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

parental responsibilities and care for their ageing mothers and fathers. Women are still
predominantly the family caregivers, but even this generality is changing. Sons are
beginning to move back into their parents’ home to provide care not only for their
parents, but also for ageing members of their extended family. Old taboos are being
replaced by new ones. Washing one’s parent and seeing them naked may no longer
cause one to blush, but not having enough money to pay for a professional caregiver for
one’s older parent may actually be a larger source of social embarrassment.
Adopting the recent Marshall Sahlins argument on kinship in light of caregiving does not
clear things up either. Sahlins argues that kinship is about, if nothing else, a mutuality of
being (Sahlins 2011). Sahlins describes his approach by casting kinship in an
intersubjective mutuality of being, and the intrinsic importance of participating in one
another’s existence. To quote a useful passage, Sahlins says:
The constructed modes of kinship are like those predicated on birth
precisely as they involve the transmission of life-capacities among
persons. If love and nurture, giving food or partaking in it together,
working together, living the same land, mutual aid […] are so many
grounds of kinship, they all know with procreation the meaning of
participating in one another’s life. I take the risk: all means of
constituting kinship are in essence the same (Sahlins 2011, 14).
So what are we left with? Is it enough to say that in the case of the LTCs, caregivers are
forming kin relations with their residents because of their conjoint being (caregivers are
ageing too), and their performative modes of relatedness? They share the same space,
albeit in different ways, but is this enough to say that there is an emerging kinship
structure that is founded upon a common experiential interdependence that is shaped
by the terroir of intimate labour, empathy, and an ideology of the family?
As older people continue to secure long-term care, breaking and remaking homes will
pose policy and social challenges in the future. For the people who eventually check into
a long-term care facility, they do so unwillingly, dragging their feet and souls. Giving up
the car keys is their first significant act of surrender, and what awaits them is a long list
of inevitable losses. What matters for most of the residents in places like the CCRC is a
return to home. Home, however, is more than just a functional return to the physical
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