Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Australian residential aged care as a site of intimacy between physical things, public spaces and nursing home residents to expand the conceptual frame of intimacy to that between person and place so that the social forces made manifest into materiality can be examined.

Paper long abstract:

Is it possible for older people to have a sense of home living in a nursing home? What is at the core of feeling at home in a contested cultural space of nursing home? This paper investigates the everyday experience of older people doing daily activities, such as handling mobility aids and walking, in the nursing home environment. This paper aims to argue that the fusion of person and place is at the core of feeling at home, and the sense of home is made possible for the residents in the public spaces of nursing home in their repetitive sensory engagement with the physical things and spaces. Exploring Australian residential aged care as a site of intimacy, this paper articulates the primordial and reciprocal relationship between physical things, spaces and person as deeply embodied, intimate and affective. While the government regulations are made manifest through the materiality of physical things and spaces, the residents' everyday engagement with things and spaces become the embodied processes of incorporating the materiality of statecraft, which lead to the mutual constitution of the regulating state and the compliant nursing home residents. This paper is based on the author's 12-month fieldwork conducted in two Australian metropolitan residential aged care facilities as part of an ethnographic study of residents' lived experiences. To rethink anthropological understanding of care in term of intimacy between person and place, this paper offers both insights and empirical materials.