Felicity Aulino’s Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2019) intricately traces the habituated practices of care in Thailand. Following family caregivers, volunteers, healthcare workers, and the elderly, she examines how indigenous theories of the mind, self, and morality shape quotidian actions of care and how these theories and actions delimit political possibilities for change. …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
I saw my grandfather in Madurai, India, for the last time in January 2014. He was already gone somehow; I could tell when I got there. Where was the “him” in him, I found myself asking. We’d written a book together about his life, published it in two languages. But his smiles now were distant and vacant, and what he …
Take up the ethnography as you might a conversation. Read a sentence. Read it again. Finish the paragraph, or the chapter, then go back to a phrase that snagged your attention. It will have changed. Take up that transformation. Know that you are reading with a community of others.
Consider the way the chapters are pulsed with gentle, recipe-like directives. …
Probably the most simplistic statement on death, needing no elaboration, would be that “each and every being has to die” sooner or later. For a common Hyolmo individual, these words extend themselves from being a mere statement to something carrying a deeper message. This message serves as a reason for, or rather a reminder of, the importance of becoming a
…“When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years,