I begin this essay with the words of my neighbor Deysi, a working-class storekeeper with an infectious smile. When she learned that I had returned to the Peruvian city of Ayacucho to conduct research in a local home for the indigent aged, she remarked casually that its elderly residents ultimately had been institutionalized because they did not “give their children a profession and a good education.” By contrast, Deysi explained, if a parent had provided a child with a good education leading to a career, the child “with gratitude always loves his parents, and thanks them.” When I impertinently inquired whether her children might one day put her in the institution, Deysi said within the hearing of at least three of her seven, “I don't think they'd be that ungrateful.”Footnote 1
Deysi's words made me think differently about how the relationship between parents and children is characterized in the urban Andean context. To begin with, I found it noteworthy that as I tried to figure out who should be caring for old people, remarks like Deysi's kept pulling me back in time to urge an understanding of how those old people had cared for their own children. This suggested that the phenomenon of kinship care must be considered using a life-course perspective, for actions of caregiving for an aged parent in the present may be seen as responsive to other moral actions taken by that parent in the past, just as actions of caring for a small child in the present may be seen as gesturing toward a future in which the actions will be repaid.
Secondly, given the almost calculated formulation I have just outlined in which care is demarcated as reciprocal, I would not have expected gratitude to be as closely involved as Deysi insisted it was. My own folk understanding of kinship, gratitude, and obligation led me to think that kinship relations are thought to entail obligations, and that actions performed in consonance with obligations do not require a response of gratitude.Footnote 2 I took this understanding not only from my own experience but also from conversations with middle-class friends in Ayacucho. During my fieldwork in Peru's governmental adoption program a few years earlier (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2008b), for example, a staff member in Ayacucho had articulated for me her formulation of kinship as rooted in a naturalized kind of duty and obligation, rather than gift and gratitude: “Sons and daughters are obliged to tend to and care for their parents. It's a natural obligation, you see? So no one demands it of them—the relationship itself is what pushes them to tend to one another.”Footnote 3 To be sure, the adoption office is a site where much effort is invested in creating relationships between parents and children that align with middle-class norms of kinship.Footnote 4 Deysi's words suggested that there might be other ways to make sense of parent-child relationships.
Where the adoption office employee naturalized kinship obligations, Deysi's words denaturalized them: If the parent provides the child with education and career, then the child loves the parents. In so doing Deysi emphasized one of the most widely noted attributes of Andean kinship, namely, that its participants experience it as constructed or produced (Van Vleet Reference Van Vleet2008; Weismantel Reference Weismantel1995). By bringing together this sense that kinship is actively constructed with statements like Deysi's about the precise kinds of parental care that incite children to feel grateful and to respond accordingly, we can see shifts in kinship obligations in Ayacucho within a context of social transformation and differentiation.
For Deysi, gratitude is central to kinship obligations, and the referent of the gratitude—the “benefit” that the child is receiving from the parent—is crucially linked to local notions of progress that encompass education and professionalization. In present-day Ayacucho, ideologies of progress are widely shared and education is seen as powerfully transformative—in some interpretations it has the power to whiten (de la Cadena Reference de la Cadena1998; Degregori Reference Degregori and Apter1997; García Reference García2005; Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2008b; Whitten Reference Whitten1981). One of the ways Ayacuchanos make sense of their relationships to aging parental figures is to equate them with—and to highlight the critical importance of—a good job, a good education, and a good upbringing. Those whose parents did not provide their children with such things blame their parents for their own suffering, and their lack of gratitude can undergird a refusal of responsibility for the aging parent. Stated more broadly, gratitude should flow only from exchanges that are perceived as giving opportunity to the younger person. And the eventual return of caregiving from a younger to an older person should only occur if it is truly a return, that is, if the older person's initial acts of care benefited the younger person in ways that are viewed as locally significant. Focusing on gratitude and ingratitude, as Deysi insists I do, has helped me to answer why, and under what conditions, people care for one another in this particular context (compare Cohen Reference Cohen1998 for India; Tripp Reference Tripp1997: 105 for Tanzania). As I will argue below, the context that ingratitude and gratitude help me to understand is one of social change and economic inequality, concretized in changes in family roles and generational misunderstandings.
The notion I am interested in here, in its positive form, is that glossed by agradecer in Spanish. A dictionary definition would follow this word down two paths, one of feeling gratitude, and the other of expressing or showing gratitude, practices, or performances of gratitude.Footnote 5 In both instances, however, gratitude is understood to be a sentiment that should arise from the bestowal of something that benefits the person who ultimately feels it; demonstrating gratitude conveys the beneficiary's recognition that he or she has indeed benefited.Footnote 6 A response (the demonstration of gratitude) is required for social life to work as it should. The important distinction between feeling and demonstrating gratitude becomes clearer when considering the negative forms, which tend to appear in speech in noun rather than verb form, labeling accusatorily: ingrato/a (ingrate), malagradecido/a, desagradecido/a (ungrateful one).Footnote 7 Again turning to the dictionary, such ungrateful people do not repay, respond to, or in some cases even recognize the benefit that they have received.Footnote 8 As is often the case, then, the negative example of ingratitude helps clarify precisely what gratitude is—it involves recognizing (as Ricœur tells us, Reference Ricœur2005) that something was given, and responding in a culturally and socially appropriate fashion.
