Ethnographic writing is born of relationships—not just as a method, but as the very fabric of knowledge. Care, obligation, and kinship emerge in fieldwork not only as topics of study but as the unstable ground on which understanding is built. This lesson asks how to write care as something dynamic: negotiated, contested, and often ambivalent. Haraway’s (2016) idea of making kin urges writers to recognize kinship not as biology but as co-constituted relationality—formed through affect, labor, proximity, and survival. In anthropology, scholars such as Veena Das (2007) and Cheryl Mattingly (2014) show how everyday care emerges amid structural violence, where moral action is improvisational and fraught. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017:90) reframes care as “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation.” These theories foreground the interdependency of beings—human and more-than-human—and call attention to the ethical responsibility of representing relational worlds in writing.
Relationality is not limited to human genealogies or traditional social categories. We constantly forge connections—responsibilities, tensions, and care—with animals, plants, ecosystems, machines, and strangers. In our writing, we should recognize lived interdependencies, whether in multispecies entanglements, human-machine collaborations, or communities formed through shared survival rather than blood. Together, these perspectives suggest that care and relationality must be written with attentiveness to ambivalence, asymmetry, and entanglement.
Relationships are never static; they are made and remade through acts of sustaining, straining, or breaking. A moment of caregiving might braid love with resentment, duty with exhaustion—each thread pulling against the others. To write relationality is to attend to these shifts: how a son becomes his stepfather’s caretaker overnight, how migration stretches obligations across borders until they snap, how a fisherman knows the moods of the ocean, or how a nurse tends to an AI system as if it were a colleague. Such stories refuse the shorthand of fixed roles (caregiver/dependent), demanding instead narrative strategies that capture motion. Writing care ethnographically means staying with that tension and motion—between action and feeling, intimacy and structure, witnessing and complicity. When writing care, ask yourself: What does this relationship do? What holds it together? What strains it? What do I risk in telling this story? What does the reader risk in reading it? How do I trace the boundary between protection and erasure in what I choose to represent?
Recursive narration might trace how a single act—a hand placed on a shoulder; crossing a border in the opposite directions—carries different meanings over time. Juxtaposing past and present voices could reveal how memories distort or haunt. The gaps between accounts (yours, theirs, the institution’s) might expose the fractures in what “care” supposedly means.
You can also use detailed sensory description if you want to render care as something embodied and contextual. For example, to honor care as action—often habitual, often unspoken—you may pay attention to and describe details: “He slid the spoon slowly, tilting it so she wouldn’t choke. The TV murmured in the background. She didn’t look at him, but her fingers tapped twice on the tray.”
Care is rendered in gestures (a meal left at a doorstep), in refusals (“I won’t speak of that”), in the weariness of repetition (daily injections; daily arguments). But it is also shaped by forces beyond the intimate: wage labor that leaves no time for tending the sick, policies that sever families, histories of violence that demand care as a mode of survival. The challenge is to hold both scales at once—the tremor in a voice and the structural silence it emerges from—without collapsing one into the other. In writing, you may place disparate scenes or characters side by side to highlight tensions or contradictions in care. For example, to allow for relationality to emerge through contrast, you may notice and document moments where structural and intimate care are drawn into the same frame: “In the same room where his mother learned to bathe him, a bureaucrat now debates the cost of installing a ramp.”
Finally, writing itself is an act of care. Whose exhaustion do you foreground? How do you narrate a refusal without framing it as failure? What do you omit to protect, and what do you expose to honor complexity? These choices are ethical before they are stylistic. To write relationality is to acknowledge the asymmetry of representation: the act of rendering others is always an intimate negotiation, one that may fracture even as it tries to hold.
Focus
How care, obligation, and kinship are depicted as layered and contested.
Learning Goals
- Recognize how familial roles and care work are narrated across cultural contexts.
- Write care scenes that foreground emotion and structure simultaneously.
Activities
- Close read a piece of ethnographic writing and chart out how care is expressed, constrained, or transformed over time.
- Write a short vignette where the meaning of care is ambiguous, strained, or negotiated.
- Discuss: How can writing itself be a form of care? What ethical commitments are embedded in narrative choices?