Survival. Perhaps the word carries more weight today than ever. We are all engaged in this exercise of collective survival. Many of us have found ourselves forced to become accustomed to the unwelcome novelty of the burden of extreme uncertainty. And it is only now that we can understand what it means to live in vulnerability. We now found ourselves …
Ättestupa is the Swedish word given to a number of steep cliffs. The myth of the ättestupa holds that in prehistoric Nordic times, older community members would throw themselves off a precipice for the sake of the greater good during famines or crises. The harrowing myth of ritual sacrifice has shown up in recent popular culture, such as in the …
Few things are more stereotypically British than discussing the weather. A sense of national pride seems to pervades this discussion. In fact, during our time in the UK (as three of the co-authors grew up outside the UK), we have viewed it as an art form, and one we very much enjoying trying our hand at. It is almost comforting …
Neighbours together during the Autumnal festival (pre-COVID; Photo: A. ChatterjeeAnamika landed in Dubai on an October 2020 afternoon, and called her mother, Arpita, to let her know about her safe arrival.[1] Anamika’s brother, Mainak, resides in Pune. Arpita is 67 and her husband Manoshij is 77. Despite their old age, they preferred to live alone in Kolkata instead …
In this blogpost, we draw from our current fieldwork on the island of Ærø, a place which has branded itself as “the digital island”[1], to explore how care workers tinker with screens during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to care for the elderly from a distance.
A New Way of Seeing
Marie is a healthcare worker on the …
This blog post is a teaser for a longer article to be published in vol 41, issue 2 of the Journal of Anthropology and Aging in November 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented us with a unique opportunity to examine how societies perceive urgent biological risk, and how they manage population groups who may be susceptible to such risks (cf. …