Care without heart: kinship, chronic illness, and the emotion of care in Delhi

Abstract

Drawing on ethnography of one family’s life with diabetes in a poor settlement in Delhi’s suburbs, this paper examines the relationship between emotional structures of care and kinship in the face of chronic illness. While anthropologists have argued for a relational understanding of care and discussed how, in India, modernity and social transformations have resulted in crises of familial care, less attention has been paid to the emotional terrains of care and its difficulties as they unfold in concrete relationships over time. This paper demonstrates how emotional intensities define the possibilities, limits, and ambivalence of kin care for the chronically ill. Described as care without heart, this mode of attention implies a continuation of care labour that maintains kinship ties and holds the possibility of kin futures, but is disinvested emotionally and feels unsatisfactory. The analytic of care without heart expresses a particular mode of care by which persons navigate dominant moral regimes around gendered family responsibilities and imperatives of love in relationships, but without fully subscribing to them. Care without heart at once signifies an inadequate form of care, invokes North Indian normative moral regimes around family care responsibilities and emotions, and acknowledges the shortcomings of these regimes and norms of relatedness.