Aging in Place: Changing Socio-ecology and the Power of Kinship on Smith Island, Maryland

Authors

  • Jana Kopelent Rehak UMBC and UMD

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/aa.2019.181

Keywords:

aging and changing socioecology, kinship, lifecourse, heritage

Abstract

This article examines how the people known as Smith Islanders interact with their environment over the life-course. The purpose of the study is to contribute to a better understanding of aging in a small, rural, coastal community which changes are environmentally driven. To address the aging process in changing environments in this essay, I explore the relationship between the place, sense of self, and knowledge. Because the majority of people on the island today are in late life, the main threads in the fabric of this ethnographic narrative weave themselves into stories about aging experiences. I focus on males’ experiences, their traditional knowledge, and the role of kinship over their life-courses. The life history narratives of a Smith Island waterman known as Eddie Boy, discusses two elements present in both his childhood narratives and his late adulthood: work and kinship. I show how changing socio-ecology has altered the potential for intergenerational relations, which older islanders cherish, and how such changes in late life pose a new aging dilemma for current Smith Islanders.

Author Biography

Jana Kopelent Rehak, UMBC and UMD

Dr. Jana Kopelent Rehak, Czech American cultural anthropologist is currently a researcher at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Lecturer at University Maryland CP. Her research embraces a range of issues such as coastal environment and social ecology, urban ecology and aesthetics, aging, social inequality, political life, violence and social suffering. In the Czech Republic, she worked with ecological refugees from Chernobyl and published a book Recovering Face about Czech Political Prisoners, addressing issues of aging, social justice, national identity, communication, reconciliation and memory in the context of post-socialist Central Eastern Europe. Her urban anthropology work, since 1994, is based on an engagement with communities in Baltimore, addressing urban development, housing, health and social inequality. From 2013 she has been exploring environmental and social changes on Smith Island in Maryland, with focus on cultural heritage, life cycle, and aging. The signature of her work is a visual representation of socio-cultural life. Her most recent collaborative publication Politics of Joking, is an attempt to make an original contribution to anthropological study of humor and joking in political life.  

 

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Published

2019-02-08

Issue

Vol. 40 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Articles

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