Aspiring in Later Life

Movements across Time, Space, and Generations

Edited by Megha Amrith, Victoria K. Sakti, and Dora Sampaio

SERIES: Global Perspectives on Aging

Rutgers University Press

In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.

Download the open access book here.

A welcome addition to the study of migration and aging, this volume explores ambition, intimacy, and other aspirations as elders envision a good life and craft new vistas in later years. Ethnographically vivid fieldwork draws the reader into the uncertainties and elations of intergenerational households of transmigrants, returnees, and refugees.'
Michele Ruth Gamburd, author of Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka

This important volume advances the idea that people do have aspirations all through the life course and that we need to know more about their thoughts, choices, and how they dynamically engage with cultural scripts about aging.'
Sherylyn Briller, professor of anthropology at Purdue University

MEGHA AMRITH leads the "Ageing in a Time of Mobility" research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. She is the author of Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia and co-editor of the volume Gender, Work, and Migration.

VICTORIA KUMALA SAKTI is a postdoctoral researcher in the "Ageing in a Time of Mobility" research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. This is her first book.

DORA SAMPAIO is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is the author of Migration, Diversity and Inequality in Later Life: Ageing at a Crossroads.

Introduction 1
Megha Amrith, Victoria K. Sakti, and Dora Sampaio

PA R T I
Desire and Self-Realization

1 Growing Old Hand in Hand: Aspirations of
Romantic Love in Later Life among Romanian
Transmigrants in Rome
Dumitrița Luncă

2 Letting Go and Looking Ahead: The Aspirations of
Middle-Aged Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore
and Hong Kong
Megha Amrith

3 Aspirational Movements: Later-Life Mobility as a
Female Resource to Age Well
Lisa Johnson

PA R T I I
Intergenerational Negotiations

4 Aspiring to Retire: Intergenerational Care in a
Ghanaian Transnational Family
Cati Coe

5 Between Aging Parents There and Young
Children Here: The Aspirations of Late-Middle-Aged
Peruvian Migrants in Santiago as a Transnational
Sandwich Generation
Alfonso Otaegui

6 Whose Aspirations? Intergenerational Expectations
and Hopes in Eastern Uganda
Susan Reynolds Whyte

PA RT I I I
Living in the Present

7 Before It Ends: Aging, Gender, and Migration in a
Transnational Mexican Community
Julia Pauli

8 Disrupted Futures: The Shifting Aspirations of Older
Cameroonians Living in Displacement
Nele Wolter

9 “Setting Off from the Mountain Pass”: Facing Death
and Preparing for the Journey Ahead in
Tibetan Exile
Harmandeep Kaur Gill

Afterword
Erdmute Alber

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

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