Practices of Care

Autorentext

Farha Ghannam is Professor of Anthropology at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt (Stanford, 2013).

Klappentext

Daily life is structured through care practices: cooking dinner, repairing a fridge, hanging laundry, lifting weights. For the men and women of a working-class Cairo neighborhood, these acts organize social and familial relations and increasingly stand in for the state, as collective care addresses gaps in education, healthcare, and infrastructure. A competing neoliberal notion of self-care recasts personal discipline as the measure of a happy, successful, responsible subject. This ethnography shows that both collective and self-care are shaped by the inseparability of gender and class and are informed by economic pressures, social norms, and cultural meanings.

  Building on three decades of ethnographic research, Farha Ghannam considers how men and women negotiate different demands, expectations, and priorities in engaging practices of care. Men take on exhausting, physically demanding work to provide for their families; women convert household income into the social and symbolic capital—status, distinction, prestige—that elevates a family's standing. Religious conviction, social expectation, and economic need together constitute care as a relational, contextual, and performative set of practices, enacted under the watchful eyes of neighbors, kin, and God. The result is a richly grounded account of care's material and moral complexities—revealing how care is practiced, by whom, and for what purposes.