Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
In rural northern Vietnam, rising rates of chronic illness highlight the moral and social conundrums faced by those caring for ill family members.
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.
The Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, a federally unrecognized Indigenous group, reveals the importance of broadening conceptions of resilience.
Resilience has been conceptualized within international development as the ability to “return to a state of equilibrium” after exogenous shocks. For many Indigenous communities, however, there is no equilibrium to which to return. This article explores how the federally unrecognized Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe (NCRNT) has developed a creative strategy of resilience beyond a return to “equilibrium” in the face of their almost complete erasure by genocide and the illegal termination of their sovereign rights by US state and federal government agencies. The NCRNT’s experience reveals how activities underlying Indigenous resilience include a need for historical redress and reconciliation, thereby creating a “new normal” that is reflective of Native history as well as the ongoing social, political, and economic realities of existing within a settler state. This article bridges history and development studies, revealing how both disciplines must learn from Indigenous groups seeking restorative justice. It further employs oral histories, artwork, and documentation from the newly created NCRN Tribal archive, and so is presented as an interactive digital article.