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

daily tasks of living along with medical/therapy appointments, supervision of drug
treatments and schedules, being advocates, etc.). Fry goes on to say that, “Indeed, one of
the first tasks of caregiving when an elder becomes frail is to figure out the services
available in the eldercare market and the rules and regulations” (Fry 2003, 328). The
upshot is that persons are more mobile as they seek new opportunities in the labour
market. This accumulation of wealth ensures that “Nuclear families are not only
residentially distinct, but manage separate domestic budgets” (Fry 2003, 326).
Moreover, kin in the United States are not typically seen first and foremost as future
sources of financial support and reservoirs of labour. Fry’s reading of Bella, Madsen,
Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton’s Habits of the Heart: Individualism and commitment in
American life (1985) suggest that kin are persons, “who have their own trajectories and
whose accomplishments are to be enjoyed. Families are fun. Families and households
should be the institution of intimacy in an otherwise predominantly bureaucratic
society” (Fry 2003, 327).
This is not a chapter about how an ageing ego inhabits his/her kin universe. Rather, I
want to explore how caregiving and kinship are ambivalent concepts and kept at arm’s
length, especially in the context of LTCs. Is there an analytic relation between the act of
caregiving and the formation of new (fictive) kinship systems and relations? Care does
not sit in a vacuum, either. Susana Narotzky points to an overlapping of value realms
that are economic and non-economic. If the present day practice of capitalism can be
associated with an “[…] erosion of relations of solidarity and cooperation […this] has
significant implications not only for the individual actors but for the capacity of the
entire economic and political system to endure” (Narotzky 2008, 12). This ambiguity as
Narotzky notes, also leads to the state shedding care responsibilities, “[…] while
underscoring personalized and particularistic modes of provisioning support, in a
context of increasing self-regulatory practices” (Narotzky 2008: 9). This emerging
situation jettisons kinship away from Marxist understandings of household
reproduction, and places it in a greater field of affective relations, intimate labour, and
new forms of kinship not grounded simply in biological constructions of culture (and
vice versa). This chapter draws from two distinct sites. Fieldwork data was gathered at
an adult foster care home, which I will refer to here as Grandma’s Place, and is located
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