Political Belonging through Elderly Care

Author(s)

Tatjana Thelen, Cati Coe

Abstract

In this article, we examine the ways that elderly care generates political belonging. Our approach builds on studies which argue that nurture and care create kinship, but takes that argument further by suggesting that care generates membership in numerous social formations, across scales. We suggest that elderly care helps illuminate key aspects of political belonging, particularly the temporality of political membership, because elderly care entails mutuality and reciprocity over a long period of time. In addition, elderly care is an interactive process in which older persons, their caregivers, the state and other actors negotiate modes of political belonging that entail affect as well as rights. Furthermore, elderly care has been used to construct representations of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ families which are ideologically connected to particular political formations. These representations generate difference and ‘Othering’ of internal and external populations. Ultimately, we argue that a focus on elderly care collapses domains that are usually kept artificially separated, like kinship and the state, and private and public, in ways that are productive for social analysis as a whole.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

External organisation(s)

Rutgers University

Journal

Anthropological Theory

Volume

19

Pages

279-299

No. of pages

21

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499617742833

Publication date

12-2017

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504017 Cultural anthropology, 504009 Ethnology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Anthropology, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/bdb033df-a4bb-435f-8f1d-b60ba87ca785