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Material Memories Ethnography

Women's Purposeful Use of Popular Culture Anachronisms in Quasi-Communal Retirement

Concepts in Rehabilitation, Inc.

This is a study of elder women now living single in retirement and the strategies the women create to survive in this new cultural setting. Retirement-complex living in the emerging American elder care market calls for devising individual occupation strategies to adapt to the previously unknown lifeway in which the retirees form a family community matrix. Lacking cultural precedent, traditional old ways, anachronisms vanishing from the mainstream of popular culture, provide a means for the women to create and use personal bridging strategies in "living happy." Included are scripted and solipsistic rituals that provide self-appraisal of one's health status through immediate experience. The author discovered that living out these old ways in the present has surprising health-giving outcomes because of the attendant purposeful occupation and social interactions old ways compel from elder women within this emergent household form.

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 29, No. 5, 563-592 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/089124100129024007


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