This early view online article is scheduled for publication in Anthropology & Aging 39(1), 2018. Age Inscriptions and Social Change Erdmute Alber University of Bayreuth Author contact: erdmute.alber@uni-bayreuth.de Cati Coe Rutgers University Author contact: ccoe@camden.rutgers.edu Abstract This special issue introduces the concept of age-inscription. It accounts for the ways that transitions, expectations and markers […]
Tag: life course
Finding community far from home: A student report of #AAGE2017
By Michelle Bentsman I arrived at the AAGE conference in Oxford unsure of what to expect. I was a few thousand miles from home, standing likewise on foreign intellectual terrain. Despite my involvement in death studies, I am a comparative religion scholar in training, and I have only recently begun immersing myself in anthropology. However, […]
How easily does ‘care’ travel? Crossing boundaries at #AAGE2017
By Gina Crivello Every time I attend an anthropology conference it feels as if I’m returning to a piece of home, having worked for the past fifteen years in the multi-disciplinary field of International Development and during which time I have been just as likely to collaborate with economists as with anthropologists. Concepts like ‘kinship’, […]
What commitments and cares connect generations? #AAGE2017
The 10th Biennial AAGE Conference, “Culture, Commitment and Care across the Life Course” brought together over 100 participants from 15 different countries for two days of research presentations, workshops, and keynote lectures. We opened on June 8th, as UK citizens were voting in a snap election that would proclaim their commitment to education, social care, […]
“Not in His Right Mind”: The Life course of Adoptees Diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder in the United States
By Rachael Stryker In spring 2010, Tennessee adoptive mother, Torry Ann Hansen, sent her seven-year-old adopted son, Artyom (Justin) Savelyev, back to his native country of Russia with a note that effectively said “Return to Sender.” Her reasons? That the child was “not in his right mind,” “violent,” and “mentally unstable” (Batty 2010). In the […]
The Importance of ‘Blood,’ Identity, and Intergenerational Relationships over the Life Course of Ugandan Children Orphaned by AIDS
“They are my daughter’s blood. I couldn’t watch my blood suffer,” an elderly grandmother in Uganda told me. She was referring to her daughter’s four orphaned children, explaining why she refused to allow the children to go live with their father’s clan – the clan that is traditionally responsible for the upbringing of orphaned […]
Time and bodies in grandparenthood
After more than a decade of following how the lives of grandparents and grandchildren – two different generations- in northwest Tanzania have unfolded, it is increasingly exciting to think with the concepts of time and the body. How does time play out in relations with grandchildren as they gradually grow up from toddlers to young […]
Futures Past: Absent Kinships and the Japanese Child Welfare System
Assigned to write about “futures” in the context of childhood, I find myself dwelling on the past. Although approaches to childhood often must grapple with how “the child” is seen to signify the future (of a family, of a town, of a nation, of humanity), within child welfare systems, which are the context of my […]
“Time is no longer a river”: Reflections on life, death, and youth in the digital age
This post is part of the Life Course Collaborative Research Network blog exchange, also available on the website of ACYIG. To see all of the posts in the series, click here. In a recent editorial about how our “overdocumented lives” are making it more difficult to let go of the past, Susanna Schrobsdorff writes: Most […]
Growing old and growing up: Teaching and learning about death
This post is part of the Life Course Collaborative Research Network blog exchange, also available on the website of ACYIG. To see all of the posts in the series, click here. In 2004, as part of my research regarding the beliefs in ‘strigoi’ (a term referring to dead people who come back to harm and […]