Anthropology of Aging and Care Buch, Elana D
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2015, Volume:
44, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In concert with lengthening life spans, emerging forms of care in later life reflect complex and diverse social changes. Embracing a polysemic understanding of care as simultaneously resource and ...relational practice, this review works across scales of social life and theoretical approaches to care to highlight connections and fissures between global political-economic transformations and the most intimate aspects of daily life. Arguing for analyses of care that account for the kinds of projects, stakes, and obstacles that emerge as people engage in social reproduction in later life, this review traces the circulation of care across aging bodies, everyday practices, families, and nations. Care in later life never exclusively impacts the lives of the old; it is thus a critical site for understanding the diverse ways that increased longevity is shaping the meanings, experiences, and consequences of life itself.
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In paid home care—one of the fastest-growing occupations in the United States—low-wage workers help elderly clients living in their own homes remain independent by embodying and then reproducing the ...elders' lifetimes of experience. Exploring the bodily and moral consequences of everyday home care practices in Chicago, I show that in this context, sustaining independent personhood depended on and intensified unequal social relations. To sustain clients' personhood, workers developed a deeply embodied empathy that enabled them to imagine and re-create the elders' social and sensory worlds. Home care practices involved unreciprocated circulations of bodily experience that led some workers to feel that the needs and preferences of their clients took priority over their own comfort and well-being. Care workers' bodily practices thus became one way in which social hierarchies shaped individual subjectivities and came to seem morally legitimate.
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By tracing the transformations of troubling exchanges in paid home care, this article examines how differently positioned individuals strive to build caring relations within potentially restrictive ...regimes of care. In paid home care in Chicago, older adults and their workers regularly participate in exchanges of money, time, and material goods. These gifts play a crucial role in building good care relationships that sustain participants' moral personhood. Amid widespread concern about vulnerable elders, home care agencies compete in a crowded marketplace by prohibiting these exchanges, even as they depend on them to strengthen relationships. Supervisors thus exercise discretion, sometimes reclassifying gift exchanges as punishable thefts. In this context, the commodification of care did not lead to the actual elimination of gift relations, but rather transformed gift relations into a suspicious and troublesome source of value.
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The troubling dynamic of the American home care industry where increased independence for the elderly conflicts with the well being of caregivers
Paid home care is one of the fastest growing ...occupations in the United States, and millions of Americans rely on these workers to help them remain at home as they grow older. However, the industry is rife with contradictions. The United States spends a fortune on medical care, yet devotes comparatively few resources on improving wages, thus placing home care providers in the ranks of the working poor. As a result, the work that enables some older Americans to live independently generates profound social inequalities.
Inequalities of Aging explores the ways in which these inequalities play out on the ground as workers, who are disproportionately women of color and immigrants, earn poverty-level wages and often struggle to provide for themselves and their families. The ethnographic narrative reveals how two of the nation’s most pressing concerns—rising social inequality and caring for an aging population—intersect to transform the lives of older adults, home care workers, and the world around them.
The book takes readers inside the homes and offices of people connected to two Chicago area home care agencies serving low-income and affluent older adults, respectively. Through intimate portrayals of daily life, Elana D. Buch illustrates how diverse histories, care practices, and social policies overlap and contribute to social inequality.
Illuminating the lived experience of both workers and their clients, Inequalities of Aging shows the different ways in which the idea of independence both connects and shapes the lives of the elderly and the working poor.
The troubling dynamic of the American home care industry where increased independence for the elderly conflicts with the well being of caregivers
Paid home care is one of the fastest growing occupations in the United States, and millions of Americans rely on these workers to help them remain at home as they grow older. However, the industry is rife with contradictions. The United States spends a fortune on medical care, yet devotes comparatively few resources on improving wages, thus placing home care providers in the ranks of the working poor. As a result, the work that enables some older Americans to live independently generates profound social inequalities.
Inequalities of Aging explores the ways in which these inequalities play out on the ground as workers, who are disproportionately women of color and immigrants, earn poverty-level wages and often struggle to provide for themselves and their families. The ethnographic narrative reveals how two of the nation’s most pressing concerns—rising social inequality and caring for an aging population—intersect to transform the lives of older adults, home care workers, and the world around them.
The book takes readers inside the homes and offices of people connected to two Chicago area home care agencies serving low-income and affluent older adults, respectively. Through intimate portrayals of daily life, Elana D. Buch illustrates how diverse histories, care practices, and social policies overlap and contribute to social inequality.
Illuminating the lived experience of both workers and their clients, Inequalities of Aging shows the different ways in which the idea of independence both connects and shapes the lives of the elderly and the working poor.
