Ethnographies of Loss, Longing, and the Afterlives of Care: Remnants of Attachment

The anthropological work on care has sought to diversify conceptualizations of the concept, to challenge how we recognize it and identify its happening, and to critique its complicities and caveats. This volume revolutionizes this framing by articulating a mode of care that remains dynamic, and which acknowledges the changeability of care and caring over time and place. These authors address a fundamental tension in the theoretical and conceptual of work of care to date; namely, that attempts to identify care or problematize it often end up staying it, even when that staidness expresses complexity. By turning to the concept of the remnant and bringing to the anthropological work on care the framework of attachment, these authors elucidate something that may be shifting, ephemeral, deceptive, haunting, or compromised, but, in its changeling nature, reveals a persistent facet of intersubjectivity and the means by which people tack together a world in relation.