Transforming Lives through Care – Subject Overview

 Subject Overview

Anthropology increasingly recognises care as a fundamental aspect of human life—not just in terms of healthcare, but also in its social, moral, and relational dimensions. This subject uses an anthropological perspective to analyse how care shapes human experience, both in everyday life and through systems like health and welfare.

To analyse understand care in a variety contexts we use 12 key concepts:

1. Society and Culture
2. Kinship
3. The Gift
4. Gender
5. Social Reproduction
6. More-than-human
7. Embodiment
8. Migration 
9. Structure & Agency
10. Governmentality
11. Neoliberalism
12. Self-Care

By examining care through these concepts, we learn how people support each other and how societies manage vulnerability and need. As we will see, care belongs alongside classic anthropological themes like kinship, language, the body, religion and magic, ethnicity and race, and gender and sexuality as a core concern of the discipline.

Assessments

Quizzes (1,000 words equivalent)--25%

Short Essay (1000 words equivalent)--25%

Long Essay (2000 words equivalent)--50%

1. Anthropology: Care, Society, & Culture    

Prompt: Chimpanzees, whales and many other animals exhibit care. So what is human about caring? We use the anthropological approach, and specifically ideas of culture and society to answer this question.

Theme: Anthropology shows how care is cultural & social not just natural

Key concepts: Culture & Society

Core reading: Arnold & Aulino "A call to care"

Interactive Task: Draw a kinship diagram; depict care relations; indicate your no.1 carer.

2. Kinship: Caring & Family

Prompt: Much of the care humans give and receive is organised within families. What about in your case? And what counts as family? What kinds of family relationships are caring? All this varies according to culture. 

Theme: Obligations of care shape family--if you can marry, who you must care for, and how you can expect to be cared for

Key Concept: Kinship

Core Reading: Winarnita & Herriman, "Caring and Family".

Interactive Task: Solve some kinship puzzles, demonstrate caring family roles

3. The Gift: Care & Reciprocity

Prompt: How do gifts of money and messages hold a group you belong to together—and with what tensions? (use example of family, friendship groups)

Theme: Caring is a reciprocal exchange of greetings and remittances

Key Concept: the Gift

Core Reading: Mauss The Gift (800-word excerpt)

Core Reading: Arnold, "Communication as Care across Borders" 

Interactive Task: 🎁 Gift analysis

4. Gender: The Gendered Burden of Care

Prompt: Around the world, women perform most childcare, housework, emotional support, and caring for older relatives. Why? Is this because women are naturally more caring, or because societies organise care in gendered ways? And what happens when men take on caring roles?

Theme: Women perform most care, but care is not simply natural. Ideas about femininity and masculinity shape who is expected to care, how care is valued, and how caring responsibilities are distributed.

Key Concept: Gender

Core Reading: Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping (excerpt)

Core Reading: Jackson, Masculinity and the Modern Dad (Sapiens)

Interactive Task: Compare expectations placed on mothers and fathers in your own society. Which forms of care are associated with women? Which are associated with men? Have these expectations changed over time?

5.  More than human Care: Caring for Animals

Prompt: Have you ever cared for an animal? Has an animal ever cared for you? Is care only about humans. Or is it more than human?

🐾 My Pet Poll

Theme: How do we care animals? How do they care for us?

Key concept: more-than-human

Core  Reading: Pig Love, Margaret Jolly.

Interactive Task:  Essay preparation 

6. Social Reproduction: Care as Unpaid Labour

Prompt: 

Who cooks meals, raises children, comforts the sick, cleans homes, and looks after older people? Much of this work is essential for society, yet it is often unpaid, taken for granted, or hidden from view. If care is so important, why is it so rarely recognised as work? 

Theme: Care is not only a personal act of kindness. It is also a form of labour that sustains families, communities, and future generations. Much of this work takes place outside the formal economy, yet society depends upon it.

Key Concept: Social Reproduction

Core Reading: Federici, Wages Against Housework (excerpt)

Core Reading: Starthern, Critique of the Gift

Interactive Task: Make a list of all the unpaid care work carried out in your household over an actual day. Who performs it? What would happen if nobody did it? What would it cost if it had to be purchased on the market?

