Discipline in chaos: Foucault, dementia and aging in India.
In India, care work for people in late-stage dementia is primarily conducted in the home. Using source material from urban India and drawing on Foucauldian theory, we illustrate the significance of three power/knowledge scripts in this context: social and cultural notions of acceptable, public bodies; medicalized forms of care; and the cultural contexts of the individual caregivers. The caregiver is the embodiment of these discourses and is charged with the task of mapping discipline onto inherently undisciplinable bodies. A tension exists between the caregiver's struggle to contain the unruliness of the person with dementia and, simultaneously, to act as a broker between the world of the care-recipient and the social world. We conclude that although the caregiver is the starting point for the exercise of discipline, the three power/knowledge scripts that inform care work are as much about surveying, routinizing and mobilizing caregivers' bodies as they are about disciplining the bodies of people with dementia.
Brijnath
Bianca
B
Social Sciences and Health Research Unit, School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine, Monash University (Caulfield Campus), Melbourne, VIC, Australia. bianca.brijnath@med.monash.edu.au
Manderson
Lenore
L
D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001294:Attitude to Health; D017028:Caregivers; D003704:Dementia / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D012919:Social Behavior; D012931:Social Environment
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