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

caregivers and care recipients? Does this outsourcing act as a kind of appendage to
conventional forms of social living, or does it create emerging relations and new social,
cultural and emotional regimes? How will care be constituted in the larger social and
political economic context in the future? What causes anxiety is not the resident’s
understanding of kinship, nor the anthropological assertion that the American family is
set of bio-genetic relations resting on a cultural notion of biology and blood as an
objective fact legalised and naturalised. Rather, the anxiety issues forth when the
question of care is linked up with kin relations. Perhaps, that is why there is so much
litigation and controversy surrounding practices of care and neglect. One cannot
conceive of care in this context without also approaching a cultural and folk evocation of
kinship and its categorical antinomies.
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