Summary :
To begin I outline the methods that underpin this study. I then take the reader on a spatial journey that starts in the home, moves to the hospital and back again (Chapters 2, 3 and 4). In Chapter 2 the heuristic processes of diagnosis, of ‘seeing’, ‘showing’ and ‘being seen’, are discussed. I argue that diagnosis is not a straight-forward process but occurs with time and in stages. In describing this diagnostic journey I will show how the diagnosis marks the beginning of a road of caring for a person living with dementia. In Chapter 3 various practices, such as doctor shopping, are contextualized via an analysis of the history of the doctor-patient relationship in India and multiple meanings of health are explored. In particular, I focus on how power and medicine are intertwined, on the effects of medications and on the hope that people seek from a cure. In Chapter 4, I explore the costs people incur in carework, the subjective emotional hurts they bear and the objective financial outlays they expend. In these chapters, I also describe the environments that care is given in, the resource scarcities of the public health system, the pressures doctors work under, the exploitations by class and the agency of people in this terrain. In Chapters 5, 6 and 7, I move away from the medical to explicate social and cultural aspects of care. In Chapter 5, I examine the critical role of food – cooking, feeding and eating – in carework. Food and its links to seva, citizenship, hunger, waste and love are examined, as is the role of surveillance and management of the body. In Chapter 6, I build on the theme of surveillance by unpacking how the bodies of people with dementia are managed to mitigate stigma. I question whether there is a stigma attached to people with dementia and return to the heuristic processes of ‘seeing’, discussed in Chapter 2. But here I show that the gaze is inverted as one is asked to see normality in abnormality. Stigma, I argue, need not be dramatic and deep to be grievous. Rather, it may happen through small slights that, when combined, create feelings of pain and isolation

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