Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute最新文献

In dialogue with the articles in this volume, this afterword takes up the relation between temporality, ageing, and models of the good. In particular, it will consider the diverse models of time that are present in each place studied by the contributors, examining how they shift in relation to one another as people age. I also explore how changes in people's time horizons as they age can shape the prospective component of models of the good. Do values change over the life-course, or do models of their realization change? Whose models of the good should take priority in decisions about what constitutes successful ageing? These and other considerations aim to bring temporality into the centre of current discussions of values, ethics, and ageing.

Against a phenomenological orientation to ageing as path or course, a contrastive frame is offered around a figure termed the enemy. Four distinctive ethnographic fragments are utilized: (1) a Polish-Jewish migrant to Canada in her late eighties who listens continually to the radio and worries over the malign forces in the world that the radio broadcasts; (2) a Dalit woman in her seventies in a north Indian slum heard by neighbours to be frequently berating her children, and especially grandchildren, for starving her and refusing her medicine; (3) an American woman in her nineties who stays up nights defending herself against computer scams, leading to financial misadventure; (4) an American wife and husband, artists in their nineties, who come to design, inhabit, and survive the space of their home in agonistic ways. Conceptual resources for reimagining ageing as an agonistic field are developed in conversation with the work of Ruth Ozeki, Bhrigupati Singh, and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown.

What is offered by considering ageing, ethics, and intersectionality from a critical phenomenological perspective that draws upon critical race theory? Based upon an extended ethnography of African Americans raising children with illnesses and disabilities, I consider the Christmas trees that a grandmother lovingly decorated each year. These annual trees are portals into the ethical horizons and poetics that permeated her life, not only as an individual but as a historical being whose personal experience was intertwined with, and speaks to, shared ethical horizons and generational time. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to demonstrating that ageing is racially shaped, resulting in dramatic health disparities, especially among Black Americans in low-income communities. This grandmother's life exemplifies these inequities. However, typifying social facts do not take us far enough in illuminating the kind of time being she is. In fact, they can be troublesomely deceptive: her life can appear too easy to explain. Informed by feminist phenomenologists, who reframe intersectionality as horizons of significance, alongside Glissant's notions of opacity and errantry, I consider how Christmas trees and other poetics exemplify the opacity and errant creativity of lived time.

This article explores temporal and ethical presents in a dementia ward in Denmark. Dementia wards are often portrayed and experienced as uncanny places where time stands still or becomes radically distorted. I approach the ward, however, as an encounter or access into experiences of time that are hidden from view in the outside world where common-sense conceptions of time (such as clock time, weekdays, months, and years) have a stronger and more persuasive hold on us. With a point of departure in the notions of the ‘ethnographic epoché’ and ‘anarchaeological reduction’, I build on recent developments within critical phenomenology and world philosophies taking my theoretical inspiration from Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka traditions. I explore multiple temporal appearances at the ward: institutional time; intersubjective, potentially frictional time; resonant time; still time; and ritual-event time, appearances that are ever-emerging, blending, and dissolving. In the vocabulary of Madhyamaka philosophy, they appear but are empty, they are empty but appear. Finally, I discuss the ethical implications of a groundless ontology of time for a contemporary Danish ageing landscape characterized by ideals of healthy and active ageing, and propose an ethics of groundless temporal generosity.