Toward an Anthropology of Self-Care

Abstract

This article posits self-care as a powerful analytic in contemporary anthropology, one that provides insight into both long-standing anthropological concerns about the person, power, and inequality and more contemporary questions about relationality, futurity, and anthropology itself. The cascade of crises that defines the now results in a collective preoccupation with care, the self, and self-care. In this moment, the work of scholars who have long theorized systemic abandonment and the unequal distribution of care is crucial not just to understanding the present but to imagining a new way forward. Proposing what an anthropology of self-care might look like, we start with the term's emergence in Black feminist thought and Foucault's late writing. We then explore how it moves through anthropology and how it has been defined by Indigenous, disability, queer, and Black feminist epistemologies. We end with sections on what we term literatures of refusal and self-care's relation to these. We thus argue that self-care provides a unique angle through which to grapple with the discipline's legacy and to imagine a new anthropology.