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Over the last two decades, there has been a rapid rise in the proportion of older adults in prisons across the world. While the cause for this trend depends on local demographic, legal and social circumstances, ethnographic attention to this issue remains sparse. This commentary examines the contributions of two recent books on older adults in prisons in order to highlight key questions and findings that might provide a foundation for future research for the anthropology of aging and the life course. Despite focusing on different national contexts, both works reveal the disproportionate harm to older adults as a result of incarceration, as well as the ways individuals cope, even in very restrictive institutional environments. I conclude by stressing the need for more ethnographic attention to the growing overlap between aging and the carceral (in and out of prisons), and the importance of this research for questioning our broader assumptions about aging, care, crime and justice.

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.

Fragile Resonance describes the paths carers take as they make meaning of their experiences and find a sense of moral purpose to sustain them and guide their decisions. When a parent or partner becomes frail or disabled, often a family member assumes responsibility for their care. But family care is a physically and emotionally exhausting undertaking. Carers experience moments of profound connection as well as pain and grief. Carers ask themselves questions about the meaning of family, their entitlement to support, and their capacity to understand and sympathize with another person's pain. Based on his research gathering stories of family carers in Japan and England, Jason Danely traces how care transforms individual sensibilities and the roles of cultural narratives and imagination in shaping these transformations, which persist even after the care recipient has died. Throughout Fragile Resonance , Danely examines the implications of unpaid carer's experiences for challenging and enhancing social policies and institutions, highlighting innovative alternatives grounded in the practical ethics of care.

Demographic and policy changes in Japan during the first decades of the twenty-first century have resulted in significantly more people growing older and dying alone, especially in densely populated urban centers. As the national Long-Term Care Insurance system continues to promote community-based elder care despite weakened family and neighborhood bonds, the home has become an intensified space of care as well as a potential zone of abandonment. This article considers these divergent potentials of home and their implications for thinking about the material, ethical, and aesthetic limits of dwelling as embodied in the specter and spectacle of the lonely death (kodokushi). Such deaths and the empty houses they leave behind index other forms of loss emerging from intertwined histories of the family, welfare, and housing and construction policy. I argue that the connection between local experiences of aging and death and national policies can be found in mediating images and narratives of mourning, which seek to locate and make sense of the inability to dwell. Approaching unwitnessed deaths as specters at the limits of dwelling allows us to move beyond the shock of lonely death and draws our attention instead to the links between caring, mourning, and the home in an aged society. 要約 21世紀前半の20年間における日本の人口動態と政策の変化の結果、特に 人口密集した都心部で、一人で老後を過ごし、亡くなっていく人々の数が著 しく増大した。家族や近隣共同体の絆が弱まっているにもかかわらず、国 の介護保険制度が地域を基盤とした在宅高齢者介護を促進し続けている ため、居宅は介護の場となるだけでなく、潜在的な放棄の場ともなってい る。この記事では、これらの居宅の多様な可能性を検討する中で、孤独死 の幻影(specter)と光景(spectacle)が具現化した場としての住まい(dwelling)の物 質的、倫理的、そじて美的な限界について考察する。孤独死と残された空 家は、家族や福祉、住宅、そして建設政策などが絡み合った歴史から生じ る社会的な喪失を写し出すのだ。ここで議論されるのは、地域における高 齢化および死の経験と国家政策との関係が、居住(dwell)不可能性を見定 め、理解しようと努める哀悼のイメージや物語を仲介することで見出しう るということである。誰にも目撃されることのなかった死を、住まいの限界 に現れた幻影としてアプローチすることで、孤独死のシヨックを乗り趣え、 高齢化社会における思いやりと、哀悼、そして居宅との関連性に注目する ことが可能となる。

Caring for an elderly person often requires constant attention, physically challenging tasks, and emotional strain, all of which accumulate over periods and manifest as fatigue. Despite the prevalence of descriptions of fatigue in carer narratives, and the massive clinical literature on ‘carer burden’ and ‘exhaustion’, the significance of fatigue as a component of care rather than a mere by-product has not been fully explored. Drawing on Levinas’ phenomenological theory of fatigue I argue that experiences of fatigue shape carer subjectivities as both vulnerable and enduring, qualities that are essential for inaugurating new ways of being towards and taking ethical responsibility for the cared-for. At the same time, fatigue can become tragic if not supported by social and cultural narratives that recognize it and give it value.

In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging-striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old.The contributors toSuccessful Aging as a Contemporary Obsessionexplore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal-aging in a way that almost denies aging itself.

Taking the safe roads through life, avoiding risk for the sake of a past one feels beholden to or a future still under construction, is rarely tenable in the context of caring. Pasts seem less real or relevant as relationships change or memories become confused. Futures become murky and uncertain even as finitude haunts every moment. It feels like too much to hope—one must act, beyond the hope of hope. In times of exhaustion, the horizon of possibilities feels diminished, and life becomes narrowed to survival in the present. Just being present, however, doesn’t afford many assurances; it means