Calibrating care: Family caregiving and the social weight of sympathy (tình cảm) in Vietnam

Abstract

This article explores family caregiving in Vietnamese households affected by type 2 diabetes. Drawing on existential phenomenology and on fieldwork conducted in northern Vietnam, I develop the concept of care calibrations as a tool to understand how family members respond socially and morally to the needs for care that diabetes confronts them with. The concept of care calibrations highlights how chronic care is undertaken as an ethical endeavor within domestic environments characterized by multiple care needs. The article explores how caregivers find their bearings in complex care situations by looking toward dominant moral standards while also adjusting pragmatically to the contingencies of domestic lives, placing themselves in others’ situations. On this ethnographic basis, the article calls for more sustained anthropological attention to the social implications of human capacities for sympathetic co-living and particularly to the intermediate realm between selves and others where capacities for moral imagination reside.