Labour and Love Competing Constructions of 'Care' in a Czech Nursing Home

• Published in: Critique of anthropology Vol. 27; no. 2; pp. 203 - 222
• Main Author: Read, Rosie
• Format: Journal Article Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-06-2007; Sage; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Anthropology; Care of the aged; Cognitive problems, arts and sciences, folk traditions, folklore; Culture; Czech Republic; Emotions; Ethnology; Gender; Health care; Ideology; Kinship; Managers; Nuns; Nurses; Nursing homes; Political change; Post-communist societies; Post-Soviet studies; Private sector; Public sector; Social change; Social relations; Traditional and modern medicine; public health; Traditional sciences and medicine; Eastern Europe; Czechoslovakia; Czech Republic; Prague Czech Republic; private; emotions; gender; public; work; kinship; modernity; post-socialism; care; Nun; Practice; Labour; Prague; Health Care; Modernity; Love; Reform; Nursing home; Nurse
• ISSN: 0308-275X; 1460-3721
• DOI: 10.1177/0308275X07076798

■ Post-1989 structural reforms to the Czech health care service allowed
for the introduction of new models of the nurse—patient relationship and
new ideals of adequate nursing care. This article follows how these shifts were
manifested in social relations within a Prague-based nursing home, founded by
Borromeo nuns in the mid 1990s. Focusing on ideas about the place of emotional
identification with patients amongst a range of nursing staff in the home (nuns,
civil nurses and managers), this article explores how ideologies of care are linked
to different articulations of modernity and, in particular, to changing
configurations of public and private as embodied aspects of the modern self.