Care and the Moral Self: (Re)Configurations of Intergenerational Care in Rural Ukraine

This article explores reconfigurations of intergenerational care in rural Ukraine, foregrounding the pivotal role grandmothers play in caring for grandchildren amid rising female labour migration. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between July 2016 and May 2018, the study interrogates the complex dynamics of caregiving and challenges dominant narratives of abandonment with regard to “left-behind children”. Instead, I emphasise the moral labour of grandmothers who take on caregiving in the absence of migrant mothers. The analysis highlights competitive dynamics between maternal and paternal grandmothers, each asserting the right to care through moralised discourses and practices rooted in co-residence, food provision and disciplinary authority. Care is conceptualised as a deeply relational and moral practice – essential to daily life and a key site for older women’s moral self-construction and belonging. Grandchildren, in turn, emerge from the study not merely as care recipients, but as active contributors of labour and emotional support. These reciprocal arrangements challenge the caregiver–care recipient binary and generational hierarchies, positioning grandchildren as caregivers and future guarantors of elder well-being. Such dynamics increasingly shape inheritance practices, with grandchildren favoured as heirs, in recognition of their proximity and contributions. By foregrounding the mutual dependencies and contestations shaping intergenerational relations, this article contributes to anthropological scholarship on care, kinship and moral subjectivity. It calls for moving beyond normative nuclear family frameworks, showing how locally embedded caregiving mediates motivation, inheritance, and the making of the moral self alongside family reproduction under conditions of migration, ageing and demographic change in post-socialist Ukraine.