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

lames the caregivers for her death, because Heather was not properly hydrated. In the
doctor’s eyes, the caregivers were negligent and not giving the residents enough fluids.
This same caregiver said, “That’s bullshit. We offer and change waters three times a day.”
I then chimed in and said, “Well, we do but sometimes we don’t and we can’t force them
to drink.” To this the caregiver just looked at me and turned away. Another staff member
from hospitality said that the cat, which belonged to a former resident on the third floor,
and that was spending a lot of time with Heather, should be given away. He said, “Don’t
let her go to Mary’s room. That cat is the grim reaper.”
Summary
I am perhaps coming too close to a constructivist argument about kinship. If as Barnes
says, “[…] parents are not necessarily those whose sexual union created the children, but
are sometimes those who nourished and raised them” (Barnes 2006, 354), then surely it
is not always those children who have to (or even) care for their ageing parents. Places
like Grandma’s Place prefer to ground care for the elderly in a folk version of kinship
which intertwines reason and nature à la Schneider. Viviana Zelizer is right to assert that
paid labour in intimate settings causes an abject feeling, especially when people continue
to wonder whether paying for care leads to lower or higher quality of care (Zelizer
2010). Maurice Godelier recently said in a BBC Radio 4 interview in ‘Thinking Allowed,’
that kinship does not give you mobile phones and airports. Perhaps it does not even give
you care in old age either. For Godelier, there was never a truly kin-based society. Social
relations penetrate and invest in kin relations, altering and metamorphosing kinship
structures over time (Godelier 2011).
Caregiving by family members in the home-space brings forth its own set of issues.
Siblings are often in conflict over how care is administered, and typically the issue boils
down to who will actually do the caregiving. Family caregivers often complain that they
are overburdened, and that siblings who are physically closer should offer more support
and care. With the onset of ageing societies and the pressures obtaining from changing
social, economic and demographic trends in contemporary societies, children and their
parents are spending more time together as adults (Harper 2004). Caregiving in this
context produces an unsettling role reversal where the sons and daughters assume
178