Hierarchies of Care

Abstract

This book explores how young women navigate everyday moral dilemmas, develop understandings of self, and negotiate hierarchies of power, as they endeavor to “make life better” for themselves and their children. The ethnography is based on sixteen months of qualitative research (2009-2010, 2013, 2014) in an international NGO-run residence for young mothers and their children in the highland Andean region of Cusco, Peru. Drawing on feminist intersectionality theory, anthropological scholarship on reproduction and relatedness, and perspectives on the dialogical, or joint, production of social life and experience, this ethnography enriches understandings of ordinary life as the site of moral experience, and positions young women’s everyday practices, subjectivities, and hopes for the future at the story’s center. These mostly poor and working-class indigenous and mestiza girls care for their children and are positioned simultaneously as youth in need of care. As they seek to create a “good life” and future for themselves, these young women frame themselves as moral and modern individuals. Bringing attention to various dimensions of caring for, and caring by, young women illuminates broad social and political economic processes (deeply rooted gender inequalities, systemic racism, global humanitarianism) that shape their experiences and aspirations for the future. Tracing the micro-politics, everyday talk, and creative expression illuminates the dynamic processes through which individuals develop complex and changing senses of self, sociality, and morality.