Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses how older adults in Brazil reconfigure their lives and orientations to the future as they are confronted with estrangement and finitude. It shows how they may both embody and resist a scenario of frailty and withdrawal in their struggles of how to relate to the world.

Paper Abstract:

The continuation of everyday life in the face of physical and cognitive changes and when confronted with finitude, is a major challenge for many older adults. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, I explore in this paper how older adults reconfigure their lives and orientations to the future as they experience changes in their own abilities and their social relationships.

Many of my interlocutors expressed a sense of disconnection, a feeling they no longer fully belong to this world. Some no longer engaged in specific habitual or social activities, taking precautions out of fear of physical injuries or feelings of shame, thereby letting go of specific aspects of life. Their perception of finitude played a prominent role in their everyday lives and narratives. At the same time, they continued everyday life and refused to foreclose the future by narrating possibilities of improvement and emphasizing that they might, once again, take up the activities they have suspended.

In tracing their care trajectories, I show how older adults may both embody and resist a scenario of frailty and withdrawal; How they come to terms with their changing realities and the end of life; and how they renegotiate their relations with others and themselves. In seeking to ethnographically understand these experiences of estrangement, finitude, and adjustment, this paper presents a phenomenological reflection on alienation as a social and psychological process that is characterized by changing social ties and internalized struggles of how to relate to the world.