In what follows, I ethnographically locate gratitude and ingratitude in two related arenas. One is child circulation (informal fostering), in which young, distant kin are brought into and tend a household, producing complex and ambivalent relationships. The second is an institution for the elderly, a site where older people reflect upon why they are not at home with their adult children. Both of the examples I offer have women as their protagonists: the care-givers and care-recipients are both women, and the cases were described to me mainly in terms of the women's encounters with one another.Footnote 9 The two examples I offer below are necessarily partial, based on the recollections of a few of the people involved, but taken together they can illustrate the ways that gratitude and ingratitude appear to index new fault lines within kinship.
Such a comparison of child care and elder care is unusual within the anthropological literature, but Deysi and others made it clear to me that they must be considered together to fully understand how caregiving decisions are made, with an eye to the past or to the future. And indeed, both kinds of kinship relationships can involve expressions of gratitude or ingratitude that in turn index and draw in other unequal social relations like gender, generation, and social class. By focusing on gratitude and ingratitude, the sticking points of family relationships in which duty and obligation are contested are revealed. I will argue that gratitude and ingratitude are useful tools for analyzing the socially unequal dimensions of kinship practices. Close attention to gratitude and ingratitude, I suggest, may also be productive for analyzing other situations of inequality.
The setting of the ethnographic examples presented below is an urban regional capital in highland Peru. Ayacucho, located nine hours from Lima over ground, is a city of about 125,000. It grew dramatically in the past few decades when falling agricultural yields and the draw of wage labor in the city brought large numbers of rural migrants to the area. During the 1980s the city further swelled when the Shining Path insurgent group began a campaign of terror against peasants in the countryside, matched only by the ferocity of the government's counter-insurgent troops that similarly targeted the rural poor. Families' abilities to care for related children and for aging parents were sharply circumscribed by the events of the war, even as many more children and older people found themselves unsupported when the kin they would normally count on were killed or disappeared.
Borneman has called on anthropologists to document “the actual situations in which people experience the need to care and be cared for and to the political economies of their distribution” (Reference Borneman and Faubion2001: 43). Responding to this call, in the two examples that follow, I identify the gratitude and ingratitude that arise in caregiving relations and analyze them in their political economic context. Though the war is over, general mistrust lingers in Ayacucho (see especially Theidon Reference Theidon2004). The possibilities for relating to others, gratefully or not, are further constrained by the region's continuing poverty and underdevelopment due to its agricultural base, historic relations of production in the region, and remote location. Social inequality is apparent throughout this fieldsite: child circulations are frequently motivated by subtle class differentials between sending and receiving families, and aging Peruvians are slotted into different configurations of care based on the economic possibilities of those upon whom they depend.
GRATITUDE, INGRATITUDE, AND THE FAULT LINES OF KINSHIP
Claims that kin have acted ungratefully reveal much about the edges and fault lines of kinship that would not otherwise be apparent. Relatedly, they show us much that is unexpected about gifting—about expectations of what should be given and how it should be received. In this article, I follow the lead of distinguished anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (Reference Lévi-Strauss1969) and Marilyn Strathern (Reference Strathern1985) in exploring the ways in which kinship and exchange are mutually constitutive, and how kinship, in particular, is composed of gifts, exchanges, obligations: of gratitude and ingratitude alike.
In invoking “the gift,” of course, I raise a phenomenon as central to the development of social relations as it is to the development of anthropological theory. In this literature (Malinowski Reference Malinowski1961; Mauss Reference Mauss1990 [1954]; Gregory Reference Gregory1980; Reference Gregory1982; Parry Reference Parry1986; Reference Parry, Parry and Bloch1989; Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2003, following Derrida Reference Derrida1992; and Candea and Da Col Reference Candea and Da Col2012 on hospitality), the gift's contribution to sociality (and its appeal for anthropology) is that it initiates or continues an economic and hence social cycle of exchange. Such sustained thinking about gifts, exchange, and reciprocity has borne much fruit for scholars of the Andean region. Ayni is the classic example—a Quechua word encompassing various kinds of reciprocity, such as days of work traded between two neighbors (Alberti and Mayer Reference Alberti, Mayer, Alberti and Mayer1974; Mayer Reference Mayer2002).Footnote 10 But as Enrique Mayer has noted, the rules of Andean reciprocity have usually been considered as productive of relationships between rather than within households (Reference Mayer2002: 131–32; see, however, Isbell Reference Isbell, Bolton and Mayer1977).Footnote 11
Like the gift, kinship relations are also (and relatedly) an anthropological concern of long standing. Contemporary kinship studies (Strathern Reference Strathern1992; Carsten Reference Carsten and Carsten2000; Edwards Reference Edwards2000; all responding in one way or another to Schneider Reference Schneider1980 and Reference Schneider1984) explore how people conceive of their relatedness to one another, what relatedness is made to do, and how it plays out in relation to other domains of analysis such as gender, class, ethnicity, or labor. Kinship and marriage relations certainly organize multiple facets of Andean life: in the rural, agricultural settings that are some of our primary research locations (Bolton and Mayer Reference Bolton and Mayer1977; Isbell Reference Isbell1985 [1978]; Arnold Reference Arnold1997; Bolin Reference Bolin2006; Van Vleet Reference Van Vleet2008), in impoverished urban settings (Swanson Reference Swanson2010), and in transnational contexts (Miles Reference Miles2004; Pribilsky Reference Pribilsky2007). In each of these settings, social inequalities (class, gender, ethnicity, urbanity) are in tension with ideologies of kinship connectedness to constrain and shape the ways that people expect to relate to one another, and how they actually do. I draw from these rich literatures on the gift and on kinship to develop my argument about how a changing context of inequality affects expectations of kin obligations.