If caring for children, partners, and older relatives is essential work, why is it usually unpaid? What would happen if family started charging 

7. Embodiment: Care & Our Bodies

Prompt: When have you felt care through your body? Was it in lifting, touching, feeding, holding? Was it something you felt, or just something you did? Can care be meaningful even when it feels routine or automatic?

Theme: Care can be an repetitive bodily act, not just a deeply thoughtful gift

Key Concepts Embodiment

Core Reading: Aulino, “Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand”

Interactive Task: "What Does Care Feel Like in the Body?"

8. Migration: Global Care Chains

 Prompt: Who cares for the people who care for us? Around the world, paid carers often leave their own families to care for children, older people, or people with disabilities in another country. What happens to the care they leave behind? Who fills the gap?

Theme: Care creates chains of care across of the globe

Key Concepts: Migration, Global Care Chains

Core reading: Horschild (Hochschild, 2000)  

Interactive Task: Choose one example of paid care work (e.g. childcare, aged care, nursing, disability support, domestic work). Create a simple chain showing how care moves between people. For example: Child in Australia → Filipino nanny → nanny's children → grandmother caring for them

9.  The Carescape: Structure & Agency

Prompt:
Who decides what “good care” looks like for older people—and how much say do care workers or older adults really have?
Is care something families should provide? Should it be professional? What does your answer say about your culture?

Theme: Taiwanese families expect their migrant care workers to act like dutiful dauthers-in-law.

Key Concept: structure-agency, 

Core Reading: Pei-Chia Lan, “Deferential Surrogates and Professional Others”

Interactive Task: Future Self Exercise. Describe how you would like to be cared for as an elderly person. Would you want emotional closeness? Professional distance? Independence?nThen consider: is your idea closer to Taiwanese expectations, Japanese models—or something else entirely?

10. Governmentality: Welfare as Control

Prompt: What if care isn’t just about kindness or compassion—but about making people easier to manage? Can care be a form of control?

Theme: With the best intentions, 'saving' Inuit from TB became an experience of violent colonial control

Key Concept: Governmentality

Reading: Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” (1991), The Foucault Effect, pp. 101–104

Reading: Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself (selected excerpt)

Interactive Tasks: Identify governmentality in real-world care systems and decide whether the concept helps explain what’s going on—or not

11. Neoliberal Care: From Welfare to Self-reliance

Prompt: What happens when care is no longer guaranteed by the state—but becomes a personal duty?
Is this freedom to determine the care you want. Ot is it just responsibility passed down the line?

Theme: reforming the welfare state means recasting what it is to be a human.

Key Concept: Neoliberalism

Core Reading:
Barbara da Roit & Josien de Klerk (2014),
“Heaviness, intensity and intimacy: Dutch elder care in the context of retrenchment of the welfare state”, Medicine Anthropology Theory, 1(1): 1–20.

Interactive Tasks: Comparing neoliberal reforms in Australia

12.  Self-Care: Survival, Resistance, & Radical Refusal

Prompt: How do you care for yourself as a student? How will you care for yourself? How could that be political activism?

Theme: If you don't want to become a neoliberal human, you'll have to take care of yourself

3 key concepts: Self care, 

Core Reading: Hobart & Kneese, Radical Care 

Interactive Task: Write 'self- care diary' for 3 days. Track non-human daily care given, received, and neglected. Reflect on radical potential.

 Conclusion: Anthropology & Care

13. Coercive Care: Healing in Violent Spaces

Prompt: Can care hurt? Sometimes care is forced—through institutions, families, or the state. Sometimes violence is framed as necessary for healing. When does care cross the line? And who gets to decide?

Theme: In these Mexican drug treatment centres caring is tough love.

Key Concept: Violence 

Reading: Angela Garcia, “Serenity: Violence, Inequality, and Recovery on the Edge of Mexico City”

Interactive Task: When is care an act of violence? Can violence ever be caring?What about involuntary care for psychiatric patients. is it different