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

Chapter 8: A Home Away From Home: The Antinomies of Caregiving and
Kinship
This chapter presents a comparative ethnographic account of caregiving and social
relations arising from two different long-term care facilities (LTCs) in the American
Midwest. By looking at practices on the ground, I show how care is conceptualised
through an ambivalent set of discourses regarding home spaces, and resident
conceptions of family and kinship. As older people are forced to downsize and relocate
to new settings, breaking and remaking homes becomes a painful and jarring experience.
Despite what memories and ideas of the family might conjure up regarding care and
responsibility, the family as a moral and cultural set of signifiers is always present
among the residents and caregivers at Tacoma Pastures. The concept of home and the
family in light of the Western autonomous self continues to be operationalized through
and conjoined by a set of new kinship relations and understandings.
Care for the elderly, and its immediate intimacy and association with dependency,
frequently evade the framings of normative Euro-American kinship. For Christine Fry,
“kinship is the care network through which one gives and receives varying forms of care
across a lifetime” (Fry 2003, 315). In a way, care is becoming too intimate and rationally
instrumental. Care sits in an uncomfortable position; there is a tension between the real
work of caregiving, and the expectations and exigencies of envisioning what constitutes
the duty of family members, and the quality of care they expect from paid caregivers in
LTCs.
David Schneider once suggested that in American culture, kinship is biology; the broken
heart and heartache are not (Schneider 1980). Schneider was making a point about
kinship as a model to live by, which draws on folk biology and biogenetic substance as a
cultural construct and an objective fact of nature. In this way, we can understand how
kinship is formulated as biology, and that substance forms a code of behaviour. In order
words, “Kinship is not a theory about biology; but biology serves to formulate a theory
about kinship” (Schneider 1980, 115). Despite this powerful and convincing
deconstruction, kinship as evinced in people’s understanding of family in places like the
American Midwest, still signifies something people claim to identify with, because the
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