Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Histories of Active Aging: Aktywność across Eras -- Aspiring to Activity: Transforming Aging through Education -- Beyond Activity: Sustaining Relations in Institutional Care -- Remembering the Polish Nation: Connections across Third and Fourth Ages -- Rethinking Memory: Everyday Rhythms of Dementia -- Gardens of Memory: Reimagining Home and Nation -- Conclusion.

This article belongs to the special cluster, "Politics and Current Demographic Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe," guest-edited by Tsveta Petrova and Tomasz Inglot. Like other countries in Europe, Poland's population is growing older, because of a combination of increasing life expectancies and decreasing birth rates. Such demographic change poses challenges for policy makers, who often understand population aging to put strain on social-service, health care, and pension systems. In response, governments and civil society often emphasize "active aging," a rubric encompassing a wide range of policies and programs meant to promote health, workforce participation, lifelong learning, and social engagement. Although active aging is often part of neoliberal policies that focus on individual responsibility, recent anthropological theory shows that neoliberal ideals of self-care cannot fully explain contemporary forms of responsibility and social relations. Anthropological theory and ethnographic data can thus help to analyze the effects of demographic change as evident in social policy and programs. In this article, I integrate an analysis of Polish governmental documents meant to promote active aging with an analysis of ethnographic data of older Poles' experiences of active aging. This article provides an ethnographically grounded perspective on the concept of active aging that focuses on how people actually experience such policies by exploring the meanings such programs and activities take on in the lives of individual and groups. Ethnographic data reveal that the past has multiple emotional valences that shape people's experiences of these programs, stemming from histories of violence and rupture in the region. This suggests that making explicit the multiple, complex meanings of the past could shape active aging policy and thus civil society to be more inclusive.

The increasing popularity of programs promoting aktywność (activity) in old age in contemporary Poland is part of regional and global attempts to encourage health and economic productivity in old age. In order to understand this interest in aktywność in old age, such practices must be seen within broader sociocultural and political-economic contexts. This drive for aktywność cannot be fully explained without understanding its status as an unquestioned moral good in opposition to illness, disability, and frailty in old age. Seeking commonalities across such seemingly opposite experiences can reduce marginalization in old age. Side-stepping binary constructions of health and illness in old age creates a more holistic perspective that demonstrates how older Poles in a range of contexts create moral lives. ; Rosnąca w Polsce popularność i szerzenie się programów promujących aktywną starość stanowi część lokalnych i globalnych działań na rzecz utrzymania zdrowia i produktywności ekonomicznej starszych osób. Aby lepiej zrozumieć zainteresowanie aktywnością w starszym wieku, należy rozpatrywać te praktyki w szerszym społeczno-kulturowym i polityczno-ekonomicznym kontekście. Wzmożonego dążenia do aktywności nie sposób dogłębnie pojąć, jeśli nie uwzględni się tego, że aktywność stała się niekwestionowanym dobrem moralnym stanowiącym przeciwieństwo choroby, niepełnosprawności i zniedołężnienia. Wskazując, że te pozornie przeciwne doświadczenia łączy faktycznie wiele podobieństw, można przeciwdziałać marginalizacji starszych osób, a odrzucając binarne konstrukcje zdrowia i choroby w odniesieniu do osób w starszym wieku – zastosować bardziej holistyczną perspektywę umożliwiającą zrozumienie, jak starsi ludzie w Polsce kreują sobie w różnorodnych kontekstach moralne życie.

Gardening has well-established physical, social, and emotional benefits for older adults in varied circumstances. In Detroit, Michigan (United States of America), as in many cities, policymakers, funders, researchers, community organizations, and residents regard gardening as a means of transforming bodies, persons, communities, cities, and broader polities. We draw on ethnographic research conducted during one gardening season with 27 older African Americans in Detroit to foreground the social dimensions of wellbeing in later life and thus develop a more robust and nuanced understanding of gardening's benefits for older adults. Based on anthropological understandings of personhood and kinship, this article expands concepts of wellbeing to include social relations across multiple scales (individual, interpersonal, community, state) and temporalities (of the activity itself, experiences of ageing, city life). Even when performed alone, gardening fosters connections with the past, as gardeners are reminded of deceased loved ones through practices and the plants themselves, and with the future, through engagement with youth and community. Elucidating intimate connections and everyday activities of older African American long-term city residents counters anti-black discourses of "revitalization." An expansive concept of wellbeing has implications for understanding the generative potential of meaningful social relations in later life and the vitality contributed by older adults living in contexts of structural inequality.

Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations. Through detailed accounts, in such diverse settings as nursing homes in Sri Lanka, a factory in Massachusetts, cemeteries in Japan and clinics in Mexico, the authors explore not simply our understandings of growing older, but the interweaving of individual maturity and intergenerational relationships, social and economic institutions, and intimate experiences of gender, identity, and the body