Abstract: In many contemporary debates, care has been invoked against the state to demand more support for citizens, families and communities. While politically effective, this use of care is theoretically unproductive: it reproduces top-down images and scales that oppose ‘micro’ care practices to the encompassing ‘macro’ state. In this talk, I propose to overcome these binaries by exploring how care as boundary object contributes to the coevolution of the state and kinship in opposition to each other. Mapped onto temporal imaginations of modernity, care is not only instrumental in distributions of resources, but also shapes political subjectivities. I illustrate my approach with ethnographic examples from Hungary, Serbia and eastern Germany that demonstrate how care shapes political transformation and the economic inequalities. My ultimate aim is to invert the hierarchy and ask how care shapes boundaries and configurations of the state.

Tatjana Thelen is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and will serve during the 2023 academic year as Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford. She previously taught at universities in Zurich, Bayreuth, Halle and Berlin. After carrying out fieldwork on post-socialist economic transformations in Hungary and Romania, she joined the Legal Pluralism Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and shifted her interest to care and welfare with fieldwork in eastern Germany. She returned to Hungary and Romania, as well visiting Serbia, for a Volkswagen-founded project on access to natural and state resources in rural areas.  

Her theoretical work has centered on the role of care responsibilities in the (re)production (or dissolution) of significant relations that bridge diverse fields in economic and political anthropology. A second major topic has been the state and especially its conceptual separation from kinship. This question was also at the heart of an interdisciplinary research group at the Center for Interdisciplinary research in Bielefeld that she headed along with colleagues from Los Angeles, Zurich and Bayreuth.