5. Embodied Care: Care & Our Bodies

Welcome to Week 5 of Transforming Lives through Care. This is part of a course in the Anthropology of Care at La Trobe University.

🎯 Learning Goals

• Understand how care is lived and experienced through the body.
• Explore the anthropological concept of embodiment as a way of analysing care.
• Recognise how routine bodily practices—rather than abstract feelings—can express deep commitments to others.

🚦 Introduction: Embodiment

Caring is always embodied. When I cuddle a crying baby, two bodies are involved. This may seem obvious, but what happens when we take that fact seriously?

What if, instead of starting with the idea that “I think therefore I am,” we begin with “I have a body that is in space, moved and moved by others”? From this perspective, consciousness, identity, and care emerge not just in thought, but through physical being: suckling, holding, wiping, cleaning, feeding.

This is the starting point for anthropological theories of embodiment. Rather than treating the body as an object, anthropology treats it as the medium through which care happens. Bodies are not just neutral containers for emotion or action—they are the very way we relate to others, especially in acts of care.

📚 Recommended Materials

📘 Essential Materials

Visit Phenomenology & Embodiment, Lived Experience. This is a blog post from a subject I teach on the Body & Mind in anthropology. The post will provide you with an introduction to the idea of embodiment. 

Watch Herriman "Embodiment"

Read ç

Boonyuang " takes hold of her mother by the armpits and yanks her up to the top of her bed with several rapid, forceful movements. A slight grimace passes over the older woman’s face and is quickly gone. It is the first changing of the day, and, softly muttering “dirty, dirty”..Boonyuang gets on with her routine."

Notes: Aulino invites us into a modest household in Chiang Mai, where a daughter cares for her aging mother through daily bodily routines—lifting, cleaning, wiping. These are not framed by grand emotions, but by small, practiced movements that accumulate meaning through repetition.

🗣️ Interactive tasks

Complete the: What Does Care Feel Like in the Body? 

🏁 Conclusion

Summary: This week we have seen how care is not just about love, intention, or ethics—it is also about the body. Anthropologists like Aulino show us that ordinary acts like wiping and lifting are not beneath analysis; they are at the heart of what care looks and feels like.

Significance: Taking the body seriously changes how we understand care. It brings attention to what often goes unnoticed—routine, fatigue, repetition, and quiet attunement. This is a crucial shift away from seeing care as only an emotional or moral act, and toward seeing it as something practiced and lived.

What’s Next: Next week, we explore how gender shapes who is expected to care, and how caregiving roles can both reinforce and challenge gender norms.

🔎 Further Research

Ramirez, M., Janke, E. A., Grant, M., Altschuler, A., Hornbrook, M., & Krouse, R. S. (2019). Cancer Survivorship at the Intersections of Care and Personhood. Medical Anthropology, 39(1), 55–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2019.1642886

Sanz, C. (2017). Out-of-Sync Cancer Care: Health Insurance Companies, Biomedical Practices, and Clinical Time in Colombia. Medical Anthropology, 36(3), 187–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2016.1267172

Welcome to Week 5 of Transforming Lives through Care. This is part of a course in the Anthropology of Care at La Trobe University.