Female Paid Domestic Care Work: A Node of Social Reproduction

CareWork is an anthropological study of domestic paid female care work for children and elderly persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Motivated by the global under-recognition of this essential activity as real labor and by recent global changes in its organization, my research goes beyond the almost exclusive anthropological theorization of care within kinship studies.

Building on (socialist) feminist scholarly traditions on domestic work, which places care at the centre of political economy, CareWork investigates informal paid female domestic care work as a socially productive and reproductive relational activity in a dialectic relationship with broader social transformations in BiH and beyond.

To enhance and fill gaps in current scholarship it uses an innovative methodology: it traces care work through ‘care clusters’ (various households differentially affected by it) and focuses on two connected sites—Sarajevo (primary site) and Austria (auxiliary site, a nearby top destination for BiH labour migration by carers)—to reconstruct the dynamics and dialectics of such work.

This ethnographic study revolves around the following questions: a) How is this care work organized?; b) How does it shape up in relation to broader social processes (e.g. reconfigurations of labour and social security, of ethnonational relations, of migratory patterns) in light of processes of Europeanization?; c) What kind of effects/changes does this care work produce for the various stakeholders?

In BiH global changes are particularly visible as it is marked by multiple formal—postwar, postsocialist, Europeanizing—transformations over the last 25-years.

Tracing how social transformations converge in care work, CareWork affirms care as a central category of anthropological theory and demonstrates how social scientists can productively employ it as a prism for studying social transformations, as a deeply gendered node of social reproduction with retrograde and emancipatory potential.