for care―a form of work that is far more complex than the everyday domestic chores to which a certain view of care has reduced it – has given us the possibility of assembling a fundamental body of powers and knowledges―practical, analytical, theoretical, and methodological―that can be used at the service of our insurgency and emancipation. Drawing on this body of knowledges, I choose the concept of artisanship of the epistemologies of the South to think about a feminist ethics of care against the capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal orders.
Artisanship is almost always thought of as somewhat the survival of the archaic, the derivative, and the micro-scale. I consider that there are two dominant ways of thinking about what an artisan can be and the work they produce within the logic of artisanship. The artisan is the person who cannot, for many reasons, enter the labour market or the industrial and/or technological labour nexus and therefore is understood as a person with a lack of capacity or opportunity. In this sense, the artisan is a flawed character as far as capitalist rationality is concerned. The artisan may also be the one who chooses a lifestyle that is different but subsidiary to the main (normalised) one. This means that the artisan’s practises are a deviation or a nonconformity from the norm both in terms of processes and results. As long as the artisan’s practices are not considered insurgent, they may be tolerated and can be pondered as a social escape valve for people or groups who have no aptitude or desire to adapt to the norm: hegemonic modernity. In either case, artisanship is seen and understood as a disability and/or a deprivation. I aim to counter and discuss these common-sense understandings of artisanship to carry on with this reflection.
I argue that artisanship is creative and imaginative action in the world. It is a set of non-segmented practices that seek to solve problems and reinvent contexts and places where life happens and takes place. Artisanship is a complex way of learning and teaching, where repetition and innovation are integral parts of the process and not a dichotomy. The concept of repetition, so eminently present in the work of caring that is repeated over and over again, has important virtues. With repetition, one manages to refine and create precision in the gestures and technologies that are invented and used. In this sense, repetition does not serve to eliminate the singularities that each process of creation requires. It is another economy of rigour that is obtained by the careful and permanent consideration of the contingency of the materials, by the perseverance of the creative impulse of the practitioner, taking into account the contexts, as well as the resources of time and space available. But innovation is not the other side of repetition: it is that which is beyond, that which is imprescriptible and guaranteed by imagination alone. Both repetition as another economy of rigour and creative imagination constitute another form of rationality that continuously feels-thinks-does new webs of meanings, uses, forms, horizons, knowledges, and technologies.
Care work and artisanal thinking are intimately linked and one cannot be understood or exist without the other. We know that capitalist accumulation, colonial exploitation, and patriarchal power imply a separation between work and life and between productive and reproductive/unproductive work. Against this current that flows through society while holding us captive to the myth of our natural obligations as human females, artisanal work-thinking is made of continuities, articulations and co-responsibilities between activities and the people who carry them out. Fragmentation (of industrial logic) and binary reasoning (of digital logic) no longer make sense because complexity prevails in the act of thinking, designing, creating, and returning to the community what is produced from the effort and involvement that all these processes generate. On the other hand, such work-thinking is even more complex and sophisticated because artisanship implies an organicity that goes beyond knowing and doing. It is, therefore, a feeling-knowing-doing that cannot be thought of on the basis of general and abstract principles or disembodied from the body-territories that materialise it. Feeling-knowing-doing is a creative, dynamic, and contextual order; it combines rational, emotional, and pragmatic abilities and competencies which produce meanings much in the same way as they are produced by multiple meanings.
Artisanship, therefore, demands a different relationship with time. A relationship in which what comes from afar―that which modern reason classifies as tradition―is the security of what one already knows and has and which allows one to move forward with some confidence towards what is yet to come and to be done. It can be said that time for the artisanal feeling-knowing-doing rationality is a permanent link between past, present, and future, which is enriched by new appropriations and interpretations. Hence, it is not that artisanship involves a slow time, so much as a time with time in which several generations of protagonists, knowledges, and technologies are integrated in a process of co-creation and where the assumption of roots does not limit their choices. Unlike the imperatives created by the capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal sexual division of labour that separates times, places, and scales, creating strongholds of domination where it is difficult to resist to and through isolation, this concept of artisanship confronts that logic. In this sense, it proposes to unite and elaborate continuities, which are not permanencies but contextualised transformations, and where reciprocities are neither mechanical nor symmetrical but attend to the logic of the common good.
This artisanal rationality that I enunciate here is a form of what Silvia Cusicanquí (2018) calls ch'ixis entities: entities that are neither black nor white, but both simultaneously. In these ch'ixis entities, the constitutive multiple of each one is not inert or static, but a set of relations oriented to produce light, warmth, affections, bonds, and encounters. In this context, the micro-politics of everyday life, where the artisanal feeling-knowing-doing takes place and is valued, are networks and practices constructed through diverse commonalities where both, affinities and conflicts inspire other feminist epistemes. Therefore, in addition to being a ch'ixi entity, artisanal thinking invites us to rethink the political beyond the sometimes-distressing dilemma between the micro and the macro, precisely because it takes place through relations of tension, but not antagonism.
