Dr Jason Danely

Gratitude is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday social interactions, yet it has received relatively little attention within anthropology. Past approaches to gratitude have focused on its practical expressions within exchange relationships. In contrast, this article considers the phenomenology of gratitude as a moral mood. Drawing on ethnographic episodes of gratitude between older care-recipients and their unpaid family carers in Japan, I argue that gratitude generates an aesthetic atmosphere that attunes carer and cared-for to each other. I explore this through the Japanese notion ‘kage,’ or the ‘shadow,’ an atmosphere of shared interdependence and vulnerability that is not reducible to darkness or light, pain or comfort. In the context of informal care of older people, this ambiguity provides space for sharing complex relational experiences and easing the weight of emotional strain. This Japanese example provides a model of new ways to engage with gratitude ethnographically, particularly in situations involving close care.

Over the last two decades, there has been a rapid rise in the proportion of older adults in prisons across the world. While the cause for this trend depends on local demographic, legal and social circumstances, ethnographic attention to this issue remains sparse. This commentary examines the contributions of two recent books on older adults in prisons in order to highlight key questions and findings that might provide a foundation for future research for the anthropology of aging and the life course. Despite focusing on different national contexts, both works reveal the disproportionate harm to older adults as a result of incarceration, as well as the ways individuals cope, even in very restrictive institutional environments. I conclude by stressing the need for more ethnographic attention to the growing overlap between aging and the carceral (in and out of prisons), and the importance of this research for questioning our broader assumptions about aging, care, crime and justice.

Demographic and policy changes in Japan during the first decades of the twenty-first century have resulted in significantly more people growing older and dying alone, especially in densely populated urban centers. As the national Long-Term Care Insurance system continues to promote community-based elder care despite weakened family and neighborhood bonds, the home has become an intensified space of care as well as a potential zone of abandonment. This article considers these divergent potentials of home and their implications for thinking about the material, ethical, and aesthetic limits of dwelling as embodied in the specter and spectacle of the lonely death (kodokushi). Such deaths and the empty houses they leave behind index other forms of loss emerging from intertwined histories of the family, welfare, and housing and construction policy. I argue that the connection between local experiences of aging and death and national policies can be found in mediating images and narratives of mourning, which seek to locate and make sense of the inability to dwell. Approaching unwitnessed deaths as specters at the limits of dwelling allows us to move beyond the shock of lonely death and draws our attention instead to the links between caring, mourning, and the home in an aged society. = 21世紀前半の20年間における日本の人口動態と政策の変化の結果、特に人口密集した都心部で、一人で老後を過ごし、亡くなっていく人々の数が著しく増大した。家族や近隣共同体の絆が弱まっているにもかかわらず、国の介護保険制度が地域を基盤とした在宅高齢者介護を促進し続けているため、居宅は介護の場となるだけでなく、潜在的な放棄の場ともなっている。この記事では、これらの居宅の多様な可能性を検討する中で、孤独死の幻影(spectacle)と光景(spectacle)が具現化した場としての住まい(dwelling)の物質的、倫理的、そして美的な限界について考察する。孤独死と残された空家は、家族や福祉、住宅、そして建設政策などが絡み合った歴史から生じる社会的な喪失を写し出すのだ。ここで議論されるのは、地域における高齢化および死の経験と国家政策との関係が、居住(dwell)不可能性を見定め、理解しようと努める哀悼のイメージや物語を仲介することで見出しうるということである。誰にも目撃されることのなかった死を、住まいの限界に現れた幻影としてアプローチすることで、孤独死のショックを乗り越え、高齢化社会における思いやりと、哀悼、そして居宅との関連性に注目することが可能となる。

The increasing operationalisation of frailty including in primary care brings with it a risk of oversimplifying diagnostic processes and inadvertently barring access to comprehensive geriatric assessment services. The emphasis on measurement tools, despite updated guidance to the contrary, can also undermine the importance of clinical judgement, meaning that noncontractual evidence-based opportunities for medical optimisation (e.g. exercise promotion, nutrition optimisation) as well as appropriate access to social supports may be missed. Another significant consequence is to open up an ever-widening gap between clinical approaches and lived experience, including overlooking strengths and resources in problembased approach and inadvertently alienating the very group it is trying to assist. This article argues that the next horizon in frailty should not be to continue to refine its operationalisations but rather to reconnect with more holistic approaches to health and illness in old age, which are more in tune with the tradition of geriatric medicine. Building on recent trends to shift conceptualisation of health and illness in old age, this project would benefit from sociological and humanities-based approaches that foreground older people’s lived experience using theoretically informed description focused on a first-person perspective. In reconfiguring what we think frailty is, such a shift will bring us closer to the views and experience of older people who live with frailty. We see a brighter horizon for frailty in that direction.

This article examines practices of watching and walking as aesthetic staging grounds for the embodiment of social values, well-being, and aged subjectivities. Using a small, grassroots neighbourhood-watch “pilgrimage" created by and for older adults in Kyoto, Japan as my primary case study, I describe how the sacred meanings of pilgrimage come to inhabit spaces of civic social engagement (and vice versa) and elder subjectivity through practices of mapping, record-keeping, and ritual. I argue that following these practices with the older adult pilgrims leads us beyond what Coleman (2002) referred to as a theoretical “pilgrimage ghetto,” and creates openings to engage with multiple registers of intersubjective practice: watching and being watched over; grounding and transcending. Watching and walking also contest the marginality, dependence, and precarious invisibility that dominate popular discourse on aging in contemporary Japan.