title: Folding paper swans, modeling lives: the ritual of Filipina eldercare in Israel.
abstract: This article examines the practices of folding paper swans by Filipina migrants employed as live-in caregivers for elderly, dying patients in Israel. These practices create a microsystem model of adjustment through precise, small-scale, and repetitive movements. This microsystem synchronizes a tripartite process: the swan's process of construction, the patient's process of decay, and the caregiver's process of self-creation. In the short term, the microsystem is sustained, but in the long term, the microsystem contains within it the seeds of its own self-destruction, as the patient eventually dies, the caregiver is reassigned to another patient or deported, and the swans are gifted. Therefore, the swan folding expands both medical anthropology understanding of caregiving as a ritual and the phenomenology of global caregivers who use immediately accessible materials-paper and glue-as an imaginative tool for ordering their daily experiences as dislocated and marginalized workers.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Keren
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mazuz
mesh_terms: D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D001154:Art; D002562:Ceremonial Behavior; D006699:Home Care Services; D006738:Hospices; D006801:Humans; D007557:Israel; D010679:Philippines; D014171:Transients and Migrants
keywords: Filipina migrant worker; eldercare ritual; ethics; global-local homecare; self-creation