There are two ways in which my ethnographic material from the Andes suggests that kinship and gifts should continue to be read together. First, they are both arenas in which ambivalence reigns. The social relations made possible through gifts are sometimes uncomfortable. Gifting can create a kind of close interdependence that is both necessary and dangerous, helping to create familiarity but also ensuring that the relationships remain under constant examination: “Treat your affines with caution, even suspicion; but you do need and want to have affines. Try to avoid importunate demands from your acquaintances; but make your own on them” (Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2003: 630). Close kinspersons, like parents and children, may also be considered within such an ambivalent analysis. Writing on both the gift and on kinship identifies ambivalence as a centrally useful analytic (see, e.g., Peletz Reference Peletz1995). Specifically, attending to expressions regarding ingratitude can reveal expectations that are not in alignment with one another about obligation and duty. Doing so within a kinship context is especially useful, given that kinship invokes notions of obligation and duty more so than do many other kinds of relationships. As Jeffrey Jurgens notes for Turkey, “A person's status as an upstanding parent, child, relative or friend often rides on the degree to which she or he meets others' expectations in relations of exchange” (Reference Jurgens2009; see also White Reference White1994).
Second, “kinship and economy popularly tend to be defined as exclusive of each other” (Strathern Reference Strathern1985: 193), and as such anthropologists have occasionally replicated this opposition in our own theoretical models (Medick and Sabean Reference Medick, Sabean, Medick and Sabean1984). Consequently, it is important to identify sites where, despite anxious talk to the contrary, kinship and economy are simultaneously co-produced. Viviana Zelizer has made this observation with regard to the increasing “sacralization” of children over the course of the twentieth century in North America, which actually resulted in a further commercialization of their lives (Reference Zelizer1985: 15). Jonathan Parry has followed this argument to its logical conclusion in a fascinating analysis of Mauss' work, where he notes that “an ideology of the ‘pure gift’ is most likely to arise in highly differentiated societies with an advanced division of labour” (Reference Parry1986: 466–67). Parry's analysis suggests that an expectation of gratitude following customary parental or filial actions might index an increasing differentiation of economic relationships from other social ties. Hence, claims of ingratitude may be useful as indexes either of shifting socioeconomic patterns more broadly, or of conflict over whether those actions should in fact be viewed as customary.
During fieldwork, I frequently witnessed performances of gratitude and allegations of ingratitude during routine social interactions. Following the work of anthropologists who examine how culture emerges in real time (e.g., Tedlock and Mannheim Reference Tedlock and Mannheim1995), I consider here performances of gratitude or ingratitude and their invocation in everyday interactions rather than gratitude or ingratitude as primarily related to affect and emotion, though I recognize this approach has been extremely useful in other settings (for classical approaches see Chodorow Reference Chodorow1978; Gilligan Reference Gilligan1993 [1982]; Ruddick Reference Ruddick1989; for more recent uses see Rebhun Reference Rebhun1999; Padilla Reference Padilla2007; Russ Reference Russ2008). I am concerned here with how people convince others that they feel grateful, or ascribe states of ingratitude to others. Michael Lambek has termed kinship acts such as these “ethical,” because they involve “acts of bestowal, reception, initiative, and the affirmation of responsibility for oneself and on behalf of others and, equally, of exercising judgment with respect to those others” (Reference Lambek2011: 11). Such ethical acts make statements about what is expected or obliged, about the quality of the relationship, or about what was given. By being attentive to moments when people are called ungrateful, we are granted insight into current or changing social norms.Footnote 12 In its ability to incite discourses of moral failure and responsibility, then, ingratitude is far more revealing than gratitude.
INGRATITUDE IN URBAN ANDEAN CHILD CIRCULATION
My first example is a case of child circulation, a phenomenon that I studied for nearly two years (2001–2003) in Ayacucho and Lima, Peru (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2007; Reference Leinaweaver2008b; Reference Leinaweaver2008c; see also Walmsley Reference Walmsley2008; Weismantel Reference Weismantel1995). By “child circulation” I refer to the temporary incorporation of a young person into a new house and family, often that of a relative.Footnote 13 It is quite common, particularly among poorer families, who feel both economic and social pressures to send a child to a slightly better off family member. In this way they can allay some of the expenses of raising a child, or free themselves from child care obligations in order to seek out wage labor in faraway cities, mines, or plantations. But, just as importantly, they create or strengthen social connections with well-placed family members, creating or fulfilling obligations that keep those ties active. From the perspective of the receiving family, a young newcomer may be able to assist with the household chores or keep company with the family members. Crucially, the young person must understand circulation as involving an opportunity for education or progress—perhaps school fees will be paid or relocation will mean the chance to attend a better, urban school. Because of the poverty and inequality that is the background for these circulations of children, they become particularly fraught sites within which expressions of gratitude and ingratitude take on heightened meaning.
