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What does it mean to be ageing in Chile as a migrant? What does it mean to be late middle-aged nowadays? How does living half of your life in a foreign country impact perspectives on later life? Is retirement an opportunity to go back to the home country? What will happen to the next generation, raised in a different country from their parents? Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyses the experience of ageing for Peruvian migrants aged around 60, who have lived in Chile for over 20 years. Their lives are informed by a series of experiences of being in between. They live between two countries, two generations (their Peruvian parents and the...
The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is mor...
Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America. The volume shows how people create and reinforce their conditions of being by employing different genres of transgression and by creatively shifting contexts of significance. Local socio-cosmic orders, the interrelation of creative genres (myth, verbal art, song, ritual, and handicrafts), and their changing frames of reference (from communal celebrations to wider political and commercial realms) demonstrate the relational, generative, and processual quality of Amerindian creativity.
Older adults in Japan, one of the most ageing countries in the world, are starting to adopt the smartphone. What does this mean for friendship, gendered labour, multigenerational living, internal migration, health and indeed purpose in life (ikigai)? Based on 16 months of ethnographic research in urban Kyoto and in rural Kōchi Prefecture, Ageing with Smartphones in Japan follows people as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement. Examining how older women and men negotiate oppressive structures within society, the smartphone emerges as both challenging and perpetuating gender-based norms around care. In witnessing the response of older adults to the wider context of societal...
In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility. This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition. Download the open access book here.
There are not many books about how people get younger. It doesn’t happen very often. But Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland documents a radical change in the experience of ageing. Based on two ethnographies, one within Dublin and the other from the Dublin region, the book shows that people, rather than seeing themselves as old, focus on crafting a new life in retirement. Our research participants apply new ideals of sustainability both to themselves and to their environment. They go for long walks, play bridge, do yoga and keep as healthy as possible. As part of Ireland’s mainstream middle class, they may have more time than the young to embrace green ideals and more money to move to ene...
Honorable Mention for Best Book Award from the Historia Reciente y Memoria Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (LUM), a national museum in Peru that memorializes the country’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Emerging from a German donation that the Peruvian government initially rejected, the Lima-based museum project experienced delays, leadership changes, and limited institutional support as planners and staff devised strategies that aligned the LUM with a new class of globalized memorial museums and responded to political realities of the country’s postwar landscape. The book analyzes forms of authority that emerge as an official institution seeks to incorporate and manage diverse perspectives on recent violence.
With people living longer all over the world, ageing has been framed as a socio-economic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil shows how older people in a middle-class neighbourhood conciliate these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for the Third Age. Work is what bonds this community together, providing a sense of dignity and citizenship. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as c...
In the first years of the 21st century, economic liberalisation began to transform telecommunications services throughout the Pacific Islands. Government regulators, corporate executives and everyday consumers hopefully imagined that opening mobile phone markets to competition would result in greater access, lower costs and accelerated development. Uneven Connections examines the ways in which liberalisation took hold in Papua New Guinea (PNG) when a unit of the Caribbean-based mobile network operator Digicel Group Ltd. seized the opportunity to compete with the state-sponsored incumbent. The book highlights how mobile phones entered the lives of urban and rural Papua New Guineans after Digi...
‘Who am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?’ These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond. Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people l...