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Older adults want to exercise a sense of control over their relationships, structures and surroundings as they navigate the later life course. Through detailed ethnographic case studies, this book examines the dynamic lifeworlds of a hundred and seven community-dwelling older adults in Europe before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the importance of agency, the frictions between self-perceptions of age and outside impositions and the need to deconstruct old age as a homogenising category. These insights challenge simple narratives of older persons as social burdens by highlighting the complex roles they fill in family, neighbourhood and communities.
“This a delightful kaleidoscope of countless aspects of growing old ... it is a unique book in the sense that it presents a rich collection of ‘vignettes’ of elderly people across Europe. It is something that I have not come across before in anthropology.” • Sjaak van der Geest, University of Amsterdam
Katja Seidel is a Senior Lecturer at the Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck and co-Director of the ‘ethnocineca – International Documentary Film Festival’ in Vienna. She has conducted fieldwork in Argentina, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Spain and Germany, and co-directed the Holocaust research project ‘A Letter to the Stars’ in Vienna.
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Jay Sokolovsky
Introduction: Ageing in a Time of Crisis
Chapter 1. Social Worlds: Living, Learning and Liaising
Chapter 2. Moving through the World
Chapter 3. Working Worlds
Chapter 4. Financial Worlds: Spending and Affording
Chapter 5. Informal Care Worlds: Providing Care
Chapter 6. Formal Care Worlds: Receiving Care
Chapter 7. Legacies and Future Worlds
Conclusion: Age, Agency and a Summary
Epilogue
Appendix: Participant Index
References
Index