제9, 10주 Aging in the Modern World

Ch. Introduction

PREVIEW

This chapter introduces senility, dementia, hot brain, sixtyishess, Alzheimer's disease, dotage, weakness, enchantment, and other states. It notes that this book is about the language of behavioral inappropriateness and the practices of exclusion that come to encompass the lived experience of many old people. It is about the structures—bodies, generations, households, neighborhoods, neurons, classes, and cultures—that mediate and sustain the relationship between experience, significance, and practice. It is ultimately about the differences between bodies that explode efforts to ground an analysis in any of these frames—biological, political, or cultural—without rethinking the relationships between them.

http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1525/california/9780520083967.003.0002

Ch1. 

PREVIEW

This chapter discusses Zagreb Tamasha, an article in India Today about Alzheimer's disease, neuropathology, cerebral softening in the tropics, senility, dementia, and the city of Varanasi. Tamasha in Hindi is a commotion, a performance—song and dance, tragedy, burlesque, and romance strung together with lots of noise. In 1988, anthropologists from around the world convened in Zagreb for a global conference. Several sessions were devoted to old age. Meanwhile, a 1985 article India Today reported on a search for the characteristic neuropathological signs of Alzheimer's disease in Indian brains. A team of neurologists and neuropathologists concluded that some sort of protective factor might be preventing the occurrence of Alzheimer's disease in India.

저자는 Zagreb에서 있었던 Tamasha(힌두어로 소동, 소란)를 소개하면서 이 챕터를 시작하고 있다. 챕터의 제목과 마찬가지로 앞으로 논의될 내용과 관련된 여러가지를 소개하는 내용이며, 다뤄진 내용은 다음과 같다. 개념틀(frame of reference)의 차이로 생겼던 Zagreb에서의 에피소드, 인도의 알츠하이머를 다룬 India Today에 실린 1985년 기사, Better Brain, Tropical Softening이라는 개념, 의학적으로는 어떠한 설명을 하고 있는지(DSM-III와 DSM-IV의 차이, ICD-10), 저자는 senility를 어떠한 의미로 사용하고 있는지, 연구를 하는 동안 어떠한 문제를 겪었는지, Varanasi란 곳의 특성이 어떠한지 등등이, 이 챕터에서 배경 지식으로 설명하고 있다.

http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1525/california/9780520083967.003.0003

Ch2.

PREVIEW

This chapter isolates several particulars of an American sociology and a European history of senility, particulars that tell a specific story about conjunctures and debates in India. It uses the tabloids as a shorthand for raising questions about American class consciousness and any attempt to articulate a cultural study in the United States, even of the potted comparative sort that expatriate anthropologists implicitly engage in. It also uses tabloids, metaphorically, as a sign of the effects of a style of anthropological and social reasoning still prevalent in South Asian studies.

Keywords: American sociology; European history; senility; India; anthropological text; tabloids

Chapter.  20007 words. 

Subjects: medical anthropology

Alzheimer's Hell이라는 챕터에서는 치매에 대한 담론을 검토하고 있다. 타블로이드지를 사용하여 미국 사회에서 이것이 어떠한 방식으로 다뤄지는지를 보고 있으며, 저자는 타블로이드지를 미국계층의 의식(American class consciousness)에 대한 질문을 제기하기 위하여 사용하였다. 또한 타블로이드지 판매에 도움이 된 많은 역설들이 미국 주류 매체에서는 다루어지지 않았다고 하고 있다. 또한 노인병학의 역설에 대해 서술하고 있는데, 노인들의 '정상'을 목적으로하는데, 그 자체가 그들을 어떤 다른 부류, 또는 고립된 부류로 만들어버리는 현상을 의미한다. 

Ch3.

PREVIEW

This chapter discusses gerentological objects, aging in India, internationalist science, free radical exchange, and the old age home. It notes that the strength of the Indian contingent was indicative of the growth of social gerontology in India. To approach the construction of the senile body in Varanasi, it examines Indian gerontological practice and some of its discursive and political milieus, to place the relation between the senile body and the structure of the family within the ongoing production of the taken-for-granted. The problem of aging is taken as an originating point. It is assumed, not demonstrated.

