Communicative Care: Building Communities of Care Through Communication in the Belarusian Resistance-in-Exile
摘要
Communities of care rely on conversations between and among their members. Whether maintaining relationships stretched across borders or building ties of solidarity with co-workers or neighbors, everyday communication is the means through which communities form and the glue that maintains the relationships through which they collectively enact care. This chapter presents a communicative care approach for investigating and theorizing the complex interrelationships between language and care (Arnold, Communicative care across borders: Language, materiality, and affect in transnational family life. PhD Dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2016; Communication as care across borders: Forging and co-opting relationships of obligation in transnational Salvadoran families. American Anthropologist, 123 (1), 137–49, 2021; Living together across borders: Communicative care in transnational salvadoran families, Oxford University Press, 2024). While Lynnette developed this approach through her work with transnational Salvadoran families, in this chapter we examine communication in a different community of care: the Belarusian resistance movement in exile. We draw on Volha’s ongoing ethnographic research in online and offline spaces within the Belarusian anti-authoritarian movement. In particular, this chapter focuses on Volha’s research with Belarusian pensioner activists, including interviews, fieldnotes from multiple trips to Warsaw, Poland, and Vilnius, Lithuania, and two participatory workshops. This chapter assembles composite narratives that highlight everyday communicative practices that might otherwise be ignored, demonstrating that they are vital for care. The communicative care strategies developed during the Belarusian uprising were adapted to new experiences of exile. While this communicative care sometimes took the form of more explicitly activist engagements, it also involved interpersonal care through which individuals navigated the challenges of everyday life in exile. Through communication, activists facilitated practical, material, and economic forms of care. They also used communication itself to enact care by nurturing the relationships that made care possible and sustained the resistance movement. Even as it facilitated and enacted care, communication made meanings, outlining the responsibilities activists had to one another and implicitly depicting the communities of care they were building. Through this analysis, the chapter suggests that communicative care is not only a methodology for studying communities of care, but, more importantly, a means of theorizing how such communities are built and sustained.