Aging and Loss Danely, Jason
2015, 20150102, 2015-01-30
eBook
By 2030, over 30% of the Japanese population will be 65 or older, foreshadowing the demographic changes occurring elsewhere in Asia and around the world. What can we learn from a study of the aging ...population of Japan and how can these findings inform a path forward for the elderly, their families, and for policy makers?
Based on nearly a decade of research,Aging and Lossexamines how the landscape of aging is felt, understood, and embodied by older adults themselves. In detailed portraits, anthropologist Jason Danely delves into the everyday lives of older Japanese adults as they construct narratives through acts of reminiscence, social engagement and ritual practice, and reveals the pervasive cultural aesthetic of loss and of being a burden.
Through first-hand accounts of rituals in homes, cemeteries, and religious centers, Danely argues that what he calls the self-in-suspense can lead to the emergence of creative participation in an economy of care. In everyday rituals for the spirits, older adults exercise agency and reinterpret concerns of social abandonment within a meaningful cultural narrative and, by reimagining themselves and their place in the family through these rituals, older adults in Japan challenge popular attitudes about eldercare. Danely's discussion of health and long-term care policy, and community welfare organizations, reveal a complex picture of Japan's aging society.
This article offers a conceptual framework of Facebook’s sub-platforms: Profiles, Groups, and Pages. We demonstrate the crucially different affordances that these sub-platforms possess, and the ...various resulting social practices and dynamics that they enable. With mourning and memorialization as a case study, our findings point at emergent practices ranging along a personal-to-public spectrum of communicative functions and media uses: Profiles offer a personal quality, albeit differently for the bereaved’s Profile and the deceased’s Profile; Groups possess a hybrid nature, combining self-expression alongside public aspects, reviving thus premodern bereaved communities; and Pages possess a distinctly public quality, serving as online memorialization centers where the deceased becomes an icon and a resource for mobilizing broad social change. This comparative and integrated approach may be applied productively to other contexts and other social media (sub-)platforms.
This collection features essays by leading scholars on the philosophical, theological, poetic and cultural aspects of lament, touching on the textual traditions of lament in Judaism, from Biblical, ...rabbinic and medieval iterations to contemporary Yemenite oral lamentations. The volume also includes four texts on lament by Gershom Scholem, translated here for the first time into English, as well as essays interpreting Scholem`s challenging work.
Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Sovereign Attachments is a landmark monograph in the study of Islam in South Asia. This review approaches the book by way of three intersecting themes: the management of ...religious affect in the Indian subcontinent, past and present; the relationship between Muslim publics and what Khoja-Moolji calls ‘figurations’, or tropes (e.g. the ‘mourning mother’, the ‘brave soldier’, and so on) that are variously embodied and contested in contemporary Pakistani discourse; and the ways that Islamic normativities are constructed and mobilized by both the Taliban and the Pakistani state.
Resumo Quais são as dimensões sociais do luto por perda de um animal de companhia? Como é vivido no quotidiano, em práticas e rituais? E que implicações tem para a redefinição das fronteiras entre os ...humanos e os outros animais? Cruzando contributos dos Estudos dos Animais e da Sociologia da Vida Pessoal, este artigo propõe uma interpretação do luto por um animal a partir de um olhar triplo. Primeiro, a partir do lugar que os animais de companhia ocupam nas redes pessoais dos portugueses, e da relacionalidade da vida contemporânea. Segundo, olhando para as práticas e rituais específicos que, após a perda de um animal, continuam a tecer a fina teia que os integra nas vidas dos humanos. Terceiro, considerando as desigualdades que atravessam o luto em função da espécie, e que fazem não só com que se perpetue a excecionalidade do humano face aos outros animais, como que certas espécies não--humanas sejam vistas como mais dignas de luto do que outras.
The global COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have a major impact on the experience of death, dying, and bereavement. This study aimed to review and synthesize learning from previous literature focused ...on the impact on grief and bereavement during other infectious disease outbreaks. We conducted a rapid scoping review according to the principles of the Joanna Briggs Institute and analyzed qualitative data using thematic synthesis. From the 218 identified articles, 6 were included in the analysis. They were four qualitative studies, one observational study, and a systematic review. Studies were conducted in West Africa, Haiti, and Singapore. No research studies have focused on outcomes and support for bereaved people during a pandemic. Studies have tended to focus on survivors who are those who had the illness and recovered, recognizing that some of these individuals will also be bereaved people. Previous pandemics appear to cause multiple losses both directly related to death itself and also in terms of disruption to social norms, rituals, and mourning practices. This affects the ability for an individual to connect with the deceased both before and after the death, potentially increasing the risk of complicated grief. In view of the limited research, specific learning from the current COVID-19 crisis and the impact on the bereaved would be pertinent. Current focus should include innovative ways to promote connection and adapt rituals while maintaining respect. Strong leadership and coordination between different bereavement organisations is essential to providing successful postbereavement support.
This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring ...access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.
PDF
