Affect, infrastructure, and vulnerability

Care work requires a vulnerability and ethical responsiveness towards the cared-for, including an openness to ebbs and flows of affective intensity. For care workers, affective vulnerability is not only a precondition for good care but can also precipitate exhaustion, neglect, and even violence under precarious political and economic conditions. I argue that the concept of vulnerability allows us to trouble the distinction between the supposed oppositional forces of care and violence, allowing us to imagine other possible ways of being in the world with others. Drawing on ten months of fieldwork in Kyoto, Japan, I describe how care workers constitute a human infrastructure whose vulnerability facilitates flows of compassion and cruelty, erotic intensity and heavy fatigue. Care workers’ narratives reveal a process of striving to embody vulnerability and sustain moral selfhood without breaking down

Aging and Subjectivity: Ethnography, Experience and Cultural Context

Anthropologists use the concept of subjectivity to describe the interplay between feeling, experience and social context. How can ethnography help researchers link theories of subjectivity to practices of working with older adults? This paper brings together critical gerontology of global aging, narrative gerontology, and anthropological theories of subjectivity to examine the experience of aging in contemporary Japan. In 2015, over one in four Japanese people were over the age of 65, and as pensioners enrolled in the national mandatory long-term care insurance program, older Japanese adults, like those elsewhere in the world, feel pushed and pulled by a variety of interests as they attempt to manage interpersonal relationships, health and hopes. One narrative that has emerged from this context of longevity and care was a narrative of old age as being “burdensome.” Using examples of this narrative from fieldwork with older adults between 2005 and 2014, I argue that these concerns reveal tensions between competing subjectivities. While many older people still aspire to maintain selves embedded in interdependent and reciprocal relationships, care services address them as if they were autonomous individuals. This chapter describes the frustration this brings for thinking about future possible selves in old age, and considers alternative cultural models of subjectivity

Affect, Infrastructure, and Vulnerability: Making and breaking Japanese eldercare

Care work requires a vulnerability and ethical responsiveness towards the cared-for, including an openness to ebbs and flows of affective intensity. For care workers, affective vulnerability is not only a precondition for good care but can also precipitate exhaustion, neglect, and even violence under precarious political and economic conditions. I argue that the concept of vulnerability allows us to trouble the distinction between the supposed oppositional forces of care and violence, allowing us to imagine other possible ways of being in the world with others. Drawing on ten months of fieldwork in Kyoto, Japan, I describe how care workers constitute a human infrastructure whose vulnerability facilitates flows of compassion and cruelty, erotic intensity and heavy fatigue. Care workers’ narratives reveal a process of striving to embody vulnerability and sustain moral selfhood without breaking down. Keywords: affect, vulnerability, care work, elderly, Japa

What older prisoners teach us about care and justice in an aging world

Over the last two decades, there has been a rapid rise in the proportion of older adults in prisons across the world. While the cause for this trend depends on local demographic, legal and social circumstances, ethnographic attention to this issue remains sparse. This commentary examines the contributions of two recent books on older adults in prisons in order to highlight key questions and findings that might provide a foundation for future research for the anthropology of aging and the life course. Despite focusing on different national contexts, both works reveal the disproportionate harm to older adults as a result of incarceration, as well as the ways individuals cope, even in very restrictive institutional environments. I conclude by stressing the need for more ethnographic attention to the growing overlap between aging and the carceral (in and out of prisons), and the importance of this research for questioning our broader assumptions about aging, care, crime and justice

Carer narratives of fatigue and endurance in Japan and England

Caring for an elderly person often requires constant attention, physically challenging tasks, and emotional strain, all of which accumulate over periods and manifest as fatigue. Despite the prevalence of descriptions of fatigue in carer narratives, and the massive clinical literature on ‘carer burden’ and ‘exhaustion,’ the significance of fatigue as a component of care rather than a mere by-product has not been fully explored. Drawing on Levinas’ phenomenological theory of fatigue I argue that experiences of fatigue shape carer subjectivities as both vulnerable and enduring, qualities that are essential for inaugurating new ways of being toward and taking ethical responsibility for the cared-for. At the same time, fatigue can become tragic if not supported by social and cultural narratives that recognize it and give it value

Do They Tweet Differently? A Cross-Cultural Group Study of Twitter Use on Mobile Communication Devices

Culture is one of the classic and most widely studied topics in the field of technology. People of different cultural backgrounds interpret, consume, and disseminate technology differently. One conspicuous aspect of culture is communication. The expression, conversational patterns, and contextual nuances of different languages make communication a distinct cultural experience. Culture influences how communication functions between different people in different social contexts. It is also an underlying feature of encoded messages; a knowledge of the sender’s culture helps to discern his or her intention. Communication technology is also susceptible to the influence of culture. The mobile and social aspects of technology add another dimension to the communication process. Twitter, a leading social medium run on a mobile communication device, is a good example. This empirical study examines the use of Twitter in users with two distinctly different cultural ideologies: individualism (characteristic of the U.S.A.) and collectivism (common in Korea). Participants in both countries took part in a four-man group decision-making experiment. The groups were given decision tasks to complete within a timed period. The study yielded the following results: 1) the Korean participants tweeted significantly more often than the American participants; 2) the Korean participants initiated significantly more new tweets than the American participants; 3) the Korean participants sent significantly more friendly tweets than the American participants; 4) the American participants expressed disagreement significantly more often than the Korean participants; and 5) the Korean participants exhibited a significantly higher level of group cohesiveness than the American participants. These results shed light on the cultural applications of this new, emerging technology which is becoming essential to personal and business information sharing and communication of people of different cultures all over the world. Data analysis, discussion, and implications are provided

"Where were they until now?" Aging, Care and Abandonment in a Bosnian Town

Članak je smješten u Bosnu i Hercegovinu, točnije u grad Bihać, i etnografski propituje promjene u shvaćanju koncepata države i obitelji na primjeru praksi brige o starijim osobama. Koristeći etnografske podatke prikupljene tijekom istraživanja u domu za starije osobe "Vitalis" u Bihaću, te životnu sudbinu starije Bosanke koju ovdje zovem Zemka, u ovom članku tvrdim da se država i obitelj u poslijeratnoj i postsocijalističkoj Bosni i Hercegovini materijaliziraju kao polu-odsutne. Kroz proces razotkrivanja tih mnogostrukih polu-odsutnosti, raskrinkavam i načine na koje posljedice transformacije poslijeratne i postsocijalističke države te obiteljskih odnosa utječu na živote "običnih" ljudi.This article delves into Bosnia-Herzegovina, and especially into the town of Bihać, to ethnographically examine the changing nature of the state and family, as visible through practices of elder care. I use my ethnographic data gathered at a nursing home Vitalis in Bihać, and especially the predicament of an elderly Bosnian woman whom I call Zemka, to argue that both the state and family in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina materialize as semi-absent. In the process of unpacking these multiple semi-absences, I reveal the lived effects of changing postwar and postsocialist state, and altering kinship relations as they affect "ordinary" people

Rocking the Boat

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Aspirations and Uncertainties of Medical Labor Migrants

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