I suggest here that such expressions of gratitude and ingratitude are highly useful tools for identifying local evaluations of socioeconomic difference, responsibility, and moral behavior. In other words, the appearance of gratitude and ingratitude in narratives of child circulation reflect assumptions about social relationships. An expression of ingratitude means that both parties feel wronged or unappreciated. In the case that follows, the adult thinks she is doing the child a favor and is disappointed and resentful when her evaluation is not confirmed. The child thinks the adult is exploiting or taking advantage of her; she perceives that the adult thinks she should be grateful, but this only further angers her because the quality of what has been given her is so inferior, implying that the adult thinks very little of the young person and what she has offered in return (her presence, her company, her labor).
Teresa, a middle-class woman in Ayacucho, expressed to me that Juana, a girl who had come to live with her, had been ungrateful. She drew on her history with Juana's family to explain. Many years ago, Teresa told me, she had received Juana's aunt Eulalia into her home. Eulalia lived with and worked for Teresa's family before marrying and setting up her own household. In the mid-1990s, Eulalia came to Teresa to plead that she take in Juana, Eulalia's niece, who was suffering because her stepfather would not give her money for clothing. (Juana told me that she did not know her genitor; her stepfather acted as her father.) According to Teresa, Eulalia described Juana's poverty in painful detail: she wore her mother's hand-me-down shoes and a skirt pieced together out of scraps of her mother's own skirt. Teresa agreed to receive Juana, then age twelve, who came to live with her. In other words, Teresa was helping Juana, and the implication would be that Juana should appreciate this.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the emphasis in Teresa's “arrival narrative” differs from that in Juana's. Juana told me that after she and her family migrated from their rural village to Ayacucho, Eulalia told Juana to go accompany Teresa. “‘She's a good woman,’ she told me…. I didn't want to but I was afraid my stepfather would beat me again.” Juana's reluctance and fear reveal her ambivalence toward this arrangement. Juana recounted how she lived with Teresa, her husband, and her two daughters, attending to the middle-class family's various needs. Teresa eventually became Juana's godmother for her first communion, and Teresa's daughter became Juana's godmother for her confirmation. Godparenthood is an extremely important relationship in the Andes and throughout Latin America (Ossio Reference Ossio and Smith1984; Mintz and Wolf Reference Mintz and Wolf1950).Footnote 14 For Juana to become doubly integrated through godparenthood into Teresa's family was a way for both to further establish their relationship as kinship rather than employer-servant.
The relationship between Juana and the rest of the family was not always or even often smooth, however, and after two years of what she experienced as numerous unjustified complaints and critiques, she moved back to her mother's house. When Juana graduated from high school four years later, she returned to carry out household chores for Teresa during the days but this time slept at home. By 2002, when I became close to the family, Teresa and her husband were in their sixties, and their daughters, who lived with them, were both employed in professional positions. Juana's presence in Teresa's home became erratic and she finally confessed that she had enrolled in vocational classes in the mornings and thus could only come in the afternoons. Teresa insisted she needed Juana there in the mornings, and tried to convince Juana to change her class schedule. Instead Juana left for a second time, underscoring her desperate but tenuous grasp on education as the only way to move forward.Footnote 15
Juana's departure caused Teresa to perceive her as ungrateful. It put a strain on Teresa and her husband, who as they aged faced both physical difficulties and the social challenge of finding a new young person to help her in the home. Teresa and Juana's complex relationship is not just that of a patron and servant, or a benefactress and recipient of aid, but also of godmother and goddaughter, and of two women who have lived together. It is thus partly the refutation of this closeness that Teresa resents. Secondly, in child circulation, young people are told that they should appreciate the beneficence of the adults who took them in.Footnote 16 For Teresa, her kindness meant opportunity for Juana—freedom from physical violence and being able to afford clothing. Thus, Teresa felt Juana owed her gratitude and should prioritize her commitment to Teresa over her education. Teresa read Juana's departure from her home as a sign of sullen ingratitude. By contrast, Juana would not describe herself as ungrateful. Instead, she pointed to the family's moral failings to demonstrate how there was nothing for her to be grateful for, saying, “I don't want to go back there and have the same things happen that happened before—as my godparents they shouldn't have been that way.” From Juana's perspective, it was Teresa's duty to support her, not only as her godmother but also as someone previously linked to the family through Eulalia's presence. Thus, Teresa expects gratitude, and Juana resents Teresa's assumption.
