ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to introduce care and social reproduction to our understandings of resilience, the significance of which is that it necessitates a shift away from seeing resilience as something concerned with ‘self-sufficiency’ to something that involves ethical interdependence. By introducing some of the background of feminist work on care, the chapter seeks to highlight the ways that resilient practices require a commitment to social reproduction and mutual interdependency, taking examples of subsistence practices as a point of departure. Traditional subsistence practices are a special point of interest here as they counter the idea that self-sufficiency takes place at the level of the household. The examples presented in this chapter thus aim to illustrate some of the collective and reciprocal dimensions of subsistence practices and highlight that, in producing resilience at a local level, they do so in ways that redistribute resources to counteract socio-economic vulnerability, rather than exacerbating it. Yet significantly, while they each illustrate different forms of social and ecological solidarity, they risk remaining politically ambiguous in how they do so. The chapter begins by introducing feminist perspectives on care and social reproduction, before discussing some of the ethical implications and contradictions when taking place in market economies. The chapter then proceeds by looking at examples of non-market, rural subsistence practices to elaborate this form of resilience as interdependence; an interdependence that holds ethical potential, but remains politically ambiguous.
