Anthropology & Aging

Note from the Field: Women’s Shared Experiences of Care Work between Melbourne, Australia, and Athens, Greece

2024-01-30T09:29:14-05:00

Horticultural Therapy: A Sustainable and Inclusive Approach to Supporting Older People in Brazil

2023-08-29T13:56:47-04:00

This report examines an inclusive community vegetable garden project at Vila Vicentina, a long-term care facility in Bauru, São Paulo, Brazil. The project was initiated through methods of participatory action research, in which elevated garden beds were planned and constructed with the help of São Paulo State University students and Vila Vicentina staff. This report explores how the inclusive community garden initiative created a space for older adults to engage in leisure and horticultural activities, and contributed to improvements in physical engagement, social interaction, and overall well-being. Our findings suggest that governments and organizations should continue to develop and support initiatives that focus on horticultural activities, as they have the capacity to enhance the physical, environmental, and mental well-being of older adults.

Book Review: Well-being over the Life Course: Incorporating Human-animal Interactions

2025-03-12T09:30:14-04:00

Book Review: Retirement Migration and Precarity in Later Life

2025-03-13T17:10:20-04:00

Book Review: Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging

2025-03-12T09:09:02-04:00

Book Review: Voices of Long-Term Care Workers: Elder Care in the Time of Covid-19 and Beyond

2025-03-12T17:16:15-04:00

Book Review: Anthropological Perspectives on Aging

2025-03-13T17:03:25-04:00

Book Review: A Poetic Language of Ageing

2025-03-12T09:20:17-04:00

Book Review: Cultures of Ageing and Ageism in India

2025-03-12T09:16:03-04:00

Enabling Dwelling: Caregiving and Familiar Object Interactions amidst Cognitive Decline in Rural South Africa

2025-03-10T03:56:19-04:00

As people experience cognitive decline, they make and remake their identities in practice, including through interactions with everyday objects. Facilitating object interactions thus becomes an act of care. We present ethnographic data detailing how two women with cognitive decline, who were receiving informal home-based care in a rural area of South Africa, shaped and expressed their identities by dwelling — using objects to enact practices through which they formed binding relationships— and how dwelling built on and shaped their identities and relationships. Both women interacted with objects related to domestic and agricultural work — homegrown fruit, water, firewood, brooms — in ways that reflected their cultural, class and gender identities as homemakers and through which they made their homes homely. The women navigated domestic spaces with a familiarity that revealed their sense of belonging. Yet caregivers sometimes restricted their access to objects that facilitated mental health promoting practices, due to scarcity. We suggest a need to understand the social benefits of “aging in place” (at home) in relation to the opportunities that places — potentially extending to institutional care facilities — afford for dwelling. Narratives advocating aging in place must acknowledge the cultural and personal continuity, as well as the material deprivations and related restrictions, that aging at home in precarious circumstances entails, for people with cognitive decline and for their caregivers.

Encounters Between Kindness and Digitalization: Stories of Older People in Latvia

2024-05-24T08:44:31-04:00

The current drive towards digitalization means that more services in Latvia are becoming centralized and moving online. This changes the relationship between the state and its older citizens as the accessibility of services shifts towards those who can engage with these digital tools or live close to centers of local or state government. Using participatory action research (PAR) with older people as co-researchers, we explore how challenges arising from the digitalization of services are encountered by older adults living alone in Latvia, through the conceptual lens of kindness. The central research question is, how does kindness shape the experience of digitalization of state and municipal services among Latvian older people? Our research participants experienced digitalization as a series of (un)kind encounters at local and national levels, which made them feel excluded, vulnerable, and distressed. Challenges such as poverty, age-related health changes and, in cases of rural participants, remoteness, made it difficult for older people living alone to use digital services. We found that the kindness of others (relatives, neighbors, friends, and civil servants) was important for older people to overcome these difficulties and access government services; but this kindness alone cannot fully remedy the structural causes of these issues. State services need to incorporate kindness on a structural level through the design and implementation of services.