Enemies: uneasy accompaniments in late life

Abstract

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.