Calculating Care: Working Out Ways Through (Economic) Insecurity at a Neighbourhood Market in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article traces the everyday practices of vendors at Marché Collé, a neighbourhood market in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, as they calculated their way through uncertainty. As intensifying political and economic insecurity refracted into their businesses and moral worlds, the emotional and cognitive efforts of their calculative practices became heightened and more visible, illuminating what they cared about, and reflecting their changing scope of agency in exercising this care. The experiences and expertise of Marché Collé’s vendors illustrate a form of work underexplored in academic work thus far: the emotional and cognitive practices through which people direct their labour and deploy their resources to meet needs and aspirations and mitigate threats. I call this labour ‘calculating care’ and argue that the complexity and amount of this work someone must do corresponds to the (under)valuation of their labour, and body, through socially constructed inequalities.