Anthropology of Aging and Care Buch, Elana D
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2015, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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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.
The appearance of deviance as a fact of social life -- a permanent and unavoidable feature of social life and an object of study for the social scientist -- distinguishes postwar deviance studies ...from the antimethod, anti-institutional, and antinormative field of queer studies. While deviance studies focused on the description and analysis of social norms, queer scholars saw themselves as participating in their subversion. This collapse of the position of the scholar and the social deviant produced transformations in the ethos and style of scholarship, and yet it did not profoundly change the material conditions or the power relations between professional academics and the marginal subjects they study. The refusal of social scientific methods undermines queer scholars' claims to interdisciplinarity. While queer studies has understood itself alternately as interdisciplinary and as antidisciplinary, it has failed to grapple with methods of description and objectification that would allow for a fuller apprehension of social worlds and of the position of the researchers who study them. Through a return to the history of postwar sociology, this essay shows that the account of deviance as part of the social world rather than a departure from it offers an important model for queer scholarship and for the apprehension of the queer ordinary.
The Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters examines traditional uses of writing on the Indonesian island of Bali, focusing on the power attributed to Balinese script. The approach is ...interdisciplinary and comparative, bringing together insights from anthropological and philological perspectives.
This study examines to what extent financial strain, that is, difficulties to cope on one's income, is related to informal social isolation, that is, lacking social contacts with friend, relatives ...and colleagues. We consider to what extent macro-economic conditions and social protection expenditure affect informal social isolation as well as the relationship between financial strain and informal social isolation. Moreover, we study to what extent the effect of social protection expenditure on informal social isolation is weaker or stronger under varying macro-economic conditions. We perform multilevel analyses, taking advantage of data derived from the European Social Survey (2002-2010). Our findings show that experiencing financial strain induces social isolation. In economically less developed countries, informal social isolation is higher; in nations with high levels of social security expenditure, it is lower. Finally, particularly financially strained people suffer in terms of informal social isolation when macro-economic conditions are disadvantageous and welfare state expenditure is low. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT Reprinted by permission of Amsterdam University Press
At the long-term care facility where Robert Rebein's father lands after a horrific car crash, a shadow box hangs next to each room, its contents suggesting something of the occupant's life. ...InHeadlights on the Prairie, Rebein has created a literary shadow box of sorts, a book in which moments of singular grace and grit encapsulate a life and a world.In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Ivan Doig'sThis House of Sky, these essays bring a storyteller's gifts to life's dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory. Here too we find the darker tales of damaged young men returning from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a small-town nursing home grandiloquently named Manor of the Plains.Whether contemplating a fiery crash at a race track, coming to terms with an aging parent, or navigating the last days of a beloved family dog, Rebein offers a subtle, unsparing, often moving look at the moments that go into making a writer and a man. Seen in sharp detail, and recalled from a distance, his is a story of how a man can leave his home on the prairie-and yet never really get out of Dodge.
The popular conception of Nova Scotians as a pure, simple, idyllic people is false, argues Ian McKay. In The Quest of the Folk he shows how the province's tourism industry and cultural producers ...manipulated and refashioned the cultural identity of the region and its people to project traditional folk values. McKay offers an in-depth analysis of the infusion of a folk ideology into the art and literature of the region and the use of the idea of the "Simple Life" in tourism promotion. He examines how Nova Scotia's cultural history was rewritten to erase evidence of an urban, capitalist society, class and ethnic differences, and women's emancipation. In doing so he sheds new light on the roles of Helen Creighton, the Maritime region's most famous folklorist, and Mary Black, an influential handicrafts revivalist, in creating this false identity.
Policy makers, in their endeavour to craft the state, treat social relations and legislation as neutral and impersonal. This detached engagement with social life is undertaken to facilitate a ...particular social order (Manicon 1992). In the maintenance system, this shaping of social life is also undertaken in how maintenance money is dealt with, in purely economic terms. Through a discussion of in-depth interviews with women and men who use the maintenance system, this article illustrates how maintenance money is naturalised in conceptions of gender in general and in terms of fatherhood, within the maintenance system. Maintenance money is central in influencing relationships between women and men, men and their children, and (most significantly) in the smooth operation of the maintenance system. This article demonstrates that the use of the maintenance system shifts the negotiations for men's money to the state, thus challenging the bases of traditional gender relations and the notions that men are eager providers. It illustrates that by using the maintenance system, women use the state to claim their power. This they do by accessing men's money, without engaging in the matching traditional obligations. The article concludes that the maintenance system with its neutral position on maintenance money provides a platform for already-existing relationship tensions between women and men to be played out.
Germany is the example of a country, in which preventing social exclusion of a disabled person is treated as a basic aim of the social politics. Right now Poland is on a stage of changes both in the ...social attitudes towards the disabled and the legal aspects. In the year 2003 in Germany there were almost twice as many disabled people as in Poland in the absolute numbers (8,4 million and 4,5 million). In Poland there are a lot of people who do not feel disabled, but who maintain the status of disabled people. The definition of a disabled person used in Germany and in Poland differ in the way they describe the disabled person, differentiate the levels of disability and the symbols of the disabled. The Polish definition of a disabled person describes the disability as an inability to play a social role - the ability to work in particular. The German definition characterizes the disability as a restricted ability to play a role in the social life, which is understood as a possibility to work, but also other aspects of social existence. In Poland the right to obtain most benefits depends on the income - the help given to the disabled people has got the features of the social benefits. In Germany all the help depends on the needs of a particular person. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Numerous studies have documented the transnational experiences and local activities of Chinese immigrants in California and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less is ...known about the vibrant Chinese American community that developed at the same time in Chicago. In this sweeping account, Huping Ling offers the first comprehensive history of Chinese in Chicago, beginning with the arrival of the pioneering Moy brothers in the 1870s and continuing to the present.Ling focuses on how race, transnational migration, and community have defined Chinese in Chicago. Drawing upon archival documents in English and Chinese, she charts how Chinese made a place for themselves among the multiethnic neighborhoods of Chicago, cultivating friendships with local authorities and consciously avoiding racial conflicts. Ling takes readers through the decades, exploring evolving family structures and relationships, the development of community organizations, and the operation of transnational businesses. She pays particular attention to the influential role of Chinese in Chicago's academic and intellectual communities and to the complex and conflicting relationships among today's more dispersed Chinese Americans in Chicago.
The analysis of the rationing tasks performed by territorial self-government in the economic sphere of counteracting alcoholism points to some conclusions. Various legal means applied to the ...rationing of trading in alcoholic beverages determining access to alcohol, indicate a considerable role of the gmina self-government and regional self-government in the discussed sphere. This role is not assigned to the poviat self-government in anyway, but to a large extent is related to gminas.
On the one hand, there is a positive aspect of the process of passing on the wide competence to the territorial self-government as consistent with the principles of subsidiarity and decentralization that guarantee an important influence on one of the most important branches of social life. On the other hand, we should remember that in this case the trading in alcohol beverages is a special kind of economic activity.
In the doctrine there is an opinion that the issue of alcoholism is the nationwide problem, not only the local one. Therefore one should consider whether solving alcohol problems should be assigned to local authorities often remaining under local influence and financial needs of a local pressure group, whose interests may not be consistent with the needs of restrictions on access to alcohol. This contradiction is deepened by imprecise legal expressions and doubts coming from currently binding legal regulations concerning upbringing in sobriety and counteracting alcoholism.
