Time in the State of Dementia Caregiving in South Korea: When Care Becomes (Non-)Waiting.

Abstract

Exploring how time emerges as a central problem for lone family caregivers of people with dementia, this article draws attention to care as a way of being in time with others. In addition to active doings that are oriented toward achieving goods that have drawn much attention in recent anthropological discussion on care, care of an intimate other often entails the state of being for the caregiver on which another person's way of being in the present heavily relies. Examining how time is experienced among caregivers who strive to live in the dyadic world of home-based dementia care in South Korea, I consider care as (non-)waiting both in the long term, anticipating the end of the state of caregiving, and in everyday life anticipating small and large fluctuations and interruptions. In the state of caregiving, time is experienced as tense, repetitive, and chronic, which needs to be endured in order for an intimate other to be within the family. Lone caregivers' accounts of the overwhelming weight of care-time both allow and demand us to consider care as a way of being in time with the other, and attend to the experiences of lived time constituted by the difficult intersubjective relationship and its effects on the possibility of having a sense of the near future. This article calls for attention to caregiving as a state in which temporalization becomes challenging, if not impossible.