Who cares?

In this paper, we employ a comparative perspective to understand our respective field sites’ ‘ambiences’ of violence and their impact on care work in the field. Both authors have transformed romantic relationships with partners from the countries where they conduct research in into relations of kinship, and they have parented joint children with their spouses. In both cases, gender norms, as well as state legislation and normative practices, influence care relationships, as they come with a possibly violent urge to order social relations. By focussing on the gendered dimensions of our socialization as care-giving field workers into South African and Pakistani social settings, ways of knowing and kinship-making, we seek to contribute to an anthropological understanding of relationality within transcultural research practice.