ABSTRACT
The anthropology of rural China since the turn of the twenty-first century reveals a general picture of aggravated disruption and subsequent reconstitution. Generally speaking, compared with earlier old people’s homes in rural areas, the Central Respect the Elderly Homes were larger in scale, had improved infrastructure and often a few workers serving a much larger number of residents. The chapter presents four ethnographic cases to illustrate how cooperation between staff and residents, mediated by female care workers, unfolds in the Home in practice. In all these cases, the ways in which female care workers make cooperation possible share the common feature that they perform some degree of self-deprecation, tolerance or sacrifice so that the assumed tension between management and residents is loosened. Compared to the actual function of female care workers in making intra-institutional cooperation possible, their work is nevertheless almost invisible in the institutional display of its performance to external audit.
