For Better or for Worse: Lifeworld, System and Family Caregiving for a Chronic Genetic Disease

Modernity has meant a cultural and social differentiation within the western society, which, according to Jurgen Habermas’ theory on communication, can be seen as a division between different forms of actions that takes place in different realms of the society. By combining Habermas’ notions of lifeworld and system with Arthur Frank’s analysis of stories as a way to experience illness, the article performs a cultural analysis of the meeting between families involved in caregiving in relation to Huntington’s disease and the Swedish welfare system. The ethnographic material shows how caregiving is given meaning through communicative action and illness stories, which are broken up by an instrumental legal discourse employed by the welfare system. This confrontation between communicative and instrumental action breeds alienation towards the state and the welfare system among the affected families. However, the families are able to empower themselves and confront the system through a hybrid form of action, which combines communicative and instrumental action. As such this hybridity, and the space that opens up on the basis of this hybridity, constitutes an important space within the modern society.