Such muted tensions are common enough in child circulations. The ostensible line between maid and circulated child is often unclear or nonexistent. Albert Schrauwers has found a similar phenomenon among To Pamonans in Indonesia: domestic exploitation that takes place within kinship “is not a simple perpetuation of historical relations of servitude but a form of labor mobilization that has emerged in the niches of the capitalist transformation of the highlands” (Reference Schrauwers1999: 21). Live-in service is prevalent in Peru, where young children who are circulated are sometimes done so in order to provide household service. A disagreement over Juana's role in the household grounds the disagreement between Teresa and Juana over whether gratitude is required. That is, the very undefinability of her role (because child circulation and servitude are not easily distinguished) permits wildly differing interpretations of the social expectations that surround it. In other cases I recorded, young people were (eventually) grateful for what they received from the older ones when they subsequently recognized it as a life lesson. One young woman was belatedly grateful for an aunt and uncle who forced her to speak Spanish instead of Quechua during the time she resided with them (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2008b: 131). Another young man thanked the caregiver who beat him with the buckle end of his belt; at the time he hated the man, but he now gratefully tells the former caregiver that being beaten made him who he is and kept him from going down a bad path of drinking or theft.Footnote 17 In this sense, young people can express gratitude, even if delayed, for receiving tools and treatment that enable them to achieve the good life.
But in the case of Teresa and Juana, this ideal—that the responsible older party should discipline and shape the younger one into a successful adult—was flouted, in Juana's view, when Teresa asked her to prioritize her household work and caregiving over her vocational classes. Teresa's dismissal of Juana's attempts to improve herself through education went too far, in the local ideologies of the region where education is prized above almost everything else as an almost magical route out of poverty. The politics of gratitude and ingratitude are used by both the powerful and the weak, as both parties to a relationship try to manipulate it toward more favorable terms. In this case, Teresa perceived Juana as ungrateful, and correctly identified that Juana—unable to speak up for herself because of her position within this micro-hierarchy—was nonetheless complaining through the powerful signal of demonstrating ingratitude. In other words, Juana, perceiving that Teresa felt she should be grateful, refused to collude in portraying Teresa as generous. By refusing the gratitude that Teresa anticipated, Juana also effectively denied an ongoing exchange relationship between Teresa and herself, potentially laying the groundwork for her more permanent exit from Teresa's household.
Ayacuchanos who identify with the perspective of the socially and economically superior adult in such relationships assume that circulated children should feel grateful. From this perspective, young people should show this gratitude by remaining loyal and obedient, and properly prioritizing their goals. The problem at the root of this assumption is seen in the way that an accusation of ingratitude highlights very different perceptions that the young person and the receiving adult have of the framework of their relationship. The different perceptions have to do with the idea of responsibility and duty: whether it is a duty or a kindness for an adult to take in a young person will determine how she responds. From the young person's perspective, it is critical for the successful functioning of the relationship to view it as a duty rather than a kindness (compare van Dijk Reference van Dijk2012: 36). The alternative would require her to understand herself as a recipient of charity, a role that, in the Andean context, implies the asocial positionality of not being able to participate in an exchange relationship (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2008b: 80). And it would imply that the relationship on whose grounds she had left her family and changed residences was not in fact one of kinship, but something more contractual and perhaps, potentially, less justifiable as a result.
INGRATITUDE AND THE HOME FOR THE AGED
While child circulation often draws from and approximates parent-child relations, many of the children who move in this way feel their new relationships to be much closer to servitude than to kinship. But my second example of the use of discourses of ingratitude anchors this discussion even more squarely in the realm of parent-child relationships. Anthropological kinship studies have long demonstrated that despite deeply held ideologies about such relationships, even the most cherished and symbolically significant relations have stresses and fractures. Despite the widespread ideology that Andean families take care of elderly relatives in the home (Weismantel Reference Weismantel1988: 170), for a few decades now there has been a home for the aged in downtown Ayacucho, the Asilo de Ancianos (or “elderly asylum”), where I conducted participant observation and interviews in 2007 (see image 1).
A home for the aged in downtown Ayacucho, the Asilo de Ancianos (or “elderly asylum”), where I conducted participant observation and interviews in 2007 (author's photo).
The asilo is run by a sisterhood of nuns (the Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly) and is occupied by about a hundred old people from the region—a very small sample indeed, but a revealing one. The majority of residents are poor, indigenous women. Most of them come from families unable to provide for them, and in this way demonstrate—as one of the nuns explained to me—the way that obligations to aging family members wane and wax depending on a nation's economic standing, so that the population of the asilo swelled during times of particular austerity or outright violence in recent Peruvian history.Footnote 18 However, even those whose presence in the institution is not ascribed to poverty or tragedy reveal how relationships between parents and children may be understood (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2008a).
One of the residents of this institution is Felicitas, a retired schoolteacher. In contrast with the full skirt and long braids most of the female residents wore, Felicitas' pants and short hair marked her as urban and non-indigenous, and her former profession is locally quite respectable. This is an interesting case, in part because it is so clearly an outlier. So many of the elderly in the institution are poor, and their abandonment can be understood in those stark economic terms. But Felicitas has no economic reason to be there, according to prevalent understandings of race and class in the region. So I wondered, what could explain her presence in the asilo?
Felicitas does not live at home because, as she told me rather cryptically, “Women prefer their husband to their mother.” While I was not entirely sure what she meant by this, I had already heard that—precisely because it is so important for aging parents to be cared for in the home—marital relations can suffer when tensions surface about whose parents will reside with the couple. Some couples resolve this friction through negotiation, others, separation; a few resolve it through leaving aging parents at the institution.
