Paper short abstract:

This paper is a methodological reflection on working with older people. I compare two ways in which people narrated their life histories to me, asking what it might reveal for thinking about the temporality of story-telling in anthropology more generally.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a methodological reflection on working with older people. I will describe two cases of recording life histories, using it to reflect on the temporality of ageing and its relationship to fieldwork practice. A number of my informants agreed to record their life histories with me. The temporal kink of storytelling for me was a gap, a location from which to reflect on the ageing process. The ways that they narrated their lives — mostly in the living rooms of their homes — allowed me to reflect on many aspects of one's relationship to past and present selves. No one life history was recorded in the same way; I offered to each complete freedom in this regard. One person drew me into their world with photographs of their past. Another refused to let me use a voice recorder preferring instead to write their life as what they called a film script and discuss it with me. I pay attention to the queer temporality revealed in ways of narrating the life course, and what it might reveal for thinking about the location of life history and narration in anthropology more generally.

Paper short abstract:

Linking the discourse of productivity with the materiality of the ‘old body’, this paper asks how people experience time in post-retirement. It draws from the ethnographic case study of Japanese ‘silver backpackers’ who move to live in Malaysia after their retirement.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have observed that one's sense of time and of becoming is closely connected to one's performance of productivity. But what happens to the performative nature of time when one retires? The recent material turn in feminism challenges us to take the materiality of the body seriously in relation to discourses. Linking the discourse of productivity with the materiality of the 'old body', this paper asks how people experience time in post-retirement. It draws from the ethnographic case study of Japanese 'silver backpackers' who move to live in Malaysia after their retirement. It observes that they fill their 'empty time' (Benjamin 1968) by engaging in morally productive activities such as helping neighbours and teaching in local schools. I suggest that the morality of connection is an understudied, but nonetheless important, platform for the production of value and time in post-retirement. However, their sense of becoming in a foreign place is simultaneously constrained by the materiality of their ageing body. My ethnography of retirement migration illuminates the interaction between the bodies that are becoming, and bodies that are decaying. Hence it blurs the boundaries between young and old. The material consequences of discourse require ethical responses. This paper contributes to a more nuanced idea of 'productivity' by drawing on the lived experience of retirees whose 'productive time' is assumed to be over in the postindustrial society.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to illustrate how elderly lay women conceptualize their old age through Buddhist beliefs.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic data collected from a fieldwork among elderly lay Buddhist women in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), this paper aims to illustrate how elderly lay women conceptualize their old age through Buddhist beliefs. Collecting life stories of my informants, I notice that they often called the time when they were young and entangled in family duties and responsibilities as 'the inside realm of life' (trong đời), as opposed to 'the outside realm of life' (ngoài đời) as the time when they are old, leave household duties to their progenies, and can spend enormous time on religious practices.

Being entangled in household duties in young age is conceptualized by elderly laywomen as way to pay the 'karmic debt' they had with their families from previous lives. If one has paid off this 'debt', one can enjoy a well-earned rest in old age, and thus get to the 'outside' realm of life. The 'outside' is conceptualized as the old age when one can spend time to cultivate virtues and good merit in religious practices, for the benefit of one's family and also for one's good death and rebirth. I argue that Buddhism provides elderly women an alternative narrative for their old age, breaking from the dominant notions of Vietnamese womanhood revolving around traditional household roles.

Buddhism not only expands the territory of elderly women's everyday activities, but also extends the temporal conceptualization of old age not just as a life stage of biological decline, but rather of active social engagement and self-cultivation.

Paper short abstract:

I investigate how Japanese elderly life can be understood as a musical time, through elderly musical participation in communal karaoke. These elderly musical engagements problematise established ideas of Japanese elderly life as a time of passivity, dependence and burden on the national economy.

Paper long abstract:

Andy Bennett points out that for older people today, who have aged within the socio-cultural environment of the 20th century popular culture industry, popular music continues to inform their qualitative and subjective life experiences. Bennett's argument is perhaps most pertinent to Japan, where life expectancy is among the top few in the world. Elderly Japanese participation in karaoke is common, but there is little research attempting to understand their experiences and motivations. Looking at two groups of Japanese karaoke enthusiasts, mainly in their mid-fifties to seventies, I investigate how they relate to their preferred popular genres and songs, and how they derive pleasure and emotional fulfilment from their karaoke participation. Analysing both their musical and social bases for karaoke enjoyment, I show how these older Japanese engage with music as a cultural resource for elderly living, and draw attention to Japanese elderly life as a musical time. Furthermore, I explore how their activities constitute an active negotiation of what it means to live successfully as an elderly person in Japan, and problematise established ideas of Japanese elderly life as a time of passivity, dependence, and burden on the national economy.

Paper short abstract:

In aging rural Japan with a low birthrate, endangered craft of sedge hats has thriven elders' conviviality. They strive to pull the past into the present realities through succeeding skills, oral history, local chronicles and the state narrative of cultural heritage.

Paper long abstract:

Rooted in shades between plains and mountains, sedges have sewn successive ties of mutual trust among families of Fukuoka Village. In the northwest of the Japan Alps, deep snow has fostered sedge hat production, creating a communal side job during the slack season in the rice-farming village. For the last four centuries, Fukuoka sedge hats have fashioned flexible forms to screen scorching sunlight, snowstorms and human gaze. Villagers crafted wild sedges in turn from their pioneering generation, developing techniques of its cultivation and hat manufacturing. While witnessing the multilayers of Japanese landscapes and lifestyles, sedge hats have sustained the utilization of spring water and mountainous muds. Enduring centuries of seasons, its labor division has fabricated an intimate communal family network among villagers as craftspeople, intra-village brokers or outward merchants with emphasis on domestic gender roles, men processing bamboo ribs and women sewing sedges. Yet it barely survived modernization and economic globalization that opened access to alternative umbrellas and Western hats. Along with other daily utensils until today, those imports entangled sedge hats in the nationwide historicization of domestic crafts with simultaneous frictions between obscure regional products and increasingly familiar mass products. Entering the twenty-first century in the absence of young successors, its technique was designated as a national Important Intangible Folk-Cultural Property with the grave urgencies of preservation. Now engaging local journalists, officers and schools, the craft is warming hands of the elders who seam the past into the temporary realities with threads of conviviality that they have spun.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the experiences of young women at risk of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer as they make decide to undergo prophylactic surgery and surgically induced menopause. I consider how premature menopause disrupts one’s sense of temporality and ageing as embodied time horizons become disordered

Paper long abstract:

With the advent of genetic testing, individuals can now be identified as positive for biomarkers of cancer susceptibility, such as the BRCA1/2 mutations linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC). While having the mutation does not necessarily result in cancer, the lifetime risk for women with either BRCA mutation to develop breast cancer is estimated between 55-85% and 10-60% for ovarian cancer. Current risk-management processes recommended for women at risk of HBOC includes a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy before the age of 45, resulting in the onset of premature menopause. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork within genetic cancer clinics and support groups in Australia and the United States, my research considers the ways in which these women's experiences of ageing, that is, the narrative or plot-like unfolding of a person's life and those around them, are thrown into confusion by the need to undergo a surgery resulting in early onset menopause. I explore how these women's understandings of their past experiences, present time and future possibilities are exposed as intrinsically uncertain as they decide whether to have a surgery that could save their life but accelerate their ageing in profoundly embodied ways. I focus on how these women are faced with a certain time-consciousness of life as lived -- undergoing surgery may help them reach old-age cancer free, a opportunity not afforded to their own mothers and grandmothers, but necessitates early-onset menopause, an event often considered to mark a transition stage in a woman's life, sooner than desired.