Journal article
Postponing Passage: Doorways, Distinctions, and the Thresholds of Personhood among Older Chicagoans
Ethos (Berkeley, Calif.), Vol.43(1), pp.40-58
03/01/2015
DOI: 10.1111/etho.12071
PMCID: PMC4577063
PMID: 26401061
Abstract
This article analyzes the quotidian ways that older Chicagoans remade and traversed physical boundaries between their homes and the city beyond. In so doing, it explores how changing engagements with the environment impact social personhood in later life. In a context in which personhood is equated with independence, elders relying on paid care workers to remain in their homes found themselves at the threshold of social death. To sustain their independence and personhood, older Chicagoans sought to prevent spatial and social transitions using a range of everyday tactics and material practices located around the doorways of their homes. These liminal practices simultaneously reasserted racial, class, and other social distinctions between elders, home care workers and others, helping elders continue to occupy familiar subject positions. For these older adults, homes and their thresholds became a resource with which they resisted profound changes to their daily lives, subjectivities, and social personhood.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Postponing Passage: Doorways, Distinctions, and the Thresholds of Personhood among Older Chicagoans
- Creators
- Elana D Buch - Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Ethos (Berkeley, Calif.), Vol.43(1), pp.40-58
- DOI
- 10.1111/etho.12071
- PMID
- 26401061
- PMCID
- PMC4577063
- NLM abbreviation
- Ethos
- ISSN
- 0091-2131
- eISSN
- 1548-1352
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/01/2015
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology
- Record Identifier
- 9983984536702771
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