The reciprocal and relational dimension of care delineates another way for collective connectivity deeply situated in the everyday occurrences. Personally speaking, the significance of care conceptualized by María Puig de la Bellacasa is that she managed to astutely accentuate the hidden yet productive connections beyond human agencies, without discharging the ethical responsibilities and accountabilities of human beings.
1 wildlife market and COVID-19
As a zoonotic global disease, the highly-debated discussion centering around COVID-19 has in a way offered one specific dynamic space to unfold the entanglements of various agencies living together on the planet. The seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, which has been believed as the source of the COVID-19 pandemic by many, arose many discussions in the public sphere since January. Not only selling seafood, the market also had a large wild animal section where live and slaughtered species were for sale, for instance, snakes, beavers, porcupines, pangolin, civet cats, bat, and baby crocodiles. With an expensive price, the meat of wildlife has been considered as the presentable luxury and precious traditional medicine for most buyers.
On the one hand, increasingly convenient logistics channels and the overall development of technology make wildlife trade more efficient. On the other hand, the dietary habits and socio-cultural ethics of the pre-industrial era have not entirely left Chinese culture. While getting substantial food is no longer a matter of survival for most Chinese nowadays, eating novel meat from rare animals or plants still holds as a special identification for some people in order to attain certain social recognition and identification. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the crazed appetite for wildlife of certain groups of people has been ferociously condemned among the online debate in China. Therefore, the corona time probably leads to the reconfiguration of ethics that goes beyond the human world, let more people reconsider the rapid, innovation-driven imaginaries of technological visions of the future, especially the detrimental limitedness of the human-centered framework.
2 soil, and local agriculture practice
In her book, Puig de la Bellacasa particularly addresses care in the context of industrialized farming, where soil is treated as a service for humans, or as an ingredient into human production. She also states that indigenous practices have become sources of innovation (212–213). Indeed, more than just the instrumental relation, the soil has a divine and active role in the agricultural conventions and folk religions in China even til today. Usually called the “Lord of the Soil” or “Earth God”, such deity has a very intimate and multifaceted role in the localized practice in agriculture. Instead of the subject-object dichotomy, the farmer and the personalized soil have a rather reciprocal communicative relation. To be sure, treating soil as a living localized entity is not only a distant religious belief for them, but also has been embedded int to the daily farming practice, where the dimension of care in Puig de la Bellacasa’s sense can possibly be identified.
In his Gods, ghosts, and ancestors (1974), Arthur P. Wolf suggests that the Chinese term ‘tudi’ signifies more than mere earth and soil, which is, in fact, indicative of the natural human relation with the land and, more specifically, the built human environment. Also, the intimate interactions of farmers with the soil denote the dynamics of ‘the sensorial universe’ proposed by Puig de la Bellacasa. Only by the frequent haptic experience and the caring encounters with the soil, the agricultural practice can become part of ‘knowledge’. With 560 million rural population in China, such convention has not died out but still is participating in contemporary times, which constantly troubles any universalized conceptions of post-industrial envision.
