| Summary/Abstract |
Theoretical debates around the study of ‘kinning’, or emergent intimacies, have usually centred on parent–child relationships, while the later stages of life have largely been ignored. The author suggests that one of the fundamental dilemmas in later-life-kinning lies in the ‘means-ends dichotomy’ and argues that ‘fiction’ may help people to creatively tackle this dichotomy. Ethnographic data were collected from Sri Lanka, where the elderly are prompted to rearrange and/or extend their care relationships, both within and beyond the boundaries of family, against the backdrop of dynamic socio-demographic changes. Evolving in a relatively informal fashion, these activities to rearrange and extend care relationships often involve the direct/indirect mediation of money. Undertaking a detailed case study of an elderly woman, Dorothy, and her caregiver-cum-’kin’ Piyadasa, the author aims to illustrate how fiction enables us to face unfathomable situations or fundamental contradictions – in this case, a means-ends dichotomy. Contrary to the assertion that fiction in the process of kinning can help one define or ‘discover’ a destined, permanent relationship to form a ‘pseudo-biological’ relationship as suggested in previous research on adoption, this paper demonstrates how fiction can help us dwell in uncertainty and gradually reshape our relationships to one another.
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