The placing of care: ordinary ethics of mobility in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands

Abstract

This article concerns the migratory experiences of a group of Naxi in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, framed by the drastic social changes brought about by market reform in the past few decades in rural China. The unprecedented level of mobility of a younger generation leaving home for education or work leads to tension between their deep ties to local lifeworlds and a yearning for prosperity envisioned elsewhere. The article looks at the ethical and existential implications of their routinized movements between home villages and nearby cities, which involve both those moving and those left behind in caring relationships. I argue that such movements negotiate a place-based and gendered relationality that defines people's responsibilities for each other across space and time – including both humans and ancestral spirits – despite living through the fragmenting effects of displacement and separation.