Folding Paper Swans, Modeling Lives

This article examines the practices of folding paper swans by Filipina migrants employed as live‐in caregivers for elderly, dying patients in Israel. These practices create a microsystem model of adjustment through precise, small‐scale, and repetitive movements. This microsystem synchronizes a tripartite process: the swan's process of construction, the patient's process of decay, and the caregiver's process of self‐creation. In the short term, the microsystem is sustained, but in the long term, the microsystem contains within it the seeds of its own self‐destruction, as the patient eventually dies, the caregiver is reassigned to another patient or deported, and the swans are gifted. Therefore, the swan folding expands both medical anthropology understanding of caregiving as a ritual and the phenomenology of global caregivers who use immediately accessible materials—paper and glue—as an imaginative tool for ordering their daily experiences as dislocated and marginalized workers.