이 챕터에서는 우선 인도 노인학에 대해서 기술하고 있다. 노인성 치매를 당연하게 받아들이는 것과 대비되게 Zagreb에 참석한, 인도 북부에서 온 인류학자는 대가족의 지위가 점점 하락하고 있음을 노쇠함의 지표(index of senility)로서 받아들이고 있었으며, 인노노년학의 주된 임무는 무엇인지, 정부의 지원은 어떤지를 살펴본다. 또한 기존에 출간된 Aging in India 시리즈를 리뷰하면서 서구적 관점에서 오늘날의 '쇠퇴' 연구로만 봄으로써 노인학 연구를 정당화하고 있다고 주장한다. 또한 Aging in India를 다루는 연구가 나이든 사람들의 suffering을 제대로 다루지 못하고, 오히려 헤게모니가 형성되며, 노인을 해석하는 어떤 특정한 set이 형성되고, 그 와중에 사회의 차이를 나타내는 기표(signifier)로서의 노인여성은 지워지고 있다고 말한다.

Ch4.

PREVIEW

What does it mean to speak of memory and forgetting? What is the relationship between memory and bodily, social, and economic power? Are there other processes of embodiment—more critical than the anxiety of old age and the experience of senility that soak up the act of forgetting? This chapter considers such third-person constructions. 

Ayurveda literally suggests the authoritative knowledge of longevity; all eight branches of medicine are seen as critical to a clinical practice preserving and extending one's years. Memory in both professional and popular literature and representations of Alzheimer's becomes the necessary and sufficient index of the embodiment of aging, how one worries about ending up.

'리어왕'에 대한 내용과 함께 시작하는 이 챕터는, 리어왕이 노령(old age)에 대해서 여러가지 이론이 있는 형상학(contested phenomenology)들이 반복적으로 재해석되고 재작업되는 전지구적 현장이라고 하고 있다. 미국에서는 알츠하이머라고 하면 주로 '기억을 상실하는' 것을 중심으로 다룬다. 반면 저자가 연구한 바라나시의 사람들은 병적인 노령(pathologic aging)이라고 하면 기억력 그 자체의 감퇴보다는 정동적(affective) 변화를 더 중심으로 생각한다. 또한 기억(memory)과 자본이 어떻게 연결되어 있는가를 언급하고, 마지막으로는 진실로 가는 길로서의 망각(Forgetting as a path to truth)이라는 소챕터를 통해서 오히려 모든 것을 잊지 않으려는 것이 옳은 것은 아니며, 노쇠화된 몸(senile body)은 '기억'보다 '욕망'으로 재현된다고 말하고 있다.

Ch5.

PREVIEW

The positioning of the old person in the third-person terms of hot/cold and other oppositions points not only to the physiological but the social body of the abstracted elder. The windy and dry person, blowing both hot and cold, illuminates a wealth of positioned information. Heat, particularly in the context of the life cycle, may be read as the externalization of power. These oppositional rhetorics of thermodynamic sociality were more useful glosses in some interviews than in others, among some households more than others, in ways that did not cut neatly across class, caste, gender, or family history. This chapter locates the voice of the hot brain in more general ways: as emblematic of intergenerational conflict, as part of a set of old voices, as a particular embodiment of the family itself, and as a sign of what we might call a dying space.

힌두교에서 영감을 받은 현자를 의미하는 Rishi는, 모든 감각에 대해 통제할 수 있는데, 단 하나 통제할 수 없는 것이 있고, 그것이 바로 화(anger)라고 한다. 뜨겁지만(hot) 의미있는 말은 듣는사람에게 지혜를 전달해주지만, 실제로 일어나는 대부분의 뜨거운 목소리(hot voices)는 신경질적이고 부적절한 화가 표출된 것이다. 뜨거운 목소리에 대한 해석은 계층과 성별, 가정의 구조에 따라서 모두 다르며, 알츠하이머병이 글로벌화되면서 계속 변하고 있다. 여기서 저자는 "뜨거운 뇌"의 목소리를 몇 가지 방법(세대간 갈등의 표출, 노인들의 목소리의 집합체, 가족 그 자체의 전형(embodiment), 그리고 마지막으로 죽음의 공간(dying space)라 불리는 것의 증후 등)으로 바라보고 있다.

