Ethnographies of Social Support

Markus Schlecker, Friederike Fleischer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137330963
• eBook ISBN: 9781137330970
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why do elderly choose to move away from their children so as to not receive their support? Using a number of case studies, contributors explore social support as a tool of mutuality, or maintaining relatedness and sharing feelings, rather than preventing or patching up problems. This book helps correct the dominant framework of deliberate action.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Markus Schlecker

It is perhaps unsurprising that the ways in which anthropologists have looked at social support have been shaped by a preference within the discipline for disadvantaged social groups. The bias seems to have been reinforced by a trend outside the academic world—the increasing number of humanitarian interventions—that accelerated after the end of the Cold War. Anthropological work on social support has, as a result of these influences, and for the most part unwittingly, approached the subject in terms of purposive action, broadly understood as efforts to alleviate and overcome problematic states of affairs. Authors have typically postulated insecurity and risk as the fundamental conditions under which social support is organized (see, e.g., Benda-Beckmanns 2000 [1994]; Pine and Haukanes 2005; Read and Thelen 2007).

The essays in this volume explore social support through ethnographic case studies that share an emphasis on the element of the unexpected.¹ In this manner, the contributors wish to provide a corrective to the dominant framework of purposive action. By offering case studies where support unfolds in less straightforward ways, the contributors seek to counterbalance the emphasis on functions by drawing attention to what might be called mutuality. If purposive action foregrounds questions of effective mitigation and prevention of problems and risks, mutuality brings into focus the adherence to a common moral code, the sharing of values, the maintenance of solidarity, and the perpetuation of communities. Mutuality acknowledges support as the everyday business of living in a world that one necessarily shares with others, that is, support as a background operation. Where support is recognized as a set of functions or a strategic conduct, supporter and supported are considered to have separate roles and their hierarchical relations are given salience. Mutuality foregrounds a common bond of mutual reliance that ties together people, where support is an existential sharing.

The contributors to this volume conceptualize support as encounters wherein the relationship between mutuality and purposive action is continuously redefined in interactions. As one of them comes to dominate the experiences, accounts, and interpretations of a given support situation, the other recedes to the back. In situations where support is highly formalized, it tends to be clearly framed and understood in terms of strategic interventions, functions, and so forth. Yet even in such formalized settings, negotiations between different parties may lead at least to momentary reversals. Conversely, understandings of support in informal settings of mutual assistance may become temporarily or permanently altered. Korean elders deliberately curtailing support encounters with their children, refugee seekers having emotionally charged encounters with NGO workers in Greece, or a Hong Kong housing administration encountering illegal squatters and being concerned about giving too much assistance—all give evidence of this interplay between purposive action and mutuality.

The dynamic model of support builds on a comparative reading of the collection of case studies in this volume. The inclusion of the concept of mutuality into this dynamic model owes much to anthropology’s abiding interest in the gift as creative of sociality ever since Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le Don and more generally the Durkheimian tradition of being attentive to connections between ideology and solidarity. It also owes to recent inspirations by Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2000, 2008) ontology of human sociality as singular plural, Joanna Overing and Alan Passes’ (2000) explorations of Amazonian sociality through the concept of conviviality, and Stephen Gudeman’s conceptualization of sharing as “an act of making and maintaining community” (2001: 86). These authors are all part of a wider intellectual project of rethinking sociality beyond dichotomous constructions of individual and society, self and other. Mutuality, as it features in the model of support encounters introduced here, seeks to capture these themes of human sociality and autonomy.

Gudeman’s concept of sharing allows for a conceptualization of non-market transactions within a community without the need for dichotomous give-and-take models of reciprocity. His model of economic transactions distinguishes between market exchange, which is profit-oriented and guided by calculative reason, and the sharing of a community’s base—the allotment and apportionment of land, goods, ritual knowledge, women, and children—according to communal values and social hierarchies. In this model, reciprocity only denotes transactions beyond a community’s boundaries and is aimed at extending them. Sharing, as opposed to market exchange and inter-communal reciprocity, serves to perpetuate dedication to the community, its well-being and values.

Conviviality is an Amazonian mode of sociality that allows for personal autonomy within a collective being, a sharing of the same life by sharing emotions, laughter, and narratives. Overing and Passes (2000) borrow the term conviviality from philosopher Ivan Illich (2000), who developed a critique of Western industrial society and its ever-expanding consumerism, which he considered destructive of people’s capacities to create true sociality. Illich and the authors in Overing and Passes’s study deploy the term conviviality to capture practices and attitudes that may seem vague and without purpose, but are nonetheless vital for a community’s well-being and thriving.

