Self‐Care

Abstract

Self-care is everywhere these days. Unlike "care," it is not yet a central term in anthropology, but recent ethnographic studies point up its potential. In this keyword entry, we trace out distinct yet co-present understandings of the term that stem from radically different worldviews and construct it in oppositional, mutually exclusive ways. The first is the Black feminist lineage, which defines self-care as a political warfare within and against an American system of intersectional oppression. The second is a multidisciplinary body of work which builds on Foucault and defines self-care as a neoliberal form of domination and subjectification. Finally, we examine a burgeoning literature on refusal that emerges from multiple disciplines, including queer and affect theory, Native studies, Black feminism, and disability studies. Centering the margins, this perspective directly speaks to processes of domination, elucidating the recursive relationship among self, care, and personhoodhow practices of care produce persons, and in turn, how only those accorded full personhood are deemed worthy of care. Containing these multiple and conflicting definitions, self-care thus exposes the current experience of crisis as bifurcated: either hopelessly ongoing or hopefully at a breaking point that will lead to change.

“I really wanna put eyes on these guys”: Caregiving in prisons, pandemic, and protest

“…We use the language of care and caregiving to capture the wide range of emotional attachments, specific material acts, and relational practices these people enacted. We, and they, understand care as not simply inevitable and warm forms of connection but rather as a complex relational act, as often fraught and depleting as affirming, and always entangling moral and political economies (Oyarzun 2020;Rosenbaum and Talmor 2022). Some of the Turning Points members were trained organizers or activists while others brought activism to their work in other fields and did criminal justice reform work in their free time.…”

“…For these Turning Points women, this tension was exacerbated by their legitimate fears for their loved ones' safety and their hyperawareness of their own comparative mobility and agency. They were aware self-care was a form of resistance to intersectional systems of oppression (Rosenbaum and Talmor 2022).…”

Contesting Religious Boundaries with Care: Engaged Buddhism and Eco-Activism in the UK

“…Care underpins the meanings of personhood and poses questions of what it means to turn care onto the self. By centering care on the self, anthropologists explore the ways in which people care for themselves, what happens when people are unable to care for themselves, and how particular systems produce and value subjects (Rosenbaum and Talmor 2022). However, Buddhist interpretations and practices of care are not limited to internal well-being.…”