Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2019. xiii, 193 pp. US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-3973-6.
In Rituals of Care, Felicity Aulino employs a phenomenological approach to excavate many dimensions of caregiving and volunteering in contemporary Thai society. She provides richly detailed ethnographic accounts of the routine, continuous caregiving that Thais provide for their elderly relatives near the end of life. These descriptions are compelling and valuable, as few researchers have delved into this topic in such intimate detail, especially in the Thai context. Aulino usefully distinguishes these everyday forms of caregiving from other public but extremely transient moments of Buddhist merit making or community charity provided to an elder in need of care. Rituals of care bring the world into being through acting as though it was a particular way, rather than claiming it to be so (146). The various rituals of caregiving at the end of life, the mundane bathing, diapering, cleaning, and feeding, may therefore serve as a guide to ethical life, building over time (147).
Aulino’s book engages the reader on far deeper levels as well, moving beyond ethnographic descriptions of caregiving to peel apart layers of meaning, linking the rituals of care to Theravada Buddhism, the Abhidhammic theory of mind, sociocultural norms, and an analysis of the “social body” and the deeply ingrained rituals of caring for the social body, which not only promote social harmony, but police it as well (111). Harmony, Aulino suggests, is a key social value, but harmony itself “naturalizes oppressive patterns within the contours of social bodies” (115).
In the Thai context, “care—providing for others, whether individual ailing bodies or groups of people together as a collective—is part and parcel of living a good life” and obtaining karma (85). Care is multidimensional, both part of the ritualistic every day care provided to those near the end of life and of maintaining the social body and social relations. Aulino also situates caregiving within volunteerism, describing volunteerism as a national strategy for caring for the elderly, a kind of civic engagement route to making merit (89). The civic engagement aspect of caring for the elderly does not typically have non-family members providing bodily care for them, which is a job left to relatives. By juxtaposing the realm of civic caregiving and the rituals of providing daily, bodily care, and discussing the elements of volunteerism and related karmic benefits associated with each, she produces a richer, more nuanced portrayal of care giving.
Aulino further problematizes the contradictions associated with providing care in Thailand by exploring the systematic oppression and structural violence habitually embodied in caregiving in its multifarious forms. By locating the issues of volunteerism and caregiving within the broader political context and the red shirt/yellow shirt political protests occurring around the time of her research, she moves towards a more complex conceptualization of caregiving, concluding that “within those very patterns of domination are the means and mechanisms by which people are providing for one another. And not only are they caring for one another in these ways, they are feeling cared for, as perverse as it may seem, through processes that maintain inequality and oppression” (142). She argues that we should be wary of calling out for social justice or decrying political ideologies as oppressive if we do not account for the ways that people are complicit with and sometimes reliant on such ideologies in their everyday rituals of care. She warns of detaching people from the familiar ways of caring for each other and the social body or taking from them the ability to reinvent old forms and use them in new ways.
I appreciated Aulino’s careful, nuanced analysis of caregiving and volunteering. However, unlike Aulino, I did not find it to be surprising that the Thais in her study didn’t discuss the emotions they felt as caregivers with her, since she is both a foreign researcher and also likely of a different age cohort than the caregivers in her study (44). This is related in part to the norm of saving face in front of a relative stranger but also to the norm of Thais sharing their innermost emotions only with relatives or very good friends who are in the same age cohort. As she later suggests, it is also likely related to Thai society’s deeply rooted moral psychology of “holding in” (45) and their desire to protect the smooth functioning of the “social body” (71–72).
While I found her analysis of an Abhidhammic theory of mind and Buddhaghosa’s commentaries interesting, it seems that few Thai lay people, such as the poor urban caregivers she portrays, would be aware of these teachings or be able to articulate them (44). This is where I found Aulino’s ability to frame caregiving actions in deeper, more complex ways to be particularly fascinating. I would have liked her to investigate more directly whether or not the caregivers she interviewed would couch their experiences and the intentions behind them in the same terms.
Rituals of Care is a complex, compelling empirical and conceptual work that engages deeply with questions of caregiving and volunteerism in the Theravada Buddhist context of Thai society. The book is highly recommended for researchers on Theravada Buddhism, caregiving, volunteerism, medical and political anthropology, as well as scholars of Thai society and culture more generally.
Teresa Sobieszczyk
University of Montana, Missoula