Certainly the most radical invitation to recast support beyond purposive action came from reading Jean-Luc Nancy, who takes up Heidegger’s concept of Mitsein, but affords it primacy (“the essentiality of the with,” Nancy 2008: 3) in his ontology of human sociality. Nancy’s concept of a singular plural suggests that being is always an existential sharing, what he calls a being-with. Human existence is here conceptualized not as a self-referential presence, but as an outward-directed “being-to” (James 2006: 131ff, passim). Being is a bodily sense, which is always directed away from itself. Nancy conceptualizes being as a sharing by virtue of human consciousness necessarily preceded by and proceeding through a bodily directedness in space (a spacing) that is inhabited by other bodies (ibid). The body as the foundation or channeling of sense is conceptualized as an event, as an opening toward the experiential world, which is shared with others: “The ontology of being-with is an ontology of bodies ... ‘body’ really means what is outside, insofar as it is outside, next to, against, nearby, with a(n) (other) body, from body to body, in the dis-position” (Nancy 2001: 12). Human existence in Nancy’s model is always a “mutual sharing” where “the suffering of any one, of each one, is a suffering which I share and, concretely, for which I have responsibility ...” (Watkins 2007). Hence our use of the term encounter, whereby support can be imagined as an existential sharing, and mutuality as an ongoing being-with. The inclusion of mutuality into our dynamic model of social support takes up this fundamental sense of a responsibility deriving directly from one’s being as a being-with.

It is too early to speak of a subfield in the sense of an anthropology of support. What we have are two major clusters of studies and individual works more or less focused on this subject, variably speaking of care, social security, or social support. One main cluster of studies, which focuses on the question of social support and which, for the sake of brevity, I refer to as the social security studies, most clearly works within the framework of support as purposive action. It is exemplified by the work of Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1988, 2000[1994], 1998, 2007), who explicitly define their starting point to be insecurity,² a universal condition of human existence across all cultural contexts. As a result, the questions they pose revolve almost exclusively around the functions of social support³: the workings of normative, formal, and informal arrangements to mitigate risks and provide safety and security, access to resources, projects that distribute resources, and so on. The Benda-Beckmanns (2000) outlined a layer cake model of social security that takes account of institutional, interpersonal, ideological, ethical, and normative levels and their social and economic consequences. Despite the effort to provide multiple levels of analysis, their approach remains confined within the framework of risk and function. Whichever way support manifests itself and whichever level of analysis is chosen, for the Benda-Beckmanns and their various co-researchers, support remains a response to problems and an effort to alleviate them. Another set of studies that builds a sub-group within the social security cluster could be called the gender and care studies. They look at the intersection between questions of gender inequality and care work mainly within the domestic sphere (e.g., Tronto 1993; Kittay and Federer 2002; Pine and Haukanes 2005). Their work as often unacknowledged helpers is shown to reflect various kinds of structural inequalities, usually pertaining to gendered roles.

The insecurity premise and the framing of support as a risk-reducing function is generally shared among authors in the social security studies cluster. Informants are predominantly disadvantaged women, the elderly or poor, or ethnic or religious minorities. Research in this cluster examines either the shortcomings of formal institutions of states, legal orders, and economies (e.g., Risseeuw, Ganesh and Palriwala 2005); socially and culturally entrenched problems of support (e.g., Lee 2008); or informal supportive networks and non-state institutions (e.g., Leutloff-Grandits, Peleikis and Thelen 2009; Midgley and Mitsuhiko 2011). Rebecca Kay observes that research in this cluster tends to be polarized between “macro-level studies with a strong focus on the state ... and micro-level studies focusing predominantly on non-state actors and informal networks of support ...” (2011b: 150f).

Several authors in the social security studies cluster touch on questions that create tensions with the dominant purposive-action framework. We find hints of this, for example, in Katherine Metzo’s (2006) study of mutual support in rural Siberia. Rather than simply providing resources and labor for one another, she observes deliberate creation of debts as a way to create and maintain social bonds and significant emotional investments into these ties by use of kinship metaphors (ibid: 296). This remains, however, an underexplored side issue in her study. Kay is right when she finds that while many studies make reference to the significance of emotions and moral benefits in social support, “they are not usually explored in depth” (2011a: 46). To the present author this seems to be in no small part due to the overriding purposive-action framework, which has limited the exploration of these issues.

A second major cluster, which I refer to as the subjectivities of suffering studies, does not focus only on social support but also touches on this problem as part of a general interest in the intersections of epidemics, sufferers, governments, pharmaceutical industries, and health care systems. While support becomes an object of investigation in this cluster, the focus on risk and functions is still in place, but not as dominant as in the social security studies. Given the increased emphasis on the somatic experiences and subjectivities of suffering, mutuality is here given greater room. Within this cluster, we can note a changing approach to suffering, which was initially (1970s and 1980s) focused on cultural constructions of illness (e.g., Kleinman 1980). Toward the 1990s, the research focus moved to experiences of violence and other forms of suffering (e.g., Feldman 1991; Das, Kleinman et al. 2000) and since the late 1990s began to investigate the constitutions of sufferers’ subjectivities, especially with regard to epidemics and diseases (e.g., Kleinman 1997; Biehl, Kleinman et al. 2007; Biehl and Moran-Thomas 2009). Overall, the shift is also a methodological one, from a focus on the constitution of meaning to one on the shaping of somatic experiences, from interactions to networks and institutions, and from individual case studies to ethnographies of local communities. The changes are evidence of a gradual confluence of previously separate fields in the human sciences: especially medical anthropology, historical and anthropological studies of power and resistance, and science and technology studies. Care or support has increasingly been looked at from Foucauldian angles (e.g., Povinelli 2006).

