{"title":"Introduction. Ageing time beings: Temporality and ethics in old ages","authors":"Lone Grøn, Lotte Meinert","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14271","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14271","url":null,"abstract":"What can we learn about temporality by studying different ways of measuring time, institutional time regimes, and (a)typical experiences and creations of time when growing older? This introduction sets perspectives on this question from the anthropologies of ageing, ethics, and temporality. Understanding humans as time beings, we argue that attention to connections between large‐scale history, collective temporal registers, and small‐scale singularities of the experience of time can reveal and destabilize common representations of ageing and time. We propose an analytical direction that acknowledges and attends to situations of uncertainty and suffering, while also foregrounding questions about ‘the good’, not only through paying attention to cultural values such as ‘active ageing’, ‘filial piety’, or ‘desired dependency’ (and critiques of them), but also smaller scale, oppositional, and atypical values and poetics of ageing and time. We introduce the contributions in the special issue with close‐up ethnographies from Canada, Denmark, India, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, and the United States, and the core argument across the contributions regarding how time manifests in multiple ways but is ontologically groundless. This lays the ground for critiquing various dogmas about age and time and opens up possibilities of affording plural temporalities in social life.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143836660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword","authors":"Joel Robbins","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14275","url":null,"abstract":"In dialogue with the articles in this volume, this afterword takes up the relation between temporality, ageing, and models of the good. In particular, it will consider the diverse models of time that are present in each place studied by the contributors, examining how they shift in relation to one another as people age. I also explore how changes in people's time horizons as they age can shape the prospective component of models of the good. Do values change over the life‐course, or do models of their realization change? Whose models of the good should take priority in decisions about what constitutes successful ageing? These and other considerations aim to bring temporality into the centre of current discussions of values, ethics, and ageing.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143827669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enemies: uneasy accompaniments in late life","authors":"Lawrence Cohen","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14274","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143782380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The perplexity of Christmas trees: ageing, errantry, and intersectional time","authors":"Cheryl Mattingly","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14273","url":null,"abstract":"What is offered by considering ageing, ethics, and intersectionality from a critical phenomenological perspective that draws upon critical race theory? Based upon an extended ethnography of African Americans raising children with illnesses and disabilities, I consider the Christmas trees that a grandmother lovingly decorated each year. These annual trees are portals into the ethical horizons and poetics that permeated her life, not only as an individual but as a historical being whose personal experience was intertwined with, and speaks to, shared ethical horizons and generational time. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to demonstrating that ageing is racially shaped, resulting in dramatic health disparities, especially among Black Americans in low‐income communities. This grandmother's life exemplifies these inequities. However, typifying social facts do not take us far enough in illuminating the kind of time being she is. In fact, they can be troublesomely deceptive: her life can appear <jats:italic>too</jats:italic> easy to explain. Informed by feminist phenomenologists, who reframe intersectionality as horizons of significance, alongside Glissant's notions of opacity and errantry, I consider how Christmas trees and other poetics exemplify the opacity and errant creativity of lived time.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143782474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Doing time in old age: unsettling ethics in carceral circuits","authors":"Jason Danely","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14272","url":null,"abstract":"Since the early 2000s, the proportion of older adults in Japanese penal institutions has risen dramatically, driven largely by high rates of recidivism. This trend has developed alongside growing social insecurity about crime, as well as anxiety about old age and care in a time of increasing neoliberal discourses of individualized risk and responsibility for maintaining health. This article examines the temporal dimensions of these changes and their implications for socially marginalized and criminalized older adults. Starting from Allison's concept of ‘dis‐belonging’ (<jats:italic>muen</jats:italic>) as being out of time with others, I describe how old age inequalities of belonging are produced by chronocratic regimes, and how heterochrony emerges within the contradictions of those regimes. I argue that as old age becomes increasingly subject to chronocratic violence, new rhythms of doing and being time's body are emerging. Drawing on fieldwork in the impoverished area of San'ya, Tokyo, I show how ageing is produced through rhythms of recidivism that entail both agency and possibilities for care. Older men in San'ya see carceral circulation as a way of striving for a good life in what they call ‘<jats:italic>shaba</jats:italic>’, or the world of suffering and endurance, and a way of making time of ethical potential in old age.