This article analyzes the quotidian ways that older Chicagoans remade and traversed physical boundaries between their homes and the city beyond. In so doing, it explores how changing engagements with ...the environment impact social personhood in later life. In a context in which personhood is equated with independence, elders relying on paid care workers to remain in their homes found themselves at the threshold of social death. To sustain their independence and personhood, older Chicagoans sought to prevent spatial and social transitions using a range of everyday tactics and material practices located around the doorways of their homes. These liminal practices simultaneously reasserted racial, class, and other social distinctions between elders, home care workers and others, helping elders continue to occupy familiar subject positions. For these older adults, homes and their thresholds became resources with which they resisted profound changes to their daily lives, subjectivities, and social personhood.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, INZLJ, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
The troubling dynamic of the American home care industry where increased independence for the elderly conflicts with the well being of caregivers Paid home care is one of the fastest growing ...occupations in the United States, and millions of Americans rely on these workers to help them remain at home as they grow older. However, the industry is rife with contradictions. The United States spends a fortune on medical care, yet devotes comparatively few resources on improving wages, thus placing home care providers in the ranks of the working poor. As a result, the work that enables some older Americans to live independently generates profound social inequalities. Inequalities of Aging explores the ways in which these inequalities play out on the ground as workers, who are disproportionately women of color and immigrants, earn poverty-level wages and often struggle to provide for themselves and their families. The ethnographic narrative reveals how two of the nation's most pressing concerns-rising social inequality and caring for an aging population-intersect to transform the lives of older adults, home care workers, and the world around them. The book takes readers inside the homes and offices of people connected to two Chicago area home care agencies serving low-income and affluent older adults, respectively. Through intimate portrayals of daily life, Elana D. Buch illustrates how diverse histories, care practices, and social policies overlap and contribute to social inequality. Illuminating the lived experience of both workers and their clients, Inequalities of Aging shows the different ways in which the idea of independence both connects and shapes the lives of the elderly and the working poor. The troubling dynamic of the American home care industry where increased independence for the elderly conflicts with the well being of caregivers Paid home care is one of the fastest growing occupations in the United States, and millions of Americans rely on these workers to help them remain at home as they grow older. However, the industry is rife with contradictions. The United States spends a fortune on medical care, yet devotes comparatively few resources on improving wages, thus placing home care providers in the ranks of the working poor. As a result, the work that enables some older Americans to live independently generates profound social inequalities. Inequalities of Aging explores the ways in which these inequalities play out on the ground as workers, who are disproportionately women of color and immigrants, earn poverty-level wages and often struggle to provide for themselves and their families. The ethnographic narrative reveals how two of the nation's most pressing concerns-rising social inequality and caring for an aging population-intersect to transform the lives of older adults, home care workers, and the world around them. The book takes readers inside the homes and offices of people connected to two Chicago area home care agencies serving low-income and affluent older adults, respectively. Through intimate portrayals of daily life, Elana D. Buch illustrates how diverse histories, care practices, and social policies overlap and contribute to social inequality. Illuminating the lived experience of both workers and their clients, Inequalities of Aging shows the different ways in which the idea of independence both connects and shapes the lives of the elderly and the working poor.
While most mothers initiate breastfeeding, many do not continue for recommended durations. This study aimed to understand the gap between breastfeeding initiation and duration through an in-depth ...exploration of first-time mothers' breastfeeding experiences. Contextual factors that may facilitate or deter breastfeeding maintenance were explored by identifying common turning points (significant events or periods promoting a change in thoughts/behaviors or facilitating maintenance) described by mothers with varied breastfeeding durations. In semistructured interviews conducted from March to June 2015, twenty-eight first-time mothers in Iowa were asked to describe their breastfeeding experiences from initiation through cessation. Using thematic analysis, seven turning points, consistent across varied durations and experiences were identified: breastfeeding problems, the unknowns, recurring stressors, living new life with baby, reentering social roles, special occasions, and letting go. Turning points were usually associated with stressful situations, and mothers described intrapersonal (e.g., determination) and interpersonal (e.g., social support) coping resources as facilitators of breastfeeding maintenance. These findings highlight contextual factors that may trigger turning points, representing critical intervention periods, and the importance of enhancing support networks. Interventions to facilitate longer breastfeeding durations should consider key turning points and availability of coping resources to determine strategies that best fit the mother at each point.
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Social science and gerontological research on care tends to focus on identifying practices that qualify as “good care” and promoting interventions that might produce it. In this article, we identify ...this approach to care as the “evaluative lens.” We argue that while useful, an evaluative approach to studying care can limit scholars' abilities to attend to the complex and disorderly aspects of care in daily life. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in three distinct contexts of elder care, we show the central role that contextual unpredictability plays in care experiences. In so doing, we argue for scholarship that recognizes care as a form of becoming, embedded in processual and historically contigent relations.
•Evaluative approaches focus on improvement and intervention to create “good care.”•These approaches can omit complexities of daily life that are part of care experiences.•Ethnographic engagement sheds light on these “contextual unpredictabilities.”•Embracing empirical unpredictability of care leads to new analytic questions.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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