1.Anthropology: Care, Society, & Culture

Welcome to Module 1 of Transforming Lives through Care. This is the first module of a course in the Anthropology of Care at La Trobe University.


Raising Miro


🎯 Learning Goals

  • Understand what anthropology is and how it can be used to study everyday life.
  • Explore how care—something we often take for granted—can be analysed as a cultural and social practice.
  • Define three key concepts: care, culture, and society.
  • Reflect on how your own experiences of care are shaped by social structures and values.

 Introduction: Anthropology & Care

Anthropology is the study of humans in all their diversity—how we live, relate, make meaning, and organise life together. In this subject, we use anthropology to ask big questions about care:

  • Who gives it?
  • Who receives it?
  • How does it shape and get shaped by culture and society?

You’ll see that care isn’t just a feeling—it’s a set of practices, systems, and relationships that help hold societies together.

📘 Essential Materials

🎥 Watch: Week 1 Presentation:. Here are the slides for the presentation if you want.

📖 Read: Arnold & Aulino, "A Call to Care"

“Close attention to these everyday forms of care, combined with careful tracing of their emphases as well as their origins, can add not only deeper insights, but also a humility and sense of shared humanity to our analyses.”

Summary: Arnold & Aulino argue that care is not just a soft or emotional concept—it’s central to how societies are organized. From families to states, care underpins institutions, moral obligations, and power structures. They call for anthropologists to treat care as a foundational concept for understanding human life.

🎥 Watch: Herriman’s intro videos:

❓Test yourself

Take these quick quizzes and see if you've understood the basics of this week's key concepts:


🗣️ Interactive Task

 Interactive Task: Make Your Care Map

Follow this worksheet to create a care-based family tree. Who cares for whom in your life? Who are you expected to care for? This exercise helps us begin thinking of care not just as personal, but also as cultural and patterned.

🏁 Conclusion

Summary

This week, you completed a brief introduction to anthropology and to care. You learned that anthropology isn't just about faraway cultures—it's about examining the ordinary things in life (like care) that we usually take for granted. By looking at care through an anthropological lens, we begin to see how it's shaped by cultural values, relationships, and institutions.

Significance

Care appears to us like a spontaneous expression of an individual's affection. However, anthropology shows us that care is also embedded in societies and cultures. In other words, who gives care, how it’s valued, and who is expected to provide it are all shaped by society and culture. 

Next Module

Next we are going to another classic anthropological concept—kinship—to understand how systems of care are embedded in family, lineage, and obligation.

Further Research

Defining "care" is important but difficult. One of the more famous attempts comes from Tronto. In her 1998 article, "An Ethic of Care", she suggests four phases of care:
  1. Caring about.
  2. Caring for.
  3. Caregiving
  4. Care receiving
The article is only a few pages long and easy to read--well worth the effort!

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