Care as social action

Children are deeply enmeshed in webs of care which have strong and weak points and gaps, and within them, children are active providers, not just recipients (or refusers). Drawing on a comparative group fieldwork project across six rural Peruvian towns in 2008, we found that children are centrally involved as caregivers in an ecosystem of care that draws together plants and animals and humans, water, earth, and mountains. The mode of care often practiced by children has a particular orientation toward time; although it prioritizes immediate needs, it also elicits and grounds children’s moral development and future-oriented ethical learning. Within the framework of temporality, care is deniable, refusable; it can be unpredictable, withheld over time, or waning in strength. In this context, getting care is not guaranteed, making it precarious but also more valuable. Care is generative of new futures precisely because of its multivalence, in that care links intimacy, knowledge, and politics in powerful and productive ways. We argue that acts of care, such as those performed by the children in our study, can name, build, and demarcate the world they live in and the one they intend to live in.