From enactive concern to care in social life: towards an enactive anthropology of caring

Abstract

This article proposes the convergence between enactivism, an anthropological view of social life, and a philosophy of ethic of care. The main conceptual proposal is the extension of the notion of concern, present in the enactive philosophy, into the domain of social participation. The proposal introduces the notion that care in social life corresponds to a richer version of the basic living concern of the organism. In the enactive philosophy of the organism, concern appears as a link between the dynamical precariousness of the living system and the emerging properties of lived experience. Social participation, informed by an anthropology of social practice, is characterised as a multi-scale process of construction and maintenance of group and multi-individual identities. This article presents a caring practice perspective in order to capture the richness of life’s concern in social life. In this way, it stretches the life and mind continuity towards social dynamics. The construction and maintenance of group and individual identities in social life is a process that requires a form of concern that is best defined as care. The proposal characterises caring practices as both explicitly ethical and implicitly ecologically emerging. Finally, this article points towards an envisioned enactive anthropology of caring that unpacks the dynamics and phenomenology of social life.