Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

Therefore, bonds are never fixed and they are never complete. Caregivers operate from
their cultural understanding of what it means to be a person. The idea that persons are
autonomous and have boundaries that need to be respected means that privacy becomes
an issue. Perhaps this is in line with Janette Davies’ discussion of the habitual routine of
care assistants (Davies 2007). For Davies, the ability to turn the ‘bedroom’ state of a
patient to a ‘lounge standard’ fit to be on view, was “integral to the identity and work
role of the care assistant” (Davies 2007, 132). Thus, caregivers work hard to reinforce
the idea that their residents should be as independent and autonomous as they once
were. It is the caregivers who keep bodies in order, and maintain the appearance that all
is not lost. The caregiver must prevent bodies from doing what they do; residents are not
allowed to ‘let themselves just go’—there is a battle against senescence and entropy. All
of this happens intersubjectively. While most caregivers do not reflect on what an
ontological process of becoming and existential learning might be for the elders, they are
nevertheless certain that what they are working on is fighting against the unbecoming of
a person. Their residents need to dress properly, to take regular showers, and to
remember important things about themselves. The slippage into an inchoate is not an
option for residents in the hands of formal caregivers. It is essentially this tension that
makes it hard for principles and practices to square with one another in caregiving.
For Arthur Kleinman, caregiving is not a moral duty per se of family members, but those
who engage in caregiving do so necessarily as an existential moral experience (Kleinman
2010, 26). Caregiving is not just about how we come to dignify and think about others, it
also involves introspection. Drawing from Henry James’ writings on the divided self,
Kleinman seeks to show that caregiving has been neglected to some extent by modern
biomedicine. In fact, Kleinman points out a common criticism: Do our doctors and GPs
really care about us and our wellbeing? Kleinman presents caregiving as a mode of being
in the world with others, and says that, “What starts out as caregiving for others
becomes caregiving for ourselves” (Kleinman 2010, 18). If moral sensibility is on the
wane in modern biomedicine, recuperating caregiving as a moral sensibility will
certainly have historical and institutional hurdles and challenges. Can we reveal what is
hidden emotionally, without pandering to or wallowing in a reified idea of the
‘individual’ as a postmodern divided self? Surely, this is not the descent of the subject
116