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143757976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Still here: age and generational time","authors":"Susan Reynolds Whyte","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14270","url":null,"abstract":"The passage of generational time may be one of the most fundamental ways of experiencing ageing; we age in relation to others with whom our lives are intertwined – by becoming a grandmother or losing a father. Those of the oldest generation weaken and pass away, but in that process, they persist – for a while – with the younger generations. In rural eastern Uganda, old people are ‘still here’ for younger generations in many ways. I choose three kinds of time and generational presence to discuss experiences of interaction. First, there is the time together that Alfred Schutz called consociation – being together in time and space, attending to one another. Second, there is the time of finality and transcendence, when family members interact with old people as they pass on to the grave and become shades, ghosts of the dead. Third is the time of generativity, when the legacy of an old person is supposed to continue for the next generation. This article is about the time of generations in consociation, generations cut by death, and generations persisting.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The value of transformation: Agricultural labour and shifting bodies in the Bolivian highlands","authors":"Miranda Sheild Johansson","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14265","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores transformation as a way of being in the rural Andes. It traces how transformation connects, and produces value within, multiple different spheres of life, specifically agricultural labour, personhood, identity, and space and movement. As an analytical lens, transformation allows us to revise prevailing understandings of how value is attached to agricultural work in these highland communities, moving away from theories of social cohesion, and towards emic logics of transformation and sociality as material enmeshment. Arguing that transformation is a crucial and valued part of being human in the Bolivia highlands, this piece offers an analytical gateway to better understanding Andean cosmology. Simultaneously, the ethnography contributes to wider debates about the place of transformation within conversations on labour, personhood, and sociality.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The clock‐drawing test: reading temporalities of dementia from clinical chart notes","authors":"Janelle S. Taylor","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14268","url":null,"abstract":"The clock‐drawing test, a cognitive screening test widely used clinically, is here taken as a window onto forms of temporality present in clinical encounters involving dementia. Drawing on close reading of clinical notes from their medical records, I offer imagistic silhouettes of three older adults in the Seattle area who had no living spouse or children when they developed dementia. Attending to temporality in these records brings clinical interactions into focus as part of the fundamental relationality of dementia, even as attending dementia highlights the fundamental relationality of time. The article examines how small‐scale singularities of time in the clinic bear the imprint of collective temporal registers, including cultural expectations of the life course and larger histories of labour and medicine – and how dementia can unsettle these forms and layers of temporality. Both temporality and dementia alike, I argue, are thoroughly social, historical, and embodied phenomena, their disorientations tangled up together for the time being.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"183 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143733871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time poetics and ageing in the Ik mountains: seeing time disappear","authors":"Lotte Meinert","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14266","url":null,"abstract":"In the Ik mountains in Uganda, only few old people still have the skills to ‘see time’ with sundials. Common ways of knowing time and age now include phones and ID cards in digital registers. I follow the elder seer Komol to explore how changing the measures of time influences the experience of time and age. How do being a ‘time being’ and ideas about ‘the good life’ change with age, technology, and history? What (dis)appears when ways of tracking time and age (dis)appear? With the expression <jats:italic>bas</jats:italic>, Komol points to times that are over and readiness for the new. The value of the expression <jats:italic>bas</jats:italic> challenges stereotypes of elders as nostalgic and emphasizes their pragmatic natality and value pluralism. The introduction of ID cards with estimated age gave access to a cash transfer programme for elders. Rather than being critical of this ‘chronocracy’, elders saw new possibilities in subject positions as ‘elderly citizens’, which added layers of being ‘time beings’. Ik old age is not a life phase following a linear timeline, but better conceptualized as a carrier bag of embodied tempi and cumulative ages. With the term ‘time poetics’, I draw attention to the aesthetic, political, and ethical creations of ‘time beings’.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ghosts of a different present: spectres of possibility in the lives of older Kyrgyz Muslims","authors":"Maria Louw","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14267","url":null,"abstract":"The anthropology of possibility – and the phenomenological traditions it often draws on – has predominantly been oriented towards the future, the not‐yet. With an empirical point of departure in fieldwork among older Kyrgyz Muslims who become old in the absence of younger relatives and drawing on the critical phenomenology of Alia Al‐Saji, I explore the what‐might‐have‐been as a space of possibility that is equally important in human life as a space in which one may dwell and even thrive, and which may gain in importance as a person becomes older. I argue that if we want to understand the existential importance of what‐might‐have‐been and question the futurity bias in anthropology, we need to understand the past, not as frozen and inert, but as a space of possibility that keeps opening in new ways. I find the inspiration for doing so in the Kyrgyz concept of <jats:italic>qayip duino</jats:italic> (the hidden or unseen world) and Al‐Saji's concept of <jats:italic>hesitation</jats:italic>.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"183 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}