From a friend of mine who used to be Felicitas' neighbor, I heard more details: that Felicitas' eldest daughter, Natividad, had married a man she met on-line, and “Senora Felicitas didn't like him at all. He's dark-skinned, not handsome; you don't know what family he's from—and Felicitas is from one of the best families in Ayacucho.” My friend explained that Natividad paid attention only to her husband—she had essentially abandoned her mother, whom she did not even feed adequately. Natividad is ailing, and her new husband takes good care of her. “So partly she favors him because of gratitude, and of course there is also affection, love for this man. Natividad wants to have a life with her husband, and she has that right.” Felicitas felt that she should receive preferential treatment due to her role as mother and homeowner (the house was divided into independent apartments, and Felicitas' daughters each occupied one).Footnote 19 This made it sting all the more when she was displaced by this newcomer.
Felicitas, unhappy, visited her neighbors daily in order to escape the unpleasant conditions within her house, to the extent that her neighbors began to pretend they were not home. On one such visit, she asked my friend to take her to the asilo, which prompted my friend to admonish Felicitas' daughters to look after her better, while at the same time responding to Felicitas that she could not take this extraordinary step, for what would her daughters say? While admitting that Felicitas had a “strong personality” and might not have been easy to live with, my friend's sympathies were clearly with Felicitas and against Natividad, who did not seem to be fulfilling her moral obligations. Felicitas concluded that her life was hell, and so one day, without saying a word to anyone, she packed her things and took a taxi to the institution.
Felicitas' story is unusual in many ways but in other ways it shares features with stories of other older people in the asilo; I heard more than one of them remark that grown children, or an estranged spouse and grown children, had cravenly installed the aged parent in the asilo in order to have the house to themselves. One older man, Diosdado, said of his children who are living in the house he built for them (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2009), “They only come visit when they need something.” Although he did not use the word “ungrateful,” he implied it through the contrast he drew between his self-interested children and his own labor in constructing them a home. Diosdado's paternal actions of building a house for his children were surely at least partly meant to ensure that he would be cared for in his old age. Following my neighbor Deysi's kinship theory, then, he had done what was required by giving his children something they needed to succeed, and thus the children should rightfully be grateful, and care for him in the future. Felicitas, too, had provided her children with a house and felt that they ought to be grateful and act accordingly.
For Deysi, “ungrateful” would be an appropriate accusation from an elderly person (who fulfilled everything they ought to have done) to their child who places them in an institution. “Ungrateful” only arises when norms are violated and it in turn throws the implicit norm—gratitude—into relief through its breach. When Felicitas stated, “Women prefer their husband to their mother” she was making a critical evaluation of a daughter who had mis-prioritized her social responsibilities. That Natividad should feel grateful to her husband for the care he provided her, rather than her mother for everything she had done over the accumulated years, only added to the disappointment.Footnote 20 Felicitas' case is even more interesting because it was she herself, not Natividad, who interned her in the asilo. This action articulated Felicitas' rejection of the inferior care her daughter offered her, but required that she actively depict Natividad as ungrateful in order to explain her self-internment. Had her daughter placed her in the asilo, as many other residents' grown children had, Felicitas would not even need to make the case—Natividad's ingratitude would be apparent.
I have no doubt that Felicitas indeed has a strong personality and that this case is best described as the doings of an unusually unhappy family. Yet I find it quite significant that Felicitas' friend could describe such a specific case in broader terms of gratitude and ingratitude, of duty and obligation. The fact that such a framing exists and is easily accessible even for a case that is clearly quite complicated suggests that accusations of ingratitude directed from aging parents to grown children are a common feature of the Ayacucho landscape. Institutionalized aging parents like Felicitas think their children should feel grateful for the care they offered—and that this gratitude should translate into an obligation to reciprocate caregiving. This case, even more so than the example of Juana and Teresa, demonstrates what Komter has argued: that gratitude can be seen as “the moral basis of reciprocity … indebtedness is not in any way contrary to gratitude, but rather is its moral core” (2004: 208).
ANALYSIS: THE AMBIVALENCE OF GRATITUDE
Gifts have long been identified by anthropologists as containing ambivalent messages and powers. For example, as Laidlaw has observed, “Gifts evoke obligations and create reciprocity, but they can do this because they might not” (Reference Laidlaw2003: 628). Ambivalence has also, if more recently, been identified as central to kinship systems. This is a sentiment Michael Peletz illustrates with the salty words of a Malay man who described ungrateful relatives with the phrase “kasih bunga, balas tahi,” translated by Peletz as “you give flowers, you get shit in return” (Reference Peletz, Franklin and McKinnon2001: 413). Peletz traces the importance of ambivalence in kinship to a variety of phenomena, including the “potentially time-consuming, arduous, and/or alienating (if only because frustrating and/or unrequited) emotional labor associated with the invariably precarious transformation of duty into authentic emotional motivation” (ibid.: 434). Indeed, it is precisely the relationship between (contested understandings of) obligation and (sincerely or grudgingly given) gratitude that these examples of ambivalent Andean kinship relations demonstrate.
