Paper short abstract:

By ethnographically exploring multi-sited interventions of eldercare in Israel, I examined the ways in which the intersection between practices of care and regimes of cure shape and form the process of being old.

Paper long abstract:

By ethnographically exploring multi-sited interventions of eldercare in Israel, I examined the ways in which the intersection between practices of care and regimes of cure shape and form the process of being old.

The current Western and biomedical discourse views aging as a life-long process based upon the scientific exploration and self-governing individual. This process relies on preventive and health promoting measures that extend from clinical and healthcare institutions into the everyday lives of elderly. Eldercare practices, such as 'aging in place', 'anti-aging', 'active aging' and 'healthy aging' function as methods of managing populations. Such regimes produce experiences of being aged, frail and cared-for, construed around a norm of active, independent, and long-living subjects. As such, aging becomes a complex site of political, global and local neoliberal economics, medical and social interventions that connects different issues and temporalities.

This paper based on an extensive fieldwork in three diverse sites to capture the complex and different shapes and tempos of eldercare: the first site is in the homes of elderly patients cared-for by Filipina caregivers; the second site is at a pain clinic in an hospital and the third site is at the Jerusalem municipality's aging department promoting the "Age-friendly city" initiative to prepare for a dramatic increase in the city aging population. Each field offers different tempos of change and rearranges the humanity of being old.