Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The dynamics of care involving the elderly, the mentally ill, and the caregiver have been made invisible in humanities and biomedical research (Woodrward 2012; Kleinman 2015). The invisibility gets worse when we consider the everyday lives of diseased and caregivers in contexts of war, forced displacement, epidemics, and/or extreme poverty (Kleinman 2016). In this paper, I present the results of my ethnography in popular housing in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, located in a territory controlled by paramilitary groups. I highlight how a woman named Leonor - dwelling in a militarized territory lives her ordinary everyday life in the midst of armed combats, risks, and intermittent threats to the inhabitants - developed practices and “ethics of care” (Laugier 2015) regarding her elderly mother with advanced Alzheimer’s disease stage. The analysis of the “ethics of care” put into practice by Leonor is developed in her relationship with the meagre family income, the precariousness of both, the home, and the infrastructural services. Thus, I show what it means to care for an elderly person with Alzheimer’s disease in situations of poverty in militarized territories. The exploration helps us understand how mental illness, care, poverty, gender, family, bodies, and subjectivities are connected in daily life in a metropolis such as Rio de Janeiro.