Care as a Survival Strategy Under Authoritarianism: A Nicaraguan Ethnographic Perspective

ABSTRACT

When operating under the authoritarian gaze, the relationship between ethnographers and their collaborators becomes a profound partnership underpinned by care. In this article, I analyze three in‐depth interviews to examine how collaborators develop and utilize subversive strategies of care embedded in feminist ethics to secure their survival and that of their research community partners under the Daniel Ortega‐Rosario Murillo dictatorship in Nicaragua. I argue that under a regime of political violence, care becomes a central tenet for ethnographic relationships. This form of care becomes an essential strategy and an ethic for survival that both enables research to exist and redefines the nature of collaborative research. The acts of care that emerge from the collaborators' narratives detail a form of resistance that challenges authoritarian control and reframes the ethnographic process as one concerned with safety and protection. This article's primary contribution lies in establishing care as a foundational methodological framework for ethnographers—care provides a critical entry point for reimagining methodological and collaborative engagements, centering the imperatives of mutual safety and survival. Under authoritarianism in Nicaragua, acts of care have become an ethical and subversive necessity used by collaborators and researchers as they pursue survival, research, and the dissemination of knowledge. The current rise of authoritarianism in the United States hauntingly mirrors the political context in Nicaragua, particularly since 2018. As a result, anthropologists working with populations currently under threat in the United States can learn valuable lessons from the strategies of care that have been deployed in Nicaragua to navigate political repression.