Talking Time, Talking Care: Family Life as Situated Order and its Implications for a Politics of Care

La Valle Natalia

Open Conference Systems, Subjectivity and Learning in Everyday Life

La Valle Natalia

Last modified: 2010-04-28

Abstract

The feminization of the labor force over the last decades has raised many practical, scientific and political questions, in particular regarding family life and care. As stressed by the “ethics of care” paradigm (Tronto 1993, Paperman & Laugier 1996), the reintegration of neglected activities in social and moral theory reveals care as “an active preoccupation for the commun”. Care should be a foundation for ethical/political decision-making, and its details and dynamics should be reriously studied “in context”. Nevertheless, care as situated practice remains quite unexplored: its participation frames are generally schematized (as dyadic) and its temporalities disregarded. From a praxeological perspective, this communication will point out the meaningfulness and complexity of temporal learning process and organizational know-hows in family life. All the more since we know that both public and market decisioners within the growing field of human/social services and caring agencies still place low socioeconomic value on care actions and care actors (Hochschild 2003). I will present a video-ethnography of French households which has revealed that family members, namely adults, engage in ‘doing being ordinary’ family (Sacks 1992) by deploying a sustained concern on temporal orderliness (also highlighted by Daly 1996 or CELF/ICELF project). Recurrent forms of reasonings and talk-in-interaction, such as anticipations or directives, are used by members in ways that structure own and others’ courses of action in the domestic ecology. Ordinary home activities, rather than preexisting objects insertable into time boxes, are outcomes of a sustained discursive, embodied, material work. A work that is also an art du quotidien (de Certeau, Giard & Mayol 1994). On the one hand, home life implies a collective control and organization of “space over time” (Douglas 1991, May & Thrift 2001); on the other hand, it implies an inextricable link between control, organization, care and socialization. Describing everyday temporality from the perspective of actors’ engagements contribute to explore those demanding practices that structure, rhythm and maintain social life, that make actions ordered and morally relevant for a community (Garfinkel 1967). Beyond the crucial care paradigm, this might contribute to debates on gender equity, well-being policies and even wealth mesures (Waring 1988, Méda 2008).

 

Indicative bibliography

www.celf.ucla.edu/www.icelf.weebly.com

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