Care Anthropology / Anthropology of Caring

 Family—however you define it—is one of the main ways care is organised around the world. Whether based on blood, marriage, or chosen ties, these relationships shape who looks after who. Anthropologists use kinship diagrams to explore how people understand family, belonging, and responsibility. In this task, you’ll map your own version of family to start thinking about care and connection in cultural terms. How can we create a diagram or a map of our family relations. In this worksheet, we use a controversial diagramming tool. 🌿 Your task Your task is to create a family tree, or what anthropologists call a genealogy .  Draw your family tree. Grab yourself a piece of paper, a pencil (or three), an eraser then follow along with these instructions to draw your genealogy. Depict care relations- -here's how Indicate your No.1 Carer, as shown here . If you have any further questions, check the details below. 🌿 Kinship Mapping (details)  For this task, you're asked to crea...

Welcome to Week 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 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...

 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. We use key concepts to help us analyse and understand care in a variety contexts: Society and Culture Kinship The Gift More-than-human Embodiment Gender Structure & Agency Violence Governmentality Neoliberalism 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 (1,200 words equivalent)--30% Short Essay (1,300 words equivalent...