This ethnographic material shows that ambivalent social relations in the process of negotiation may be identified and analyzed through a search for when and why accusations of ingratitude emerge. Gratitude and ingratitude thus express ideas about obligation, relatedness, and responsibility. Focusing solely on gifts and exchange obligations on one hand, or on kinship practices on the other, would not fully do justice to this ethnographic material, but to enter through a kind of back door, by looking at ingratitude, gives new insight into both parties' positions.
I have already mentioned the overemphasis on women's roles in such cases due to a framing of caregiving as gendered feminine that erases men's roles. For example, although I knew both Teresa and her husband quite well, my notes regarding Juana's ingratitude come entirely from conversations with Teresa. But both of these cases involve other kinds of social difference as well: generational and socioeconomic, above all (see Cole and Durham Reference Cole, Durham, Cole and Durham2006 for an insightful analysis of generation). In generational terms, these conflicts are among women of different generations whose expectations are not in accordance with one another. Thus gendered inequality—the expectation that women do the carework—intersects here with generational inequality—the expectation that once the period of initial childhood dependence has come to an end, younger people care for older ones.
Social class differences are central to my interpretation of these cases. Kinship relations are unequal, despite frequent ideological insistence to the contrary, and in both these cases, we see a poorer or hierarchically disadvantaged younger woman expected to care for a better off or more established senior woman. When the care she offers does not meet the expectations of the senior, better-off woman, she is labeled ungrateful. It would be difficult to know without further comparative study whether gratitude is expected in an equal degree from younger, disadvantaged men (but see Jurgens Reference Jurgens2009). What is certainly clear from these cases is that an accusation of ingratitude—which itself denotes that gratitude was originally expected by the senior party owing to the nature of the relationship—points to a discrepancy between understandings of what was given, what can be chalked up to duty and obligation vis-à-vis generosity and kindness, and how the offerings in question align with tensions that already imbue cross-class, cross-generational relationships.
Appadurai has suggested based on his work among Tamil in India that gratitude is in many ways merely a token representing a plan to reciprocate in a socially appropriate way in the future (Reference Appadurai1985). So too, for these middle-class elders, it is clear that gratitude should lead to future reciprocation. This supports the local kinship theory put forth by my neighbor Deysi: that grown children should tend their parents or benefactors out of gratitude for the care they once received. It suggests—to put it plainly—that obligation is actually constitutive of gratitude. But the reciprocation Appadurai identifies can only work when participants are on a comparable social level. So, for instance, for Felicitas to accuse Natividad of ingratitude might imply that she views Natividad as a relative social equal, as befits two women related through such close kinship ties. In cases of extreme imbalance there is little chance that a gift or service or kindness can ever be repaid in kind.
The imbalance of socioeconomic inequality, so often present in child circulation, is what leads to the deep ambivalences highlighted in narratives like Juana's. The imbalance of age hierarchy—that between parents and children—is ultimately temporary and reversible such that grown children may legitimately become obligated to their aging parents (compare Weiner Reference Weiner1976: 125–26). If gratitude represents a promise to reciprocate in the future, then those who will never be in a position to appropriately reciprocate—which happens in cases of stark social inequality—can never be grateful. That is, perhaps the tension arising within relations of temporary inequality can be eased by gratitude only within a narrow range of socioeconomic difference. If what Teresa provided Juana was valuable, and Juana will never be able to offer a meaningful reciprocation of what Teresa provided her, Juana cannot be grateful. This imbalance is different in significant ways from the classic analysis of reciprocity as a gift that continues to generate social relations precisely because it can never be fully repaid (Valeri Reference Valeri1994).Footnote 21 Relationships like Juana and Teresa's are unevenly mediated by kinship and co-residence but are characterized most dramatically by stark social inequalities, meaning that Juana will never have the chance to repay Teresa. Interactions between people of different social classes within a kinship context require particular frameworks in order to be commensurable, and the notion of gratitude does not provide such a framework.
I see two possible explanations for this situation, which are in all likelihood intertwined: on one hand people in Ayacucho may be undergoing broader social and economic transformations that constitute new forms of kin relations, and on the other they may be undergoing a shift in how they experience such relations as given or built up. The dramatic social and economic transformations described in the introduction to this essay suggest that we can look to historical context to understand why older people are demanding a particular form of behavior and younger people are unable or unwilling to offer it. For example, vast numbers of indigenous people have relocated to Peruvian cities and, through urbanization and education, become less “Indian” while they are there. That shift translates to changes in how family life is experienced, from the mannered but generous exchanges within indigenous families to what Mary Weismantel calls “ill-defined exchanges filled with unresolved guilt and resentment” that characterize bourgeois family interactions grounded in an ideology of natural feeling (Reference Weismantel2001: 140).
I also suspect that these socioeconomic and experiential transformations are grounding new senses of modern subjectivity in a post-war Ayacucho. As younger people strive toward social mobility, they may feel it necessary to cut off relations with those who are unable to do so (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2010; Thornton Reference Thornton2001: 454). Accusations of ingratitude—that is, discrepancies between expectations and performances of gratitude—are particularly fraught when social roles and positions are surrounded by uncertainty or negotiation, and when parties are at odds over how the relationship should be defined and played out (McCullough and Tsang Reference McCullough, Tsang, Emmons and McCullough2004: 127; Komter Reference Komter, Emmons and McCullough2004: 207). Ingratitude thus may point to one party's changing understanding of social relations. When social standing is consistently being assessed and reevaluated, if individuals' expectations are not met, they may experience this as disrespect or ingratitude (Ricœur Reference Ricœur2005: 200–5). Thus, to properly understand accusations of ingratitude is to situate them within a social landscape—any interaction or exchange will be evaluated by each party, and aligned with his or her expectations in order to assess the other's understanding of each social position.
