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Paper short abstract

This paper is an ethnography of domestic dementia care in a rural Chinese household during the pandemic. It examines how illness experiences of dementia may challenge, even rupture, family relationships, and how that reveals the contingency of dementia and incongruity of kinship relatedness.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on an ordinary afternoon in a rural Chinese household that cares for an elderly couple, both living with dementia, during the Covid-19 pandemic. It unfolds in two acts. Act One centres on a paid domestic carer who wants to quit her job and complains about the challenges of care in explicit kinship terms. Reflecting on her departure, the father and son get into a physical fight rooted in contested understandings of opaque illness conditions and care arrangements, as Act Two elaborates. What brings these two acts together analytically is sustained engagement with a Chinese idiom that surfaced repeatedly during my 22 months of fieldwork (2021-2023) on dementia and care in southern China: ‘No child can stay filial for long by the side of a bedridden parent’. I explore the two acts and vernacular understandings of the idiom to examine how elusive illness experiences of dementia may challenge, even rupture, kinship relationships in the setting of domestic care, especially at a time of precarity. By bringing dementia studies into dialogue with anthropology of kinship, I argue that dementia reveals the incongruity between kinship ideals, such as filial piety, and lived actions of relatedness as embodied in practices, reflections, and attempts – including failed ones - to care. Situating dementia within an evolving sociality of Chinese kinship, and vice versa, I highlight the contingency and indeterminacy of dementia as a situated phenomenon both within and beyond the medical domain.