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- Convenors:
-
Daniel Miller
(University College London (UCL))
Pauline Garvey (Maynooth University, National University of Ireland)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/011
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will take a comparative perspective on the increasing significance of hope to older people when retired life may stretch to three decades. Retirement may create new possibilities for engagement and expanding experience, or represent a struggle based on diminishing resources and isolation.
Long Abstract:
How we hope is one of the most significant political, economic and social issues in the near future. The future does not merely belong to the young, and the contribution of older people to topics such as hope and transformation are often neglected. Lengthening life spans means that 'retirement' may last for three decades, creating an unprecedented potential for change or continuity, rupture or revision. For some, this represents a pathway to hope, an opportunity to re-set the goals of life, to become politically or environmentally active. For others, a struggle with decreasing resources and prospects of isolation.
This panel is concerned with how older populations envisage a future, develop new activities and respond to a rapidly changing and often precarious world. Practising hope may have to contend with unexpected events such as the impact of Covid-19 and its exacerbation of global and local inequalities, the experience of isolation as against digital sociality or the fine line between care and surveillance.
There are dangers in focusing upon older age. Old-age-as-other often occupies a symbolic space to the degree that 'when dealing with old age, these anthropologists become essentialists' (Hazan 2009:64). Therefore our panel will focus upon a comparative approach derived both from our ethnographic studies as well as our emphasis upon comparison as an epistemological process. We ask panellists to circulate their papers prior to the conference and make explicit comparisons during the session, to create a collective endeavour in answering these key questions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how older adults in a Milan neighbourhood variously envision and experience their lives in retirement; looking at digital forms of social participation, and how older age and retirement are seen as life stages to design together.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how older adults in an inner city Milan neighbourhood experience and shape their lives in retirement. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic research in the city and online, the paper discusses how people of various ages and backgrounds navigate between hope and ambiguity amid significant urban, socio-economic, and technological transformations.
A central focus of the paper is on the ways that research participants are transforming their experiences of ageing through forms of digital social participation, before and during the Covid-19 pandemic; examining how this relates to hope, the future, and capacities for aspiration (Appadurai 2004) in/for older age. In particular, the paper examines the ways in which this neighbourhood is envisioned as a place to become older together – as a place to design retirement. Digital technologies and infrastructures are shown to be significant in facilitating contemporary social life, opportunities, and forms of participation, while they also throw into relief the inequalities and exclusions associated with being connected/disconnected and included/excluded from formal support structures concerning ageing, health, and retirement.
Weaving in comparative research findings from across the ASSA project, the paper concludes by discussing how retirement in this contemporary context in Milan is about living with uncertainty and ambiguity, but also with possibility and hope, as people develop capacities in and curiosities about a changing world, changing selves, and changing relationships, in designing retirement together.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from an ethnography with older people working in a diverse neighbourhood in Kampala, Uganda, this paper addresses the assumption of old age as a time of rest and retirement. This presents an important counter perspective within this comparative panel on the possibilities of retirement.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing from a 16-month ethnography with older people living and working in a diverse neighbourhood in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, this paper addresses the assumption of old age as a time of rest and retirement. Many participants in their 40s, 50s, 60s and above have on-going care and financial responsibilities for their children, grandchildren, their elderly parents in rural areas, and themselves. They often discussed plans to move back home as soon as possible, and in the meantime maintain regular phone contact with older relatives living at home, sending them remittances via mobile money. Despite often providing care for both older and younger generations, many participants stated a preference to avoid ‘becoming a burden’ on their children’s already stretched time and resources, a familiar refrain encountered by the ‘Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart ageing’ team in their various fieldsites around the world. Like 78% of people living in Kampala, they often run self-owned businesses started with personal savings, often based on trade and relying on physical work. Without social protection, livelihoods can compromise health, and health can compromise livelihoods, a particular consideration as people age and their health declines. By ethnographically focusing on older people’s situated perspectives on managing uncertainty around health, work, social protection and family responsibility, this paper will present an important counter perspective within this comparative panel on the possibilities of retirement. Arguably this is an increasingly pertinent perspective, as public services are de-invested, and older populations and cities grow around the world.
Paper short abstract:
This paper suggests that the retired population within a small town in Ireland represent a form of unprecedented freedom, which may not be typical of retired people elsewhere. It contributes to the philosophy of freedom by showing how freedom can be realised socially rather than individually.
Paper long abstract:
This paper suggests that the retired people in a small town in Ireland represent a form of unprecedented and radical freedom. Unprecedented since it depends upon previously unavailable capacities, including the digital and the other accoutrements of contemporary middle-class life, such as the ability to travel almost anywhere. But it also depended upon the combination of several key elements. A relatively affluent society that repudiates its prior linkages to work, insists on a voluntarist relation to family obligations and is unusually free of political and other concerns. Of huge importance to this particular case is the way this population experienced a radical emancipation of its own generational history as most of these people were born into relative poverty and a highly controlling Catholic theocracy.
The specifics of the case are made clear by comparison with other ASSA projects which find very different configurations around retirement, such as in Brazil or Chile. Showing that this is by no means a necessary outcome of retirement. It also challenges much of the philosophical work on freedom e.g. from Sartre and Berlin because the freedom of the Irish is found to be essentially a social rather than an individual project, within which political freedom is a relatively minor component as compared to the freedoms being constructed from everyday life. This also allows us to consider questions of the meaning and purpose of life, unexplored by Monty Python.
Paper short abstract:
Instead of domestic transformation or downsizing as a road to decline, I argue that my participants who have transformed or replaced their home in their retirement do so as part of a hopeful investment in the future.
Paper long abstract:
One of the most significant ciphers for hope and fear in the Irish retired community rests on one word: home. At its best, home represents privately-owned family structures, representing a lifetime of personal memory and achievement, and a bulwark against financial uncertainty. At its worst, home implies residential care that may be anticipated with dread, particularly when associated with declining health and frailty. Home is not only saturated with sentiment but it carries heft in other ways. It can be a burden.
Within the context of ageing, and as part of our research project The Anthropology of Smart Phones and Smart Ageing, I question the notion of ‘downsizing’ amongst our research participants (Garvey and Miller 2020). Downsizing is a familiar option amongst my Dublin research participants. They are all too aware of the current housing crisis, which translates into subtle pressure on older people to share or relinquish their homes and give way to growing families. However, instead of downsizing as a road to decline, or as bowing to social pressure, the majority of my participants who have transformed or replaced their home do so as part of a hopeful investment in the future.
Instead of a trajectory towards decline, therefore, we find that a changed environment materialises more profound personal transformations. Instead of shrinking horizons, or engaging in ‘death cleansing’ my participants are securing forward-looking ‘modern’ environments, espousing anti-materialist Green ideals, relinquishing the detritus of the past and leap-frogging the young.