1. What Is Care? What Is Anthropology?

Welcome to Week 1 of Transforming Lives through Care. This is the first week 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 is it shaped by culture, class, gender, race, and more?

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:

• Anthropology
• Community & Society
• Culture

❓Test yourself

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

• Anthroology 
• Community & Society
• Culture

🗣️ 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 isn't just an emotional response—it's a social and political practice. Who gives care, how it’s valued, and who is expected to provide it are all shaped by culture. This makes care a powerful entry point into the study of human life.

Next Week

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