Description:
Through ninety-four ethnographic case studies of community dwelling older adults in Europe before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, this book highlights the importance of agency, friction between self-perceptions on age and outside impositions and the need to deconstruct old age as a homogenizing category of belonging.
Brief description:
Katja Seidel is a Senior Lecturer at the Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck and co-Director of the 'ethnocineca - International Documentary Film Festival' in Vienna. She has conducted fieldwork in Argentina, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Spain and Germany, and co-directed the Holocaust research project 'A Letter to the Stars' in Vienna.
Review Quotes:
"This a delightful kaleidoscope of countless aspects of growing old ... it is a unique book in the sense that it presents a rich collection of 'vignettes' of elderly people across Europe. It is something that I have not come across before in anthropology." - Sjaak van der Geest, University of Amsterdam