In 2002, Brazil adopted the World Health Organization guidelines for ageing societies, which protects people over 60 from violence and discrimination, addressing key issues as health, food, education, culture, sports, leisure, work and citizenship. Indeed, the Brazilian Public Health System (SUS) is accessible to everyone. But outside the state health service, the law enshrined in the National Policy for the Elderly sees elderly welfare as a responsibility of “the family, the community, the society and the state”. In other words, the family is also viewed as the primary institution legally responsible for people over 60.

For example, people over 60 are supposed to live with their families, and the state will only intervene when relatives provide evidences that they cannot afford this responsibility. The same applies to nourishment. But the National Policy for the Elderly goes even further. By law, people over 60 can sue their grown-up children to enforce this legal responsibility. If they have more than one child, they can also decide which of them will take on the onus of care. If you are selected, you can sue your brothers or sisters to try to enforce their share in this responsiblity. In most cases however, it will be a lost cause.

My grandmother and me

The National Policy for the Elderly understands that people over 60 can nominate who will become responsible for paying for this support, and it includes choosing just one of their children. If their children don’t have sufficient incomes or are deceased, grandchildren,brothers and even nephews can be nominated, too. Kinship has traditionally been a core topic within anthropology. But in this case, Brazilian law gives it a quite unique dimension – which I will explore during my ethnography of middle-age.

Image (c) Laura Haapio-Kirk

A recent news story titled Dying at home rather than in hospital, elderly Japanese “go to the afterlife quietly caught my eye with its suggestion of a preference for home deaths in Japan. The location of palliative care and the relationship of a dying person to their caregivers, whether they are relatives or professionals, can reveal a great deal about an individual’s social world, as demonstrated in Miller’s recent book The Comfort of People. Upon closer inspection the article’s title proved to be misleading; Japanese cultural beliefs surrounding death and the avoidance of burdening others (Long, 2012) indicate that the situation is more complicated.

The article claims that the current shortage of hospital beds combined with the expense of professional medical care means that for many people the choice to die in hospital is taken away from them. One reason why hospital care may be preferred over family care is that over half of Japanese carers are pensioners themselves (Hurst, 2017). The Japanese term rou-rou kaigo describes the common practice of care between the elderly. Our ASSA project focuses on people between the ages of 45-70 who may be both experiencing embodied reminders of ageing, while simultaneously caring for their ageing relatives. We will study how care is mediated through technology, specifically through the smartphone, such as by maintaining self-care through mHealth apps or caring for others through connected devices.

In Japan, not wanting to be a burden in death can be understood as a final act of care towards one’s family. I am wondering whether this may help to explain people’s interest in new technologies such as smartphones. Perhaps older people are hoping that technology will give them a means to look after themselves more effectively and so be less dependent upon their families. Or perhaps, as Long’s article suggests, some people resist such technologies precisely in order to preserve what they consider to be traditional Japanese family values. By conducting my research in Japan where life expectancy is the longest in the world, I hope to deepen our understanding of the possibilities afforded by a prolonged mid-life and explore how family relationships and networks of care are affected by the simultaneous rise of the smartphone.

– Laura Haapio-Kirk

References

Long, S.O. J. 2012. ‘Bodies, Technologies, and Aging in Japan: Thinking About Old People and Their Silver Products’ in Cross Cultural Gerontology (2012) 27: 119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-012-9164-3

Hurst D. 2017. ‘More than half of Japanese carers are pensioners’ in The Times June 28 2017. Retrived 23..11.2017 (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/half-of-japanese-carers-are-pensioners-themselves-n2v3glbkz)

Dying at home rather than in hospital, elderly Japanese ‘go to the afterlife quietly’ (November 20, 2017) Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-homedying/dying-at-home-rather-than-in-hospital-elderly-japanese-go-to-the-afterlife-quietly-idUSKBN1DK2LB