As my neighbor Deysi suggested to me when I first began inquiring into these phenomena, gratitude and ingratitude can reveal how people make sense of kinship. The rather surprising outcome of this examination is that kinship is not only read as naturally grounding obligation, despite the contention of the adoption office staff member I spoke with. Instead, as Deysi indicated, gratitude is a particularly productive way to think about how people either comply with or extricate themselves from their social responsibilities of caregiving under conditions of social change and relational inequality. For those who experience or contest others' expectations of gratitude, it is also an ambiguous phenomenon, one which heightens participants' attention to their own understandings and their interpretations of others' understandings regarding what behaviors or obligations ought to result from an unanticipated kindness or act of benevolence. My larger argument is that, in a context of social inequality and change where people are working out their understandings of social responsibility toward one another, we—and they—can look to whether or not others perceive that they should feel grateful in order to index local attitudes about care and relatedness.
CONCLUSIONS: UNCOVERING NEW MORAL ECONOMIES
If gratitude and ingratitude spring from instantiations of relationships of exchange then they are aspects of a “moral economy,” defined as the local meanings of exchange, reciprocity, and success (Ong Reference Ong2006: 199; see also Scott Reference Scott1976; Thompson Reference Thompson1971). By using accusations of ingratitude to tease out the competing expectations that people have for one another, the moral stances they take, we gain access to the moral economies circulating in Ayacucho, amid socioeconomic and demographic changes that are transforming how people are being cared for. Jane Collier has incisively analyzed transformations in kinship in Andalusía, arguing that in the 1960s kinship care was provided to parents just as it was to children out of duty, while by the 1980s kinship care was said to be given not out of duty but out of love (Reference Collier1997). In Ayacucho, a middle-class or bourgeois kinship ideology in which parents and children are expected to care for one another as part of their role-based duties coexists with a working-class kinship ideology in which proper and normative parenting and caregiving must include the unequivocal support of educational and professional trajectories. Under such circumstances, references to gratitude and ingratitude are concrete evidence for the ways in which personal relations shift in a particular direction in response to larger social changes. Within a context of persistent poverty and social hierarchy, families in Ayacucho are working out competing notions of social responsibility even as relatively disadvantaged (such as young or old) individuals within those families express a position that gratitude is not freely given but earned.
I have argued here that gratitude and, particularly, ingratitude may in certain contexts be key symbols that allow us to identify social expectations, kinship responsibilities, and changing understandings of obligation. Gratitude and duty, rather than being opposed social forces, coexist and are deeply intertwined; however, their relationship only becomes salient and a subject of discussion when implicit norms are violated. The accusation of ingratitude is a particularly revealing lens into the fraught nature of kinship relations as they intersect with hierarchies of gender, class, and generation in present-day Ayacucho. Such failures of kinship may be related to changing social mores within the middle class wherein grown children, rather than caring for their parents out of obligation, may elect to offer or withdraw care based on their own assessments of what their parents provided them in life. Here, the political economy of ingratitude links to changes in family roles and a breakdown in communication between generations about expectations of care and affection.
Much as anthropologists have continued to view witchcraft accusations as a key site for identifying social tensions (Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1937; Sanders Reference Sanders2008; Smith Reference Smith2008; Favret-Saada Reference Favret-Saada1980; Turner Reference Turner1964), so also claims and recastings of ingratitude can be said to do similar (if less exotic) work.Footnote 22 Within the sphere of kinship, in Elizabeth F. S. Roberts's study of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, she found younger kinswomen donating eggs to their senior kinswomen partly out of gratitude for what the older women had previously provided them (Reference Roberts, Birenbaum-Carmeli and Inhorn2009: 114). In my recent work on international adoptions, I have documented competing senses of gratitude—on one hand that adoptees owe something to their parents, or, by extension, to society at large (Leinaweaver Reference Leinaweaver2011: 393 and n.d.) and on the other that adoptive parents are grateful to those involved in the miraculous gift of a child, a sentiment that can in some cases be directed at a birth family but is almost always directed at the child's nation of origin, the adoption office staff, and God. Yet gratitude and ingratitude may be indexical of contentious dimensions of other kinds of social relations as well. Elsewhere in Latin America, broader relations of clientelism and patronage allow whole classes of people to be interpreted as politically ungrateful (Han Reference Han2004). Relations between donor and recipient in international aid formations are frequently glossed in terms of gratitude (Hattori Reference Hattori2003). In this article, I have argued that evaluations of informal child circulations and grown children's connections to aging parents in urban highland Peru reveal the potential richness of gratitude as an analytical heuristic for identifying unequal dimensions of relations understood to fall within the domain of kinship. These brief examples from further afield suggest that a focus on gratitude may potentially be productive in other unequal settings as well.