There are two main consequences that I draw from this feminist perspective of artisanal feeling-knowing-doing for a feminist view of care. The first is that it allows for authorial narratives from those who have always been seen and considered inferior, residual and subaltern, as is the case with the majority of women in the world. Thematising in their own terms their bodies, the worlds where they live and the knowledges they have, through multiple languages, is a matter of authorship and authority; it is the power to define that power can be energy, vitality, and vigour. Artisanal reason opens up this vast field of pronouncement, enunciation, and communication through its economy of abundance. In other words, it gives people back the inexhaustible and diverse abundance of knowing-feeling-doing in and of the world. Authorship and authority cease to be an eternal dispute between those who depart from a place of subalternity in order to gain access to some kind of privileged location and become a field of reciprocal achievement. Besides that, it allows for the appropriation of practices of dialogue and of identities that esteem themselves, value their ideas and arguments, and exercise their sovereignty over the scope, the contents and the performative character of their discussions and decisions. This sovereignty of subjectivities is given through the assumption of the radical dignity of each and every person involved and of the multiples entities which constitute them, which means that authority is shared and that the individual should not be subsumed in the collective, nor should the collective subvert identity into an abstraction.
The second consequence has to do with the ability to think artisanal practices, and thus care, as economies of exchange that are organised within oppressed social sectors that are mostly constituted by working-class people; folks that aim at social transformation through their awareness of the material and symbolic systems that oppress them; communities that seek self-determination of bodies and territories, that attend to the primacy of the common good and use pedagogies that I designate as “skin-on-skin” or the discipline of tender reciprocities (Cunha; Reis, 2007; Cunha, 2008).
This is not a question of romanticising difficulties―on the contrary. Artisanship makes difficulties painfully and perpetually present so that we learn to build resistance and glimpse alternatives, however distant and challenging they may seem to us. I do not intend to advocate for the poverty, or rather, the impoverishment that most women are subjected to, but instead, to recognise the emancipatory forces that accompany their pains and misfortunes, but which have been neglected. Thinking about an economy of care, in these terms, implies recognising the underground movements that the micro-politics of everyday life keeps active, allowing us to resist, in an effective and continued way, the powerful destructive drive of the contemporary capitalist, colonial and patriarchal reason.
It is grounded on these reflections on artisanal feeling-knowing-doing and all implied therein that I built my analysis about care. Women's works, which are permanently and tirelessly carried out to relentlessly produce life in many ways―in the domestic space, in the community and in institutions―radically escape the mercantilist logic of the accumulation of profit and individual benefits. Such work is about caring for oneself, for other people and other creatures, for the Earth and for life. Once life is at the centre, we arrive at a better understanding of care as a difficult, exhausting, endless, but absolutely necessary work. To care, which is a responsibility of everyone without exception, further involves our ability to go beyond our own limits. In a world where the logic of ready-to-consume prevails, this competence is not only insurgent but also revolutionary.
I conclude by applying another economy of desire to this essay: it is vital that we change everything so that nothing remains as it was and to put life, in all its forms, at the centre. This means radically transforming our societies. It means rejecting narrow and technocratic ideas about care, as much as denouncing the privileges and exploitation that have forced women to be the (almost) exclusive carers of our societies and to be reverentially grateful for it. It is to affirm that what the dominant biopolitics calls love is, in fact, unpaid labour (Federici, 2018). Care is, after all, the most productive work of all. It is necessary to imagine the world in a totally new way and to create a social contract where care, in its various forms, is seen as the most sublime way to maintain and nurture a life worth living.
973 steps separate my house and my mothers’ house.
I live in a flat with two balconies: one facing east and the other west. All around I have trees that are mostly pine and cork trees. There are brambles and other bushes that I don't know the name of. Many wildflowers. I can't name them, but they are all beautiful.
On my balconies I have many vases with the living―that's what the people from Serra da Estrela call the living beings that they take care of without distinguishing between species. They care and that's why they never leave home without feeding the living or watering the living. I have two pine trees, a laurel tree, a fig tree―whose seeds came with the north wind that arrives every day and inhabits the balcony to the west―a loquat tree, a lemon tree and I also planted a ginkgo biloba tree. I already had an olive tree, but to take care of it I moved it to the backyard of mother Armanda where she has plenty of land to grow. This autumn I will do the same with the ginkgo biloba tree that I will bury in a friend's yard. I cannot and do not want to, leave home without taking care of my plants or my persons that take care of my living beings. So I dry the leaves of my lemon grass and thyme and prepare infusions for those who take care of my livings, so they can keep it at home in the little capulana bags that I sew when my head can no longer bear computers or books. I then follow the paths of the beautiful flowers of my steps, the 973 to go and the 973 to return. I do not forget the queen of the night whose blossoming―only at night and only one night―releases an incomparable perfume on the balcony. And that's when I summon my spirits and my people to care for each other with those scents, without checks or debit cards. That is care, that comes and goes every day, disclosing both the difficult pathways as well as my steps surrounded by flowers.
[1] Being aware of the enormous debates around this subject, as well as of the inaccuracies that this choice of words may generate, from this point on I will use the concept "woman" to designate not only human females, but also all beings that choose to represent themselves as feminine.
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