Caring in Times of Calamity

Abstract (English)

A 2022 Oxfam Report entitled "Caring in a changing climate: Centering care work in climate action" argues that care work must be better accounted for in climate change adaptation and mitigation policies. Because the increasing number of extreme weather events due to climate breakdown have an incidence on all sorts of preexisting caring relations, it is argued that the caring for people, animals, plants, and places is compounded, often exacerbating the challenges vulnerabilities of care workers.

Taking my cue from this report, this talk explores a reflection that bridges various bodies of scholarship as they relate to the anthropology of risk and disasters: namely, the interdisciplinary scholarship on moral economy with that on care. Regarding the former, there are two main approaches to moral economies I address: the first stresses the moral affordances tied economic relations, while the second considers the values and affects produced by, and circulating around, a field of practice in a given social context. Regarding care, I focus more specifically on the concerns for speculative ethics and socio-ecological care as discussed by Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) and connect them to the arguments of feminist economists who use care as a critique of capitalism (Nadasen 2023). Succinctly, I seek to articulate a discussion on socioecological relations of care grounded in the ethnographic context of eastern Cuba, a rural region subject to increasing risk due to climate change (e.g. hurricanes), while coping with a deep economic crisis – the biggest since the country’s independence. The purpose of this reflection is to show how this interdisciplinary body of scholarship can provide a generative framework to better appreciate how local populations endure and resist amplified forms of precarity and, at a more conceptual level, animate critique in the anthropology of risk and disaster.