Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that, rather than providing a framework for understanding how things “really are,” rituals of care show an alternative mechanism for making things so. Ritual in this sense is a subjunctive mode that brings the world into being through acting as if it were a particular way, rather than claiming it to be so. Through rituals of care, one can take seriously ways of acting “as if” actions accomplish certain ends and provide for others in particular ways, as the caregivers in this book do, rather than judging such acts as solid assertions of how the world is or is taken to be. Rituals thus serve one's “plodding through” mundane life, as a guide to ethical action that builds over time. Showing up and going through the motions is of utmost importance. Seeing clearly how care takes ritual shape in Thailand offers building blocks for individual, group, and societal transformation. In terms of rote repetition, the basic stuff of care, ritual shows how humans create dispositions—right down to norms of perception—that brings forward a means of reorientation and change impossible to produce by rhetoric alone. Doing is necessary. Doing is transformative, even when repetitive.

The Violence of Care

This chapter addresses questions of structural violence and stasis in relation to the hierarchy and habituation in various forms of care. In many powerful analyses, structural violence is the term given to systematic limits placed on individual agency. This naming has served to illuminate systems of oppression and inequality. And yet, notions of individual agency, like intention, emerge differently in different historical and philosophical traditions. The chapter then demonstrates how Thai social worlds habituate people to feel themselves as part of collectives and to provide for one another through maintaining differentiated roles within groups, which forces one to consider anew people's complicity with repressive social forms. That is, one must reckon with the forms of care that emerge in and sustain oppression. Compassion and pity can thus come into view as two sides of what may be the same coin, with implications for humanitarianism beyond the borders of Thailand. Limitations are placed on individual agency in a multitude of ways in contemporary Thai society. As such, the stakes of altering norms are high because care is enacted through patronage and patterned into micro- and macrostructures. Ultimately, understanding the social training of awareness toward different modes of providing for others may lead to novel ways of approaching social change and working for social justice, in Thailand and elsewhere.