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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Toward an Epistemology of Care: The Impact of Structural Violence on Aging in Diaspora

presenters

    Gloria Frisone

    Nationality: Italy

    Residence: Italy

    University of Pavia

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

This paper offers a unique perspective on diasporic aging by reimagining anthropology as a form of care that challenges dominant epistemologies and theoretical preconceptions. Based on the research project “Transnational Aging between Italy and Africa: Anthropological Perspectives” (TAIA), this intervention will present ethnographical materials to analyze two different groups of elderly migrants critically. These include Tunisian elders residing in Italy, who face disadvantageous social, economic, and health conditions, and affluent Italian retirees relocating to Tunisia, who enjoy more favorable circumstances. The research will explore the hierarchical disparities between these two categories of older diaspora members and how the ordinariness of structural violence determines different strategies to navigate public and private services within a transnational space that connects their home and host countries. Life histories, migratory trajectories, plans, expectations, and future perspectives depend on migration policies at local, national, and international levels, determining the availability and usability of rights such as access to welfare, pensions, income subsidies, health, and personal social services, social or subsidized housing and long-term care. If all elderly migrants experience a condition of 'otherness,' welfare crises and security policies have marginalized migrant populations from the South to the North of the World and transformed these diaspora elders into vulnerable subjectivities and precarious “forms of living" (Fassin, 2018). In the wake of the most relevant currents in contemporary medical anthropology (Das, 2007; 2015; Laugier, 2013; Lovell, 2013; Rechtman, 2021), reimaging anthropological knowledge as a practice of care can offer an epistemological paradigm, focusing on the mobile and elderly body as a political and social object. The implicit connections between ethics of care and anthropological knowledge become crucial to giving a voice to socially disadvantaged diaspora elders while devising forms of resistance to the state of structural violence on which social and health inequalities are founded and perpetuated.

Keywords:

Aging, Diaspora, Care, Health inequalities, Structural violence