Mittwoch, 22. November 2017, 17:00 - 18:30 iCal
Wednesday Seminar
Beyond Kin Care? Inscriptions on Aging in Southern Ghana
Catie Coe
Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie, HS-C
Universitätsstraße 7 (NIG); 4. Stock, 1010 Wien
Vortrag
Elder care has become a significant national conversation in Ghana due to urban and international migration, lower birth rates, the nuclearization of the family, and longer life spans. In the rural towns of Ghana's Eastern Region,
new elder care practices and discourses are emerging.
These age-inscriptions signal the agency of older persons, which is often neglected and overlooked. Discursively, older adults express curiosity about Western care facilities, a heterodox idea in relation to the orthodox position
expressed by the Ghanaian government and NGOs which support kin care for the elderly. Through this heterodox discourse, aged persons are able to critique the state and the church for not providing care and re-imagine a Western institution as fitting their locally constructed needs.
On the other hand, pragmatically, aged persons and their children are adapting existing practices of adolescent fosterage to help provide elder care, a practice which is not discursively elaborated. Both age-inscriptions are less articulated than standardized discourses about the significance of adult children's care of the elderly, the orthodox position. Elderly people are anxious about their own aging, and are willing to imagine and explore new
possibilities, illustrating the ways that social change in norms occurs.
Cati Coe is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on transnational migration, care, and education in West Africa.
She is the author of „The Scattered Family: African Migrants, Parenting and Global Inequality“ (University of Chicago, 2013) and co-editor of „Everyday Ruptures: Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective“ (Vanderbilt University Press, 2011) and (with Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber) „The Anthropology of Sibling Relationships: Shared Parentage, Experience and Exchange“ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is currently working on changes in elder care, including the commercialization of care, in Ghana, as well as on Africans' niche employment in elder care in the United States and the effects of care work on their sense of political belonging.
Zur Webseite der Veranstaltung
Veranstalter
Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie | Institut für Afrikawissenschaften
Kontakt
Tabitha Schnoeller
Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie
49502
tabitha.schnoeller@univie.ac.at
Erstellt am Dienstag, 14. November 2017, 09:31
Letzte Änderung am Dienstag, 14. November 2017, 10:33