Relational chronicities: kinship, care, and ethics of responsibility.

Care for chronic illness in clinical and everyday settings is relational and underpinned by ethical dilemmas about kinship care responsibilities as much as it is about self-care practices and technologically aided living. Such is the central argument of this special issue, which explores kin care and ethics of responsibilities in the everyday lives of persons and families with chronic illness across different locations globally. Rather than outlining the importance of kin care in times and spaces where clinical attention and healthcare are absent, or examining kin care as a modality of care that is separate from, contradictory, and incompatible with the clinical one, we examine how clinical modes of attention dovetail with the ethics of kin care and relational knowledge. We explore redistributions of care responsibilities between the family and the clinic by paying attention to kinship dynamics and argue that chronicity and kinship co-constitute each other in everyday life and clinical settings.

Care without heart: kinship, chronic illness, and the emotion of care in Delhi.

Drawing on ethnography of one family's life with diabetes in a poor settlement in Delhi's suburbs, this paper examines the relationship between emotional structures of care and kinship in the face of chronic illness. While anthropologists have argued for a relational understanding of care and discussed how, in India, modernity and social transformations have resulted in crises of familial care, less attention has been paid to the emotional terrains of care and its difficulties as they unfold in concrete relationships over time. This paper demonstrates how emotional intensities define the possibilities, limits, and ambivalence of kin care for the chronically ill. Described as care without heart, this mode of attention implies a continuation of care labour that maintains kinship ties and holds the possibility of kin futures, but is disinvested emotionally and feels unsatisfactory. The analytic of care without heart expresses a particular mode of care by which persons navigate dominant moral regimes around gendered family responsibilities and imperatives of love in relationships, but without fully subscribing to them. Care without heart at once signifies an inadequate form of care, invokes North Indian normative moral regimes around family care responsibilities and emotions, and acknowledges the shortcomings of these regimes and norms of relatedness.

Ethics of Neighborly Intimacy among Community Health Activists in Delhi.

What makes community health activism an ethical undertaking? I examine how, among Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in an urban poor neighborhood in Delhi, health work is underscored by relational sensibilities. By primarily situating the inquiry into the everyday lives of ASHAs, and beyond the formal trajectories of their work, I show how their care work and relational commitments exceed the forms of care foregrounded in public health program protocols. ASHAs operate through an ethics of neighborly intimacy - relational knowledge and acts, guided by ethical obligations toward their neighbors, and underscored by existing dependencies and care, and the detachments and differentiations of relationships.