These changes have also shifted questions about support away from an interest in diagnoses, treatments, and healing to one in lived worlds of sufferers. Here, given a strong interest in subjectivity and somatic experiences, explorations of support are not as dominated by the purposive action framework as they are in the social security studies cluster. Joao Biehl’s (2007) work may be considered exemplary of this recent trend. Support in his work among marginalized groups of HIV sufferers in Brazil features as a more implicit and fundamental condition, of being together for the sake of conviviality and to assert one’s will to live against all stigmatization and isolation. The sufferer’s body has emerged in this research cluster as a nexus of supportive interventions, experiences of suffering, and representations of diseases and societal forces that exclude and stigmatize sufferers, but also the very condition for support as mutuality (see esp. Burchardt, this volume).

The studies within the subjectivities of suffering cluster indicate that social support needs to be looked at from within another framework. Support is here something ongoing, something aimed at maintaining relatedness, sharing feelings, rather than preventing, stopping, or patching up problems. This is what we seek to capture with the term mutuality. The ethnographic case studies in the present volume provide insights into different support encounters where needs, moral norms, entitlements, rights, emotions, roles, and relationships are enunciated in ways that engender semantic shifts between support as mutuality and as relief strategies. This can be analyzed from four angles: the rationale behind support, its nature, modality, and the kinds of relationships enacted. In the remainder of this chapter, I introduce the contributions to this volume through a discussion of these four angles.

The Rationale behind Support

The purposive action framework has tended to limit explorations of social support to questions about measures taken to alleviate detrimental circumstances and about hindrances, solutions, successes, and failures. As a result, previous research has more or less presumed that the basic rationale behind support is to cope with insecurity. The authors in the present volume show that this understanding of the motivations behind support falls short of the complexity on the ground where support encounters unfold through ongoing discursive and nondiscursive interactions that define the support situation. Efforts to reduce problems, cater for needs, and alleviate suffering always operate against the background of another kind of basic rationale for support, that of a fundamental aspiration to perpetuate communal solidarity, sociality, or human togetherness. Unlike the idea of support as risk reduction, which usually implies a one-directional movement of support, this other rationale gives salience to a motivation that is common to all actors involved, of helping to sustain livelihood, the community, shared values, and so on. Perpetuation belongs to the mutuality framework. It foregrounds a mutual dependence between supporter and supported as the basic rationale for support, both aiming for the continuity of their common existential circumstances, their community, or shared values.

Several of the studies in this volume draw our attention to the ways in which support encounters give rise to concerns that by offering support, one becomes too involved. Rephrased in terms of our model of purposive action and mutuality, the concern is that alleviation, as the explicit rationale behind support, becomes secondary to that of perpetuation, of establishing and maintaining long-term bonds of reliance. Alan Smart (this volume) deploys the concept of moral hazard to capture the way state authorities in Hong Kong were concerned that by providing housing to illegal squatters after a fire destroyed their habitat, they might end up encouraging arson and possibly unleash an unforeseeable expansion of the problem of state dependency.

In his study of AIDS support groups in South Africa, Marian Burchardt (this volume) describes expectations among attendees of AIDS support group meetings of clear alleviative measures, food parcels, and medical and other practical information. Yet such AID...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figure and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Housing Support for the “Undeserving”: Moral Hazard, Fires, and Laissez-Faire in Hong Kong
• 3. “Who will love you if they have to look after you?”: Sakhalin Koreans Caring from a Distance
• 4. Access to the Social: The Ethics and Pragmatics of HIV/AIDS Support Groups in South Africa
• 5. The Changing Scale of Imprisonment and the Transformation of Care: The Erosion of the “Welfare Society” by the “Penal State” in Contemporary Portugal
• 6. The Compassion of Strangers: Intimate Encounters with Assistance in Moscow
• 7. Young Chinese Volunteers: Self/Interest, Altruism, and Moral Models
• 8. Engagements and Interruptions: Mapping Emotion at an Athenian Asylum Advocacy NGO
• 9. Life, Labor, and Merit: War Martyrdom as Support Encounters in Late Socialist Vietnam
• 10. Empathy, Salvation, and Religious Identity: Hindu Religious Movements and Humanitarian Action in India
• 11. Epilogue
• Index