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

into Žižek’s ticklish borders between structure and nihilism, or even a caving into the
insurmountable gap between the ontological and the ontic (Žižek 1999). Instead
The incompleteness and limitations in caregiving are also inherent in
being human and suggest the paradox that becoming more human also
means becoming more fully aware of contradiction, failure, and
incompleteness in our own lives. Realizing the human, then, is not so
much an uplifting story as it is a critical and deep soberness over the
fate and destiny of humanity and ourselves” (Kleinman 2010, 18).
Rather than treat caregiving as simply a burden or an act of love,
Kleinman holds that the presence of being there with someone as a
caregiver necessitates that the divided self and experience of that
phenomenology “…facilitates (rather than undermines) …caregiving
(Kleinman 2010, 19).
So, what’s at stake? Herzfeld reminds us that the politics of care, discipline and suffering
have left indelible marks on the body, and that one of the projects of anthropology is to
provide a critical response to the structural realities that people confront (Herzfeld
2001). Lambek and Strathern contend that what has become omnipresent not just in
hospitals, but in academic ‘texts’ such as this one, is the body. In part this is due to: “the
increased visibility and objectification [of the body] in late capitalist consumer society”
(Lambek and Strathern 1998, 5). For Maynard, and following from Lambek and
Strathern’s understanding of the body against the fiction of post-modernism, the body is
becoming a salient signifier again. This is especially true in the case of ageing, as one
imagines discarding and exiling the parts of the body that no longer ‘work’. The body is
“coming to replace the ‘person’ as a subject of inquiry, and I would add ‘identity’ as well”
(Maynard 2007: 3). This is how I come to understand what one resident said to me one
morning when I got him up earlier than he wanted to, in order to put cream on some of
his rashes. He protested: “I’m dying and all you care about is my crotch?!”
In the absence of any theodicy, how are we to make sense of new social spaces that
provide relief and care instead of regulation and punishment (Herzfeld 2001, 217)? How
can an anthropology of care scale down to the level of particular persons and their
immediate worlds? By investigating instances of caregiving, I hope to show that my
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