The Problem with Heroes

December 9, 2007 at 6:15 pm (Academia)

The mind is a wonderful thing. While my research-related thoughts have been in a state of somewhat hyperactive flux recently (as evidenced by the previous post), an inkling that they would eventually begin to coalesce prevented me from getting too panicked. And they have. I was temping in the offices of a local food production company this week and at some point, amid the copy-and-paste-induced death throes of a significant proportion of my brain cells, the word “personhood” drifted into my brain. And all my musings thus far seemed to stop spinning and take notice of this new arrival, quietly organising themselves under its purview. And now I am calm. The details may still be unclear (and maybe it’s more productive that they remain so for now), but the essence of my project has announced itself, rewarding my faith in my churning mind.

So I’m more confident in what I want to say tomorrow. Or at least how I will begin.

In light of this, I took No Aging in India off my shelf to have a look through this afternoon and ended up reading the last couple of chapters. The book is by Lawrence Cohen and is subtitled: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. It remains the most astonishing anthropological work I have ever read. And the most intimidating, given that it deals with the subject that I have chosen to pursue for my own research. In many ways Lawrence Cohen set me on this path – I took his Introduction to Medical Anthropology course during my first semester at Berkeley, and it changed my life, awakening an intellectual passion and giving me a glimpse of the standard of academic work I may one day be capable of. Not everyone enjoyed Lawrence’s style of teaching – he veers off on tangents that it can be difficult to keep track of, but somehow manages to end up tying everything together. I am in awe of his mind and of his gifts as an author. Which makes the fact that I am intending to pursue research in a similar vein quite terrifying. Re-reading parts of the book today, I am both intimidated to the point of wanting to run a mile, but also inspired – I remind myself that he wrote the book in his thirties, off the back of ten years of research and many more years of education and teaching by luminaries in whose shadows perhaps he once cowered. That such a standard exists in the field I am choosing to enter will, I hope, encourage me to persevere, to challenge myself and to take intellectual risks along the road to becoming all that I hope to be.

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Eek

December 5, 2007 at 4:40 pm (Academia)

In other news, the universe finally responded to my efforts and I have meetings arranged at UCL on Monday with potential supervisors Paul Higgs and David Napier.

Panic! Excitement! Fear! Anticipation! Anxiety! Confidence! Ah, so many equally applicable nouns!

So the next few days will be consumed by reading and writing and attempting to formulate some intelligible ideas. At the moment my brain is generating intellectual mush along the following lines:

I know I want to conduct some form of comparative study looking at how certain white British people and certain South Asian (probably Indian) people experience ageing in Britain. This will involve looking at the role culture does or doesn’t play in experiences of ageing and I would like to pursue it from a phenomenological and embodied perspective, engaging with individual subjectivities and learning how they may or may not shift over time. The other main part is about agency and voice – I’m intrigued as to how people experience loss of agency and individual voice and both how they respond to this and how those who care for them come to negotiate a voice on their behalf. Does culture play a differentiating role in this? And what about the differences between ageing as part of an extended family and living independently, or in a care home? What about the experiences of those who may have expected to age as part of an extended family, but actually find themselves in residential care? And on, and on…

All of which comprises half a dozen potential theses, is utterly un-nuanced and probably entirely unoriginal.  Hence my slightly amused unease.

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On Doing “Nothing”

December 5, 2007 at 4:12 pm (The Outside World)

The other day I was visiting my Grannie at the care home where she lives. It’s a residential home about 10-15 minutes drive from us which has a newly constructed annexe providing nursing care primarily for those with dementia. Grannie, thankfully, hasn’t suffered from mental degeneration aside from short-term memory loss and occasional disorientation, and at almost 95 years old she still completes the Guardian quick crossword every day. And usually a few more out of her puzzle book. She is visited by either Mum, Dad or me every day.

The other day while we were sat together in the lounge, two care assistants came in to help a male resident to the toilet. We have all noticed a distressing decline in this man recently – while never particularly animated, he used to greet me with a wink, and would share toffees with another resident whom he sits next to in the lounge and eats with in the dining room. But lately he has seemed increasingly depressed; he appears more confused and is more agitated when asked to do something. When his son comes to visit, my heart breaks for them both as they exchange pleasantries and then are left unsure of what else to say.

As this man, R, was helped to the toilet, one c/a asked him how his day had been. He replied, “Not too bad,” before adding with a slight smile, “It could have been better.” The c/a smiled and said, “Oh, but that’s what we all say, isn’t it?” Then she looked at me and laughed, “I’d love to swap a day – sit and do nothing all day.” I smiled back because there was no malice in her tone, just exhaustion. But I remain acutely aware that her conception of “doing nothing” is very different to R’s reality.

For most of us, a day doing “nothing” means a day in we have a choice of what to do. And even if we consciously opt to do “nothing”, that might consist of lying on the settee watching TV, or a film, or curling up with a book, or playing excessive amounts of Scrabulous, or going for a walk, or spending some quiet time with friends or family. It feels like “nothing” in comparison to our usual routine, but we’re almost always doing “something”. For too many – in fact probably for the majority – of care home residents, “nothing” really means “Nothing”. It means sitting in a chair alternately dozing or staring into space; perhaps exchanging a few words with someone passing by; or staring blankly at a TV screen that blares incomprehensible nonsense day in and day out, and which is always switched on to provide some semblance of activity, attempting to disguise the fact that the daily lives of so many of these people are virtually empty.

 The home owner recently employed an activities coordinator, but the fact that she is contracted for no more than ten hours a week belies the primacy of profit underpinning the whole enterprise. As it happens, this makes no real difference to my Grannie who exists quite contentedly in her own company (though I have no doubt she would decline rapidly were it not for our daily visits) and doesn’t hold much truck with organised activities (and it’s crucial that individual choices and personalities be respected when it comes to activities, rather than assuming that all old people enjoy bingo, or that simply because the coordinator is there, everyone will automatically want to join in with what’s offered). But for other residents the activities are a real high point of the week and they will continue to talk about them for days afterwards.

Care homes differ markedly in the amount and variation of activities they offer to their residents (and this is clearly reflected in their prices), but all of them could and should offer more. Mental, social and - where possible – physical stimulation is absolutely essential if care homes are to provide an environment in which residents are encouraged to thrive (and that will be interpreted differently for each individual) rather than just expected to decline.

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