Ch6.

PREVIEW

This chapter examines civility and context, balance and adjustment, loneliness and menopause, Cartesian possibility, and the dementia clinic. It begins with the colonies, to locate the space between the borne and the world in which the familial body signifies within a local Indian middle-class cosmology. 

Ravindrapuri and Nandanagar were in some senses superficial communities, newly established and not yet “home” for their residents. Old parents, if they were not involved in the establishment of the new home, tended to spend more of their time in the extended family home with those children who could not establish a new urban or suburban household or who maintained more direct and interdependent economic ties with the parental household.

이 챕터는 중산층 자본가(bourgeoisie)들의 부조화(maladjustment)를 다루고 있다. 이를 각각의 소챕터에서 크게 다섯 가지로 보고 있는데, Civility And Contest / Balance And Adjustment / Senility And Madness / Loneliness And Menopause / Balance And Cartesian Possibility 가 그것이다. 그리고 마지막으로 The dementia clinic에서 1989년 저자가 정신과 외래진료실에서 몇 주간 경험했던 내용을 서술하고 있다.

Ch7. 

PREVIEW

This chapter examines the views of Nagwa residents, weakness as a structure, Muslims and other saints, the sound of dying, and the position of repose. 

Weakness is central to local experience and ideology in Nagwa. The figure of the decrepit old man played by Ramji is as central to Nagwa ideology as it is to Brahmanical and Buddhist thought. In Ramji's depiction, the old man's weakness symbolizes both the perversion and ultimate failure of elite desire, its object here the young woman. In the histories of the families discussed here, two transitions marked shifts in the perception of the old person's voice and weakness: the loss of authority and the loss of usefulness.

국제적인 담론(cosmopolitan discourse)에서의 Bad old voice의 의미가 있는 한편, Nagwa Harijan의 슬럼가에서는 Fall의 근원으로서의 카스트계급의 부담과 그 기하학적 구조를 따르는 취약함의 선형적 이동이 적용된다. Nagwa에서 취약함(weakness)는 지역적 경험과 이데올로기에 핵심이며, 여기서 다시 한 번 저자는 특정 우주(cosmos)의 거주민들의 내러티브를 통해서 그 우주 안에 neighborhood를 놓고자 한다. 저자가 대화를 나눠본 가족의 역사에서는 두 가지 이행(transition)이 노인의 목소리와 취약함을 나타내 주었는데, 하나는 권위(authority)의 상실이며, 다른 하나는 유용함(usefulness)의 상실이다.

Ch8. 

PREVIEW

This chapter examines and compares the following: dogs and old women, old women and madwomen, madwomen and witches, dogs and old men, old men and babas, and babas and the state. 

The Elder's Day image conveys a symbolic juxtaposition, that is, a connection between dogs and old women based upon particular cultural associations. In both classical Hindu and popular local narrative, dogs were one of several archetypical denizens of the ultimate dying spaces of the Hindu polis. In Varanasi, the fierce form of Lord Shiva was closely associated with dogs. To be “treated like a dog” thus conveyed a complex set of associations suggesting both iconic dependency and noise and symbolic pollution and threat. Meanwhile, the relation between terror and abjection circles around the female witch. 

Old men as babas draw upon the dense field of the renunciate and the rishi.

Dogs And Old Women

Old Women And Madwomen

Madwomen And Witches

Dogs And Old Men

Old Men And Babas

Babas and the State

Ch9.

PREVIEW

This chapter presents and reflects upon the letters of the author's grandmother. 

It notes that the seeming universality of old age draws simultaneously on the hegemony of certain representations of the old and on the universals of the body. Around the world, for those who survive into old age, eventual debility and death are certainties. But the material effects of death are variable. Though the author's paternal grandmother never mentioned being old in her letters, old age was addressed obliquely throughout. The chapter also considers why many people don't care about Alzheimer's disease. In locating the problem solely in the old person's brain, Alzheimer's denies multiple frames of difference in the constitution of the senile body. At the same time, societies are confronted with new circulations of technology and new hierarchies of embodiment as their forms of marginalization within the world system shift.

My Grandmother's Letters

No One Here Cares About Alzheimer's

Lost At The Fair