Marseille 2007
| Abstract #110 - A world without compassion: experiencing old age in Kagera Region Tanzania | ||||
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Session: 12.5: Ageing and Changeing (Parallel) on Monday @ 11.00-12.30 in PR Chaired by Gerald Gorn, Lorraine Sherr Authors: Presenting Author: Ms Josien de Klerk - Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, Netherlands |
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| Additional Authors: | ||||
| Aim: To critically examine the concept of a missing middle generation and its consequences for older people in North West Tanzania | ||||
| Method / Issue: The material for this ethnographic study was collected by interviewing 50 old men and women in one sub-village in north west Tanzania and following the daily lives of ten old men and women and their families over the course of fifteen months. | ||||
| Results / Comments: The concept of a missing middle generation is too simple to grasp the meaning of AIDS death for older people. Older people actively use and negotiate their interpersonal relations to maintain their position, and AIDS has extremely diverse impacts on older people's lives. | ||||
| Discussion: The literature on the social consequences of AIDS is characterized by the concept of a disappearing middle generation. Due to high adult mortality older people are left with the care for their grandchildren and lack a support network in old age. In this paper the concept of a disappearing middle generation and its consequences is examined using anthropological theory on experience and kinship relations. I argue that the concept of a disappearing middle generation is rooted in a structural kinship perspective in which older people are seen as victims. This obscures the way older people use and negotiate their position in an era of high adult mortality. The ethnographic material from Kagera Region, Tanzania which is presented in this paper shows how loss through AIDS has been present for 25 years and the old people of today have lost partners, siblings, children and grandchildren. AIDS has to be located in broader processes of social change. That complexity calls for another focus with attention for diversity, historicity and experience. | ||||
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