Retirement on the Line: Age, Work, and Value in an American Factory

[Excerpt] The motivations for and experiences of working in retirement are varied and contradictory. This book explores what work means for people in the United States who are of conventional retirement age. To examine issues of aging, work, meaning, and purpose, I focus on Vita Needle Company, a family-owned factory that produces stainless steel needles in the Boston suburb of Needham. As of this writing, in May 2011, the median age of the roughly forty production floor employees is 74 and the eldest is Rosa Finnegan, a 99-year-old former waitress who joined the factory when she was 85. As a cultural anthropologist, I immersed myself in life at Vita Needle for nearly five years (more intensively in some years than in others) in order to learn what, on top of a paycheck, Vita Needle provides its employees. The story I tell is based on interviews but also on my own work on the shop floor. The distinctive research method of cultural anthropology is participant observation : we immerse ourselves in the societies we study in order to understand experiences and meaning-making from an insider\u27s perspective. Sometimes we study our own societies, sometimes societies quite foreign to us, but even when we study our own, we remain outsiders and can never fully access an insider viewpoint. Though as anthropologists we can get quite close, and we use research methods and narrative techniques to bring out the insider perspectives, our stories always reflect our own priorities and perspectives that come from our personal biographies and professional positions. I was drawn into Vita Needle and became part of the story itself, and so these pages include my personal reflections on the complexity of a research design that required my own immersion in order to explore lives and dreams and situate them within the context of a broader analysis. It is my hope that readers will discover as much about their own views on aging and retirement as they do about people at Vita Needle

On sacred ground:the political performance of religious responsibility

Parts of this paper were presented at the 2013 Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS); at a ‘Post-War Sri Lanka’ workshop at the London School of Economics; and at a workshop on Muslims in Sri Lanka held at the University of Edinburgh.April 2012: In Dambulla, a bustling market town built around a crossroads on the northern cusp of Sri Lanka's central province, a mosque was attacked by a procession of protestors led by the chief priest of the nearby Buddhist temple. Ostensibly the protest was against the presence of the mosque on the grounds that it had been built in an exclusively Buddhist ‘sacred area’. Beginning with an empirical account of the attack on the Dambulla mosque, this paper argues that the preservation of what is deemed to be ‘sacred’ in Sri Lanka provides an effective idiom through which certain religious figures can intelligibly articulate political claims whilst maintaining critical distance from the dirty world of ‘Politics’. Corollary to this, and drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Dambulla, the paper explores the various different meanings of politics locally: highlighting the interplay of everyday politicking and high-profile political performance.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Design for Aging: Perspectives on Technology, Older Adults, and Educating Engineers

Does the development of new technologies invariably contribute positively to the daily lives of older adults in the contemporary United States and elsewhere? Eleven years into teaching anthropology to engineers, and five years into co-teaching a course on design for aging called “Engineering for Humanity,” my answer is: Not always, but we can make it so