Rituals of care for the elderly in northern Thailand: Merit, morality, and the everyday of long‐term care

Abstract

Caregivers’ quotidian actions challenge prevailing views of care that rely on the emotional or attentive orientation of the caregiver. The routinized care tasks provided by two middle‐aged women for their bedridden mother in northern Thailand reveal the realities of long‐term caregiving. For these sisters, care transforms “merit” and “karma” without reliance on internal conviction. This context in turn reflects how people enact values and maintain social worlds through habituated physical practices of providing for others. Ordinary care in practice—termed “rituals of care”—dislodges fixation on particular personal sentiments and affirms the study of care as a powerful tool for assessing enduring modes of moral experience as well as subtle forms of social change. [care, ritual, phenomenology, Buddhism, Thailand, embodiment, morality]

Keeping the Elderly Alive: Global Entanglements and Embodied Practices in Long-Term Care in Southeast Italy

“…In contrast, this article investigates the often-tensioned relation between emotions, experience of domestic care, and economic interest in the work of care for the elderly that migrant workers perform in an Italian context. The paper gives evidence to care work as a necessary combination between attentive practice and detachment in completion to the current description of care work as ritual (Aulino 2016) and tinkering and adaptation (Mol, Moser and Pols 2010).…”

“…The argument presented here builds on the current need for theorization and contextualization of the concept of care (Aulino 2016;Biehl 2011Biehl , 2012Buch 2014Buch , 2015Danely 2014Danely , 2015Ducey 2010;Kleinman 2009;Mazuz 2013aMazuz , 2013bMol 2008;Mol, Moser and Pols 2010;Muehlebach 2011Muehlebach , 2012Zelizer 2007). The article proposes an expansion of the concept of biopolitics, beyond the bound of state requirements that Foucault (2008) outlined.…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…Indeed, not all recurring words fit the main themes. For instance, in 2016, authors used care (6) to index varying topics, from rituals of elderly care in Thailand (Aulino ), to kinship ideology in domestic violence counseling in India (Kowalski ), to sex work in Japan (G. Koch ), although with labor and precarity among its keywords, the latter article does fit the economy and neoliberalism cluster. Likewise, media (7 in 2016; 4 in 2017) refers to mass media as well as digital and popular media in very different contexts, indexing topics that may or may not fit the main themes (Ball and Nozawa ; Dent ; Fisher ; Gray ; Holmes 2016; Jusionyte ; N. Evans ; Shipley ; Stankiewicz ).…”

“…That this ethnographic commitment creates its own impact becomes clear if we return to the download figures. Besides the articles in the two popular forums, those articles with more than 2,000 downloads include Lila Abu‐Lughod's () “The Cross‐Publics of Ethnography: The Case of ‘the Muslimwoman’” (downloaded 3,705 times), Felicity Aulino's () “Rituals of Care for the Elderly in Northern Thailand: Merit, Morality, and the Everyday of Long‐Term Care” (downloaded 3,049 times), Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma's () “The Righteous and the Rightful: The Technomoral Politics of NGOs, Social Movements, and the State in India” (2,649), and Perry Sherouse's () “Skill and Masculinity in Olympic Weightlifting: Training Cues and Cultivated Craziness in Georgia” (2,544). Besides illustrating that captivating article titles might do more to attract readers than SEO‐focused keywords, these articles show that the anthropologist's authority in the field, built over many years of hard ethnographic labor, is still the best guarantee of impact.…”

Narrative Navigation: HIV and (Good) Care in Aceh, Indonesia

“…This situation of stigmatization and low ART adherence levels is reflected in the low-prevalence province of Aceh, which many Acehnese and other Indonesians alike consider to be 2 While narrative is central to many healthcare interactions, it may not be prominent to all forms of caregiving. Routine practices of caregiving within families, for example, may take a rather different shape, as they may be much more ''ritual'' and ''embodied'' (Aulino 2016). People may express ''care'' in many different ways-which may not necessarily be conscious, or coherent (Taylor 2008 the most Islamic part of Indonesia.…”