The Limits of Care

Abstract

Drawing on the experiences of caring in agriculture and forestry among Mapuche landholders of Chile, this article advances a definition of care as an act of relating intervening mutual articulations of vitality. Caring for nonhumans entails a reflexive awareness of the ontological and ethical limits of human care, limits made visible by the nonhumans’ potentials to respond to our actions and affect us. Reflections on the limits of care foster an attentiveness to the conditions responsible for nonhumans’ ability of enchantment, a term that in Bennett’s proposal concerns an awareness on the singularness and surprising character of life. First, this article characterizes care as a human intentional action targeting dependent nonhumans, such as crops. Second, it illustrates the recalcitrance of some nonhumans to human care, as in the case of forests in Indigenous southern Chile. Third, it shows how care emerges from ethical aspirations and concerns, such as those at the core of Mapuche engagements with cultural reclamation and conservation.

The making of a conservation frontier: Nation‐building, green productivism, and environmentalism in Patagonia

“…Activists and scientists also participate in dialogues and exchanges between scientific and other ontological and ethical principles related to human impacts on the environment through different forms of experimentation, though the broad category of community‐based conservation nonetheless requires critical scrutiny to avoid assuming that collaborations are free from any problematic underpinning (see Büscher and Fletcher, 2020). The refusal of conservation principles reproduced by organizations and state institutions may lead to the articulation of alternative models of environmentalist engagement with new languages and meanings, as in the case of the trope of care ( cuidado ) widely employed by farming and Indigenous populations in Chile and Argentina with reference to environmental protection actions that do not conform to strictly preservationist accounts (see Araos, 2018; Di Giminiani, 2022; Trentini, 2016).…”

Between conservation and care: Ontological mixtures and juxtapositions in protected areas of Patagonia, Argentina

“…However, as Piergiorgio Di Giminiani argues (2022), the resignification of care is central not only for cultural recovery but also for conservation. Accordingly, a stronger approach would be to start from the intersections between conservation and relationality.…”

“…What comes into discussion in the process are two different notions of care , one that is compatible with an idea of conservation that seeks to protect the external and another compatible with an idea of relationality that seeks to protect an inclusive “we” (Klier & Núñez, 2019). In the former, distance, neutrality, and an instrumental objective are in operation, while in the latter interdependences, emotions, and affects are at play, making it possible to explore an “affective model of conservation,” as one that creatively emerges from the intersections of the Mapuche cosmovision and its projects of territorial recuperation and that can be an alternative to the dominant models of conservation that rely on faith in expert knowledge (Di Giminiani, 2022, 434).…”

Cuidando la Patagonia Azul: Prácticas y estrategias de los pueblos originarios para curar las zonas marinas del sur de Chile

“…Además, el ejercicio colectivo de creación de un ECMPO permite la emergencia de nuevas prácticas que reconfiguran los paisajes dañados por la salmonicultura, por medio de la reutilización cotidiana de la basura o la recuperación de espacios clave para la biodiversidad y la espiritualidad. Todas estas prácticas remiten a estrategias comunes de cuidado que han sustentado los modos de vida de las comunidades litorales a través del tiempo y que proyectan su futuro frente a la incertidumbre de la degradación ambiental (Di Giminiani, 2022). Muchas de las cuáles, además, forman parte de las prácticas y saberes de las mujeres, quienes asumen un papel protagónico en la mantención de tales trayectorias.…”

“…Considerando lo que señala Di Giminiani acerca de que el cuidado “no es simplemente un imperativo moral, sino que también una acción práctica sobre la co‐existencia” (Di Giminiani, 2022, 419) que conecta vis a vis a los seres humanos que ejercen el cuidado con las entidades cuidadas, acreditamos que la experiencia vital en el ejercicio del cuidado es central para entender cómo se vinculan humanos y otros‐que‐humanos en este tipo de relación. Una forma de “interdependencia y recalcitrancia” (Di Giminiani, 2022, 419) que define lo que puede o no puede cuidarse, cuándo se cuida y sus efectos sobre la sobrevivencia de la entidad sujeta de cuidados.…”