A anthropological critique of the Ethic of care

This article is a critique of the anthropology of vulnerability and of the needs on which the ethics of care are based. Firstly, this critique confronts the universal postulate of the anthropology of vulnerability to the history of the anthropology of illness. The latter manages to build up a specific disciplinary field in refusing the supervision of the medical sciences and the implicit principle to consider illness as an universal fact. The paper refers to the anthropology of nature and Philippe Descola's work in order to develop a comparative study of the systems of representations, including the naturalism of biomedecine as a model among others. It then presents the descriptions of the representations of vulnerability and the needs which are linked to the four main ontologies defined by anthropology of nature, animism, totemism, analogy and naturalism, and gives a new light to the anthropology on which the ethics of care rest. That anthropology of vulnerability could be an involuntary factor in order to make societies conform to an hygienic constraint. The ethics of care would therefore benefit greatly in freeing themselves from anthropology of vulnerability and focus on their original contextualism; in particular, they would benefit of the knowledge of the limits of naturalism at their basis. It will also allow them to provide a new tool for engeniering social transformations in a time, the beginning of XXI century, when cultures happen to mix.