Series
Volume 4
Life Course, Culture and Aging: Global Transformations
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Care across Distance
Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration
Edited by Azra Hromadžić and Monika Palmberger
192 pages, 14 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78533-800-7 $120.00/£89.00 Hb Published (May 2018)
eISBN 978-1-78533-801-4 eBook
Reviews
“This is the book’s strength: it brings together a wide range of ethnographic cases, drawn from various global settings, where ageing unfolds in diverse migratory contexts and where care is differently embodied, enacted, and circulated…this ethnographically-rich and comparative volume is of importance for scholars of migration, ageing, and care. It should be accessible for upper-division undergraduate.” • Journal of Anthropology and Aging
“The chapters are ethnographically rich, geographically diverse, and engaging. Collectively they offer a cutting-edge discussion of theory and method for analyzing how people care for their kin when migration has separated families.” • Michele Gamburd, Portland State University
“This book convincingly demonstrates that care can be provided across distance, even as it may be transformed, and care relations re-negotiated… [it] is an important contribution to the growing literature on transnational aging, in providing detailed studies of its complex and multiple effects on individuals and families.” • Cati Coe, Rutgers University
Description
World-wide migration has an unsettling effect on social structures, especially on aging populations and eldercare. This volume investigates how taken-for-granted roles are challenged, intergenerational relationships transformed, economic ties recalibrated, technological innovations utilized, and spiritual relations pursued and desired, and asks what it means to care at a distance and to age abroad. What it does show is that trans-nationalization of care produces unprecedented convergences of people, objects and spaces that challenge our assumptions about the who, how, and where of care.
Azra Hromadžić is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University. She is the author of Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), which was recently translated into Serbian.
Monika Palmberger is a research fellow and lecturer in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, research fellow at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre, University of Leuven, and author/editor of How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina (2016) and Memories on the Move: Experiencing Mobility, Rethinking the Past (2016, with Jelena Tosic).
Subject: Medical Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies
Contents
List of Illustrations
Ackknowledgments
Introduction: Care Across Distance
Monika Palmberger and Azra Hromadžić
PART I: MATERIALITIES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF CARE ACROSS DISTANCE
Chapter 1. Recalibrating Care: Newly Resettled Nepali-Bhutanese Refugees in Upstate New York
Retika Desai
Chapter 2. Healthy Aging, Middle-classness, and Transnational Care between Tanzania and the United States
Andrea Patricia Kaiser-Grolimund
PART II: SPIRITUALITY AND INTERGENERATIONAL CARE ACROSS DISTANCE
Chapter 3. Intergenerational Relationships and Emergent Notions of Reciprocity, Dependency, Caregiving, and Aging in Tuareg Migration
Susan Rasmussen
Chapter 4. ‘Old People’s Homes’, Filial Piety, and Transnational Families: Change and Continuity in Elderly Care in the Tibetan Settlements in India
Namgyal Choedup
PART III: COMMUNITIES OF CARE ACROSS DISTANCE
Chapter 5. Social Embeddedness and Care Among Turkish Labor Migrants in Vienna: The Role of Migrant Associations
Monika Palmberger
Chapter 6. Migrants of Privilege: American Retirees and the Imaginaries of Ecuadorian Care Work
Ann Miles
PART IV: FAILURES OF CARE ACROSS DISTANCE
Chapter 7. Some Limits of Caring at a Distance: Aging and Transnational Care Arrangements between Suriname and the Netherlands
Yvon Van der Pijl
Chapter 8. “Where Were They Until Now?” Aging, Care and Abandonment in a Bosnian Town
Azra Hromadžić
Epilogue: Reflections on Care and Virtue
Sarah Lamb
Index