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Discipline in Chaos: Foucault, Dementia and Aging in India

  • Illness Narrative
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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Miller (1997) notes that disgust is the most visceral of emotions, that taste is the core sensation, mouth the core location and rejection via spitting and vomiting the core action and that such actions are reflected in our facial expressions of disgust.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Social Sciences and Health Research Unit, School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine, Monash University (Caulfield Campus), 900 Dandenong Road, Melbourne, VIC, 3145, Australia

    Bianca Brijnath & Lenore Manderson

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  1. Bianca Brijnath
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  2. Lenore Manderson
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Correspondence to Bianca Brijnath.

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Brijnath, B., Manderson, L. Discipline in Chaos: Foucault, Dementia and Aging in India. Cult Med Psychiatry 32, 607